How to Build and Use a B2B Email List

One of the cheapest ways you can grow your company is to build solid business to business (or B2B) email lists. 

What Is B2B Email List Building?

The objective with business email list building is to collect email addresses by encouraging website visitors (both customers and “window shoppers”) to subscribe to your company’s emails.

Building B2B lists allows you to connect with customers. But more importantly, it keeps your website from becoming a revolving door of people going in and out without engaging with your brand.

What Are the Benefits of Business Email Lists?

Believe it or not, leveraging email lists is actually cheaper than honing your social media presence.

Think about it…Of course social media platforms like Facebook can potentially put you in front of a huge prospective audience. But, on top of you having to pay Facebook to do your advertising for you, these platforms can change their algorithm at any moment and force your marketers to scratch and claw to get their messaging in front of the right people. 

With email, there’s countless benefits…

• You own your messaging 100%, and you go straight to the customer’s inbox (check out these quick tips on writing irresistible subject lines that actually get opened)
• When done right, email can have high conversion rates (averaging around 15%)
• With email, you get to share exciting news updates about your brand that drive traffic
• Lastly, you get to nurture your relationships by addressing your customers’ greatest pain points, presenting solutions, and showing that you really are paying attention

The best thing about constantly building up your business email list is that it’s scalable and repeatable. So the more decision makers you can add to your list, the more “at-bats” you have to re-acquaint older customers with your brand (potentially upselling them), and to introduce your products to prospective customers. 

All of this equates to more leads and more sales for your sales team!

How Can I Build My Own B2B Lists?

The key to building solid business email lists is to give customers plenty of opportunity to subscribe. 

Here are some strategies to build B2B email lists that will help boost your sales:

1. Incentivize Business Email Sign-Ups

One way you can build out your B2B lists is by offering incentives for signing up. 

If your marketing team has any kind of educational or strategic content like playbooks articles, whitepapers, eBooks, or training courses that can help customers better use your product/service, learn more about the latest in your industry, or just elevate their skills, offer this exclusive material in exchange for email sign-up. 

If you offer this exclusive content in cold emails, consider investing in tools like Mail Shake and Mail Meteor, to track activity and see what copy and content increases sign-ups and what isn’t working. 

2. Front Load Your Business Email Subscription 

A rookie mistake with growing a business email list is not asking users and website visitors to sign up for emails anywhere near as much as you should. 

Dropping an email signup CTA (call to action) at the bottom of the homepage won’t get you the sales boost that you need. And burying your CTA on a page that doesn’t get much traffic won’t get you the business you need. 

Instead, you want to strategically place CTAs throughout your website and be LOUD about it. Place your CTAs on multiple pages. 

And if a CTA makes sense on a page (i.e. a features page, blog page, etc.) then plug it because it’s a no-brainer funnel strategy. If a visitor is on a page, learning about all the amazing benefits of your solution, why wouldn’t they want to sign up for a free newsletter where they can be the first to hear about new product releases?

Additionally, be sure to use attention grabbing colors (this brief article runs through the top colors that drive sales), imagery, and copy that will make the prospect naturally gravitate to your CTA like the below examples…

Check out this short video for more pointers on writing targeted messaging that prospects will find irresistible.

3. Beef Up Your B2B List-Building With a Good Data Provider

If you execute the tips we shared with you in this article (which we really hope you do!) you still are going to need a little more juice to your strategies. In order to 10x your sales, you’re going to need LOTS of contacts, which means supplementing your sign-up efforts on your website with a data provider. 

Yes, you could always buy B2B lists that will give you thousands of email addresses. But as we pointed out in this article, buying B2B lists will do more harm than good for your brand and your reputation. 

A good data provider by contrast will help you find more customers that fit the scope of your ideal target, so you can scale your list building faster. 

If you don’t want to waste time testing out different providers, and you just want to try the best on the market, book a demo and check out Seamless.AI.  

Seamless will not only find ready to buy decision makers who match the characteristics of your best customers, but by fully automating the front end of your sales process (the manual research and data entry, the list-building, etc.) we make business email lists easy.  

Check out the video below to see all the amazing benefits Seamless.AI has to offer!