4 Practical Tips to Grow Your Email List for B2B Companies

Back in the days before the internet was ubiquitous, door-to-door sales were one of the most effective ways to stay front-of-mind and drum up interest in your product. Today, though, even the Encyclopedia Britannica has made the shift to online hosting, rending their neighborhood salespeople obsolete.

In a way, email marking replaced door-to-door sales, knocking on people's inboxes and hoping for a response. When you do it right, however, it can be much more effective because you're reaching out to a subscriber list of warm leads.

If you're just getting started in email list-building or revamping your process, you're likely wondering how to build an email list fast. Speed is important, but don't fall into the trap of indiscriminately gathering every email address you can find. Here's how to grow your email subscriber list in a way that will grow your business along with it.

1. Give Visitors a Clear Sign-Up Option

This may sound like a freebie, but it's an important first step before we move on to more specific tactics. When visitors show up on your site, do they browse around aimlessly, unsure of how to find more of the content that interests them? Or, do they have the option on every page to sign up for helpful news and articles delivered straight to their inboxes?

If you're serving B2B clients, remember how pressed for time other business owners and managers often are in their workdays. They don't have time to surf your site until they find the single page with a newsletter sign-up box. The reality is that most visitors to a web page will leave after spending a mere 10-30 seconds on it—though, if you can convince them to stay for 30, they'll likely stay for longer.

If you want to capture an email address before a visitor bounces, make sure you have an easy to find sign-up box on every page of your site. Then, when business owners see something that catches their eye, they'll have a way to opt-in before the "I want that!" feeling fades.

2. Draw Them In

When you ask many online marketers how to grow your subscriber list, they'll tell you to create a lead magnet and offer it in exchange for emails. This is a great strategy, but it leaves out some important information.

For starters, eBooks, mini-courses, and white papers all make fantastic lead magnets. When you look at the ones offered across an industry, though, they all cover the same few topics. So how do people visiting these sites decide which ones to download?

An estimated 80% of web traffic ends up on only the top 10% of landing pages. If you look at them all to find a pattern, you'll see that their offers stray from the average topics and free trials.

If your goal is both higher conversions and more qualified leads, make sure what you're offering is unique. Your lead magnets will help you gather more worthwhile emails if you offer something that only your business can give and all your clients could benefit from. Just be careful not to give the farm away with the horse—end every lead magnet with a CTA that draws people back to your business.

3. Answer Their Questions

Short quizzes are an excellent demand generation tactic. While lead magnets like white papers and eBooks attract people that are already aware of their business's pain points, quizzes confront them with a "what if" element that's hard to resist.

Let's take a moment to walk through how this works.

Imagine you're a business owner who's looking for help with inbound marketing—not a difficult reach if you're reading this article. You're looking through the site of a service provider who also offers cold calling, cold emailing, and digital advertising. Without being confronted about your need for these services, you'll likely ignore them and move on.

Now, what would happen if a 5-question quiz appeared on the screen with a title like "Are you losing qualified leads to your outbound marketing strategy?" As a growth-minded business owner, you'd be curious, and any helpful information you can get in just a few minutes is worth it.

After you've taken the quiz, you'll happily provide your email address so the results can be sent straight to your inbox.

Now, two critical things have happened. First, the business providing the quiz has gotten your email and an indication of the services you're interested in so they can add you to the proper step of their marketing funnel. Second, you've made yourself into a warm lead—you'll spend time mulling over your results, likely coming to the conclusion that there is room for improvement in your outbound strategy.

If you have any products or services that could help a lot of businesses but aren't popular or well-known yet, a quiz is a great way to drum up interest in them while also building your email mailing list. Be careful not to be too aggressive with popups, though, as excessive ones can drive away visitors.

4. Take Advantage of Every Opportunity

Lastly, use your existing online presence to your advantage when gathering emails. There are tons of opportunities built-in that many businesses fail to capitalize on.

Make sure to gather emails every time someone makes a purchase or fills out your "contact us" form. At the end of every piece of content you release, place a CTA asking readers to sign up for your newsletter to get more helpful information. Check the bios of your relevant LinkedIn connections to find their emails.

And if you have an existing list of clients, go through their information and add their emails to your list as well. As long as the content you provide is valuable, they'll be happy to hear from you.

Growing Your Subscriber List Takes Time, but the Effort Is Worth It

Growing your list as fast as possible is tempting, but don't waste your effort buying emails in bulk and sending newsletters into the void. If you put in the effort and follow the advice above, your email subscriber list can become a gold mine of qualified leads.

Once you have a great list, how are you going to nurture its members into customers? Do you have a solid inbound marketing funnel in place to guide them through the rest of the buyer's journey?

If you could use some help in turning a list of email addresses into loyal clients, ProSales Connection is here for you. We'll work with you to optimize your sales and marketing pipeline, giving your business revenue growth you can count on.

If that sounds good, give us an exploratory call. It only takes a few minutes to get started on the Fastest Path to Revenue©.