Most B2B marketers recognise that email marketing is one of the most effective ways of reaching potential new customers – even cold prospects – and winning new business. It’s low-cost, quick to implement, easy to measure and provides probably the best return on investment of any marketing channel.
Database size matters
Nevertheless, communicating effectively with cold prospects, especially in the B2B sector, is one of the biggest challenges facing most marketers. So it’s worth investing some time and resources in planning your campaigns, adopting best practice and building up quality lists.
In fact, growing your database of email contacts is central to the success of your campaigns. Recent research found that 38% of marketers put list growth above deliverability, integration and even lowering their marketing costs. It makes perfect sense too. The more people you can send your emails to, the more leads you are likely to generate. You’ll also be able to segment, profile and personalise your campaigns more effectively.
Know your strategy
But growing B2B email marketing lists for cold prospects is not easy. You need to start with a strong strategy, so you can work out how large your email marketing database needs to be to fulfil your planned campaigns.
Below are five top tips for growing your database:
1. Create a list-growth strategy that defines conversion goals over weeks and months
You should consider:
- By what percentage do you wish to grow your B2B email marketing database?
- What methods will you use to do this?
What is the expected cost of the time and other resources needed to do this?
2. Factor in expected losses based on industry standards and create your own benchmarks
You can expect, for example, one third of your B2B email list to become non-deliverable each year. For a B2B cold prospect list this figure is likely to be higher. Having a large proportion of non-deliverable email addresses can depress your email response figures. Therefore you need to monitor your database to check whether your losses are in line with industry standards, and take steps to keep growing and renewing your lists.
3. Measure your success
Calculate how many new opt-ins you need so that acquisitions exceed deactivations and unsubscribes.
4. Monitor your monthly list size and compare it with stated goals
Is growth outpacing attrition?
5. Set an annual budget for list-growth tactics and integrate it with your marketing budget
Once you have a clear idea of the numbers you need to attain, you can move on to achieve these through third-party acquisition and organic growth.
Third-party acquisition
If you already have a prospect database, one of the best ways to grow it is to work with a data supplier to clean it up, enhance and append it. This can be done in several ways:
- If your database contains names and postal addresses but not email addresses, your data supplier can match your file with a permission-based email database, and provide you with email addresses.
- A data supplier can append additional demographic information to your database. This can be used to build a profile of your prospects so that your email campaigns are much more targeted and successful.
- Gather intelligence from your existing customer base to help identify look-a-likes’ that are similar to your existing best customers. Your data supplier can use this information to identify new prospects with similar characteristics.
To fuel the growth of your B2B email marketing lists, you will need to make your email campaigns work harder for you. Think about the touch points you can put in place to interact with and grow your database.
Organic growth
Organic growth is all about using your touch points with potential customers to collect their email addresses. These touch points might be online, such as on your website or social media, or offline, at industry events or through telemarketing campaigns.
The key is to optimise all touch points to encourage the cold prospects you’ve contacted to opt-in to receive further information. Remember, prospects that have opted in are the most responsive to future marketing communications. So find out what they want, when, where and how they want to be contacted.
The best way to encourage prospects to provide this information is to give them something they want in return. For example, white papers work well in the B2B market. Make it easy for them to sign up, don’t ask for too much information, and make it worth their while. Then begin your email relationship by sending them a brief welcome message.
Combine quantity with quality
Of course, growing your database is just the first step. For your B2B email marketing campaigns to be successful, you need to ensure that the messages you send to your expanded list are relevant, engaging, well designed and personalised. Even with a large database to target, you still need to apply the best-practice rules of email marketing if you are to maximise your response rates. In fact, these rules are more important than ever when targeting cold B2B prospects.