5 Tactics for Building B2B Email Marketing Lists

B2B email marketing lists. We all need 'em, we just hate making 'em.

Or, at least, we used to hate making them.

B2B email lists are not as insurmountable as they may seem at first. If you hire the right team or adopt the right strategy, creating these lists is a breeze.

In this article, we will cover five tactics you can use to build your list organically and purposefully.

Let's first take a second to recall what a B2B email list is, and why you need it.

B2B email lists are the totality of your B2B data lists organized into ideal customer profiles. Typically the information associated with each potential customer is their name, title, company, and email address. Sometimes phones may also be found and added.

You use these lists as part of your sales strategy, specifically your lead generation strategy.

By having these lists of potential customers handy, your team can use a variety of ways to approach them and turn them into real prospects and potential customers.

From that list, your marketing team can add them to email marketing campaigns or newsletters, which can result in actual sales. And your sales team can add them to cold calling, cold emailing, or social selling strategies they have cooking.

Hmm, smell that? It's all the success and revenue coming your way from a good B2B email list!

But how to go about putting these lists together? Well, sit tight as we explore five different tactics you can use to build and grow your B2B data lists.

You want your leads to find you, so investing in a strong content strategy is key. We've covered before how inbound prospecting is tied to inbound marketing, and how this in turn is tied to creating top-quality content.

You will receive the information of your leads and they will give it to you if the content you provide is valuable and timely to them. To do this, you work in tandem with your marketing team to create high-quality content for social media and with an SEO focus for Google so that you show up early in the results.

A great way to do this is with blog posts like this one.

Business blogging is truly an untapped source of revenue and lead generation for a lot of companies, and investing in this tied to a strong social media strategy can be game-changing when it comes to obtaining and building B2B data lists.

Don't have time to dedicate to a blogging strategy or don't know where to start? No problem, a professional can help you out. A copywriting company such as FoundCopy would be the way to go. You provide your readers with valuable information to them and they can then provide you with their contact details so you can continue to keep them in the loop.

But to get this information from them, you need to have a place on your website where you ask them for it.

The first of these ideas is coupled with a great lead generation strategy for any industry. And that is to have somewhere on your website where you collect the information of anyone interested in your product or service, such as a contact form.

For B2B, forms like the one we use at SalesPipe or this one by Zoom will help your SDRs qualify the leads that come in. They make it easier for your team, whether in-house or external, to determine if a lead is worth pursuing. But they also make it easy for your B2B email list to build itself, so you can add these folks to a newsletter or cold email cadence.

Tied to a strong content and inbound strategy, your leads will find you and the lists will practically build themselves, so long as you are also careful to keep qualifying them and determining what stage of the sales or marketing funnel they're in. The difference between sale and nurture should be clear to the team in charge.

If you want to truly be simple, you can do what Netflix does which is just ask for the visitor's email address as a starting point. In a B2B context, this would be more work to qualify the lead, but it is likely to get you at least that piece of information with which to start building your list.

In B2C, you simply add the costumer to your newsletter to get them to convert:

Netflix's offer of simply providing your email address to them does come with the first thirty days for free.

This is known as a lead magnet. You convince them to share their very basic information by offering something of value in return.

This can be a free trial, but it can also be a white paper, access to webinars or courses, upgrades to the service or product, quizzes and surveys, free shipping or discounts, case studies, and many more.

A great way to offer these is via a pop-up on your website, or on the landing page, your leads go to. One example of this is HubSpot's blog:

If you're offering a discount, adding a sense of urgency with a final deadline also works well to obtain the contact information you need.

And once you have that information, you can add them to nurturing email marketing campaigns or newsletters that provide further lead magnets to continue reminding your prospect that you're there.

Another way to grow your list in a more outbound capacity is to make the most of LinkedIn.

This means, yes, making use of all the search options and using LinkedIn Sales Navigator to its fullest potential. The capacity to save searches in addition to lead and accounts lists means you can just check regularly and your search will be constantly updated. You just have to add the new prospects to your lead list.

But you can always do more.

If your SDRs are external and focused on outbound lead generation work to get you meetings and your company's name out there, one of the best things you can do is encourage them to use LinkedIn for social selling.

Beyond getting a list of leads from Sales Navigator or sending InMails, LinkedIn can be brandished to far higher levels.

Think of how Airbnb used Craigslist when it first started out to find its customers. You can use LinkedIn in more ways than one.

Find a course that matches the interests of your customer profile, check their post history or what they follow to see what they like, look into joining relevant groups based on their personal interests or on what is appealing to them professionally, and look into their alma matter to try to find a connection.

There are many more ways to use LinkedIn to build lists than to rely on Sales Navigator, and if your team is relying on just this, you're missing out.

Finally, the easiest way to build a B2B email marketing list is to hire a professional.

Yes, there are indeed agencies and firms dedicated to building these lists for their clients so that they do not have to go through the hassle of putting them together themselves.

These companies make sure that the lists are cleaned and updated regularly so that resources are not going into attempting to contact poor-quality leads. It saves companies time and money, as instead of investing their own resources into doing this task, they can outsource it to specialists.

Here at SalesPipe, we offer outsourcing services for any point of the early inside sales funnel. From list building and lead generation to outbound and inbound approaches to get our clients the meetings they need to sell their product or service.

We do everything that is time-consuming and costly for our clients, so they don't have to worry about it. And we have a playbook and the history to prove it.

Whether you're an SDR or a company owner, building B2B email lists is a daunting task.

Today we shared ways in which you can do it on your own that have hopefully helped you ease some of the fear associated with the task.

But at the end of the day, it's always best to leave it to the professionals.

So what are you waiting for?

Get in touch with us today to see how we can help you get those lists started with our talented team!