More Tactics to Grow Your B2B Email List

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List growth is a perennial top priority for email marketers. Today, it's even more important to grow your list with quality sales leads to keep your messages in your readers' priority inboxes and to lessen the risk that an ISP will block your messages because of outdated, nonfunctioning, or bogus email addresses.

Many B2B marketers also worry that they don't have enough email volume to generate high-quality leads consistently for their sales forces, because they have email addresses for less than 50 percent of their customer and prospect files.

In this column, I'll mention some list-building tactics that take advantage of newer technology as well as those that are time-tested and reliable, helping you to build your lists without jeopardizing your list quality or sender reputation.

Step 1: Build a working relationship with your sales team. Although some salespeople still hoard their caches of customer or prospect email addresses, more and more sales organizations have embraced the power of the email channel.

Some have even become the people in your organization who will most likely pressure you to bombard customers or prospects with email messages in an attempt to overturn slumping sales. They now see email as a "quick fix" that will allow them to churn up business.

It's even more important to be transparent with your sales team, as they grow into their newfound love for email. Demonstrate how an email contact strategy that is intelligent, customer lifecycle-based, and data-driven will be much more effective at helping them reach their sales goals than sending their contacts irrelevant messages over and over again.

Sharing email marketing best practices and building more trust between marketing and sales will open the door to the "best" names sales had kept to itself in the past and allow you to build a program that serves the needs and best interests of the sales organization, your goals, and your subscribers' needs.

Step 2: Organic list building is still the best method. A quick sign-up form on all highly trafficked pages on your website is still one of the best sources for quality email permission capture. Try some of these fresh ideas to target signing up 3 percent to 5 percent of new site visitors:

• Present first-time site visitors with an opt-in light box layer to request opt-in email sign-up.
• In the header, add Email Sign-Up link next to Account and Registry Sign-In links. Clicking on these links should also present the same opt-in slide-in layer for sign-up.
• Take advantage of higher resolutions and wider screen widths by using the white space on the sides. Test out forms that follow the browser as they explore the site content.
• Enhance footer sign-up messaging and add graphics for prominence.

Measure and evaluate the results of sign-up placements with A/B tests whenever possible. Monitor the website revenue per visitor and the revenue per subscriber to gauge the success of each sign-up tactic.

Other methods that are proving to be successful:

• Email sign-up solicitation in transactional messages and digital receipts
• In-store signage and touch screen kiosks for sign-up
• SMS text your email address to a short code to sign up for email
• QR codes on floor-standing displays and checkout/counter displays that direct to a sign-up form
• Tablet-based opt-in email form collection at trade shows and customer events

Another tactic currently in beta is the opportunity to enable a subscriber form for branded search term campaigns on the Google AdWords platform.

Before submission:

After submission:

Step 3: "Don't buy lists" is still the rule. Never buy an email list. This rule has not changed. There are no quick fixes in list building. You will end up with a low-quality list that will be expensive and still fall far short of your intended goals. The only thing you're buying when you buy an email list is deliverability trouble, hassle, and heartache.

Put the budget you had planned for buying lists into paid search campaigns instead. That is still the best use of your marketing dollars. Drive qualified prospects to your site, and make it easy to sign up for email online to maximize building your list.

The Last Word

Remember, the silver bullet for email list growth does not exist. Attracting subscribers and building your list are deliberate processes with quality, not quantity, as your goal.

My hope is that using some of these new tactics, along with our tried-and-true methods, will keep generating high-quality leads for you over and over again. A high-performing internal email list is the key to all successful email programs.

A great list, along with a newfound love for email marketing among your salespeople, can help you turn your marketing efforts into revenue for years to come.