In this era of personalization, email marketing stands out as the most impactful way to reach the desired audience and increase conversions. In the words of David Newman, an established B2B consultant:
“Email has an ability many channels don’t: creating valuable, personal touches—at scale.”
However, email marketing is a complex undertaking that starts with creating an accurate email list. Email lists for marketing are irreplaceable elements vital to target the right users and building a loyal clientele looking forward to your newsletters or promotional emails.
But how can you create a reliable email list? Read on as we discuss the importance of email lists and walk you through 15 ways to build your own!
Email Lists: Why Your Business Must Have Them
With the advent of digitalization, it is easier for brands to stay connected with their prospects and clients at all times. The main driver of this connectivity is emails, allowing businesses worldwide to remain in touch with their users, irrespective of their location.
As such, email marketing is still the number one way to interact with clients. This is further evidenced by 64% of small businesses relying on the tool to reach more prospects and expand their user base.
But can you send these emails to the target audience without relevant information?
Here’s where an email list shines. It is a collection of email addresses and other information about your target audience that enables you to send brand communication and outreach messages to authenticated accounts. Doing so increases open rates, decreases bounce rates, and improves overall response rates.
Plus, here are some other benefits of creating email lists for marketing:
- Helps weed out qualified leads looking to engage with your business
- Offers a high level of personalization to appeal to specific pain points
- Provides a more intimate form of connecting with prospects and building personal relationships
- Increases visibility as most professionals spend 28% of their workday reading and replying to emails
Possessing your email list also grants freedom from dependence on social media websites.
For instance, if Facebook or Instagram isn’t contributing as expected in terms of branding or client engagement, you can leverage your email list to continue marketing and avoid wasting crucial time to amass clients.
How to Build an Impactful Email List: 15 Ways to Boost Your ROI
Client acquisition is a challenging task that mandates dedicated marketing and sales efforts. But relying on several channels for finding new prospects only adds to your marketing woes and increases the customer acquisition cost (CAC).
But when you utilize email lists for marketing, you can mass personalize your messages using B2B marketing automation to decrease this cost.
Here are 15 tips to help you build an impeccable email list that powers up your marketing efforts:
Initiate with a Sign-up Form
Remember – the goal of an email list is to have a list of qualified leads or interested prospects who want to engage with your brand.
The first step for achieving this is developing and publishing a sign-up form on your website. Ensure that your brand accounts on different channels redirect to this link to encourage the user to sign up and receive promotional messages and other communication from your brand.
The sign-up form must be easy to fill and accompanied by an attractive but short CTA that compels users to fill in their details. Here are some data fields to be included in a sign-up form:
- First name of the user
- Last name of the user
- Email address
Include the value proposition along with the form. For instance, if the purpose of signing up is to receive the latest industry happenings in the form of newsletters from your brand, mention it on the ‘sign-up’ or ‘register’ to entice the audience.
Gain Registrations at In-Person Events
While the pandemic may have reduced in-person events, these are far from a dying breed. After the relaxation of pandemic restrictions in 2022, 72% of event organizers were keen to conduct more in-person events, citing them as an essential source of marketing.
These live events offer a reliable method to build industry contacts and clear queries about your products and services. Establishing your stalls helps you engage in one-to-one conversations with different professionals from the industry.
Understanding their problems and catering to their pain points will make them more likely to trust your expertise. Once you establish your credibility, you can convince them to provide their email addresses to receive tailored brand communications and marketing messages. Additionally, you can sweeten the deal by offering a bonus if they decide to sign-up.
Leverage the Power of Gated Content
The internet is a goldmine of information. However, the fact remains that every piece of information does not come from a verified or trusted source. This is especially true for B2B, where niche topics require an expert’s perspective.
The aim should be to market your company’s reputation as an expert in the chosen domain with insightful content and targeted content marketing efforts.
Amidst this process, you can conduct thorough market research to weed out keywords and topics with high traffic but low competition. Lack of reliable information means people would be eager to access blog posts or whitepapers that provide deeper insights into the topic. Here’s where you can capitalize on the demand.
Craft an expertly written piece on the topic and keep it locked behind a sign-up form. Every user who wants to access the content will have to provide their email address to unlock the content, helping you contribute to your email marketing list.
Include Registration Link in Social Media Bios
Your social media presence is a gateway to access the latest updates from your brand. Whether it is your Instagram or Facebook page, prospects often find it easier to follow your posts or seek out information on a particular product or service through your posts or stories. In doing so, they constantly return to your brand page on social media.
Hence, this page is the perfect location to plug your opt-in registration form. Precede the link with a short message encouraging users to sign up for lucrative offers and time-sensitive bonuses.
For example, DTC has furnished its Instagram page with a company newsletter link. Furthermore, it has emphasized how more than 170,000 users have already subscribed, prompting the reader to trust their peers and try out the sign-up form for the newsletter.
Organize Periodic Webinars & Workshops
Webinars are a great way to initiate a dialogue and assure prospects and existing clients of your credibility in the market. With the sea of companies crowding the space, it is more important than ever to differentiate yourself with authentic thought leadership and prove your industrial expertise.
Here are some benefits associated with online workshops and webinars:
- Connect you with industry professionals with varying experience levels
- Allow you to communicate the proficiency of your subject matter experts
- Target prospects involved in the educational stage of the buying cycle
- Add new leads to your sales funnel
Along with these benefits, it is easier to convince users to sign-up for your newsletters or promotional messages after the webinar. If the audience is drawn to your offerings and trusts your credibility in the market, they will be more inclined to engage with your brand on multiple channels.
Use Quizzes to your Advantage
Depending on your targeted domain, you can offer a free quiz to help users get answers to specific queries. For example, if you are in the financial domain, you can help them analyze their spending habits or offer free insights into saving avenues, depending on their monthly disposable incomes.
Quizzes are a great way to build your email list, as the results can be directly sent to the user’s email address. Apart from intriguing the users, these carefully-crafted quizzes can also help further establish your expertise in the market and earn credibility.
Incentivize Opt-in Email Information
Think about it – are you willing to provide personal information to a company you stumbled across?
If your answer is no, you replicate the thought process of an average B2B buyer. These individuals are on the receiving end of hundreds of emails from different brands. Amongst this chaos, they are reluctant to add another name to the list unless they stand to benefit in any way.
Here’s where you can use external motivation in the form of incentives. Include discounts, bonuses, or complementary services in exchange for their email addresses.
The best example can be conveyed with Marieforleo, a website operated by Marie Forleo, a renowned business advisor with appearances on TV shows and an internationally published book.
Her reputation works in her favor, and she uses it for advertising an audio clip that tells the audience “How to get what you want”. But there is a catch. The audio can only be accessed after the user inputs their email address, and the reliability of the podcaster means that people are willing to divulge their details to get the audio clip and derive insights.
Craft Tailored Landing Pages
If your business caters to multiple domains or niches, it is to be expected that different audiences may visit your website for various purposes. In such instances, it is counterproductive to offer a specific discount or offer that may be relevant only to one such group.
Alternatively, you can equip different landing pages with personalized elements to appeal to different demographics. With a best-in-class conversion rate of 23%, personalized landing pages cater explicitly to the targeted group and ensure a tailored experience with relevant pain points.
By the end, the audience will be more inclined to sign-up for personalized emails and add to your email marketing list.
Supply Regular Updates
Building an authentic email list can take months, especially if you are choosing to secure opt-in information about prospects. During this period, chances are that the entries secured earlier can become redundant or outdated and affect your overall marketing efforts.
Hence, it is a good rule of thumb to refresh and clean your email lists after two to three months. Experiment with existing email addresses and perform comprehensive online research to check if some email IDs have been changed or deactivated. This will ensure your email list always remains recent with authenticated and validated entries.
Giveaways can Help!
Running a giveaway or holding a contest can have far-reaching benefits for your brand. Some of them include the following:
- Helps users associate your brand with a particular style
- Communicates a fun and interactive brand personality
- Assists companies in acquiring opt-in user information
Every giveaway has a simple pre-requisite where the user has to provide their email address to enter the lot and obtain a chance of winning. This is a great way to expand your email list with verified prospects while reinforcing connections with existing business contacts.
Bank on Lead Generation Forms
The primary purpose of a lead generation form is to capture visitor details and eventually convert them into a client. You can use inline or floating lead generation forms to capture visitors’ attention and display the value proposition to convince them to fill in their contact details.
Include Reassurance with Opt-in Forms
The number one worry among B2B decision-makers is the possibility of multiple and frequent marketing messages that clog up their inbox. Spam is a major problem across all domains, inviting reluctance from buyers to provide their email addresses.
One way to circumvent this problem is to mention the frequency of emails your brand will send explicitly. For instance, 4 -6 emails a month is a good number that prevents spam but also keeps your brand fresh in the user’s mind.
Use Free Blogs to Entice Users
Every organization has a content marketing strategy to capitalize on organic rankings and increase website traffic. Hence, blogs are gaining more momentum in the market, with every company keen to showcase their experience in their domains.
High-quality blogs are the need of the hour and can help in a more authoritative positioning of your brand. Frequently dishing out blogs on popular topics can also help with your brand image and convince users to seek out your content when they need insights into the domain.
This is advantageous for any brand, allowing them to supplement every blog with an opt-in email form that asks users to input their email addresses and get personalized updates every time a new blog is published.
Grant Early Access to Products or Services
Make the audience feel they are missing out by not being on your email list. Conduct periodic promotions where you grant early access to a product and service soon to be released by your brand. Make the email subscribers a priority and invite them to experience your offerings before the market.
This will convince more users to be a part of your email list to capitalize on your lucrative special access offers.
Employ Live Chats or Chatbots
Chatbots are trained to handle a variety of user queries. But did you know these tools are also invaluable in building your email lists?
Using top AI-based chatbots, you can engage the prospects on your page in real-time conversations and provide insights into the discounts and ongoing offers at the company. Chatbots are also equipped to gather user email addresses and personalize their experiences by redirecting them to the desired page on the website.
Final Thoughts
An email list is an impactful marketing tool that enables precise targeting and a high level of personalization to build a dedicated user base for brands. Using multiple email lists for marketing, you can divide your users into groups based on common characteristics and customize your promotional efforts in line with their pain points.
Building an email list requires patience and dedication. The aim is to gain voluntary information from the users through strategically-placed sign-up forms, gated content, quizzes, incentives, and even pop-up stores at live events.
Through these tried-and-tested methods, crafting and maintaining an email list for achieving marketing goals and increasing profitability will be easier.
