B2B list building is the cornerstone of effective business marketing, serving as the first step in nurturing leads and establishing connections. Much like B2B prospecting lists and marketing lists, it's about creating a contact list that's not just extensive, but also precise and targeted. The goal is to connect with the right people - those who are a perfect fit for your product or service, ensuring that your efforts are focused and fruitful.
In this guide, we focus on key strategies for effective B2B list building:
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By the end of this guide, you'll master the art of creating targeted B2B contact lists, ensuring your outreach is both efficient and effective.
Let’s get into it!
A B2B contact list is essentially a mailing list — but with some specialized properties that make it ideal for gaining new customers and users, leads, and revenue.
B2B contact lists are made up of professionals in businesses relevant to the service or product that you are offering. Often, you target decision-makers to become partners and ensure your emails will have the most impact and result in a new client.
Principally, email lists help you reach new contacts, explore new opportunities, and build new business relationships.
While in the past you may have had to make several calls to get in touch with the right people, B2B email lists make the job of your marketers or sales team much easier. No longer do they have to painstakingly go through individual company websites for contact details — that work has already been done!
Now, when you have a new product or service that will be potentially relevant to a large number of companies or organizations, you can send it to all of them at once. This means you have a much more efficient approach to your marketing process, which could lead to more efficient uptake of your products or services.
A great email list has a few key attributes to it that make it stand out from the crowd.
Of course, putting together a great email list can be tricky, but luckily there are solutions. You can consider engaging a service to do it for you like BookYourData.
Not only does BookYourData have real-time email verification, ensuring that email addresses are valid and deliverable, but when you sign up for free, you’ll be able to trial the service with 10 free leads. That’s plenty for you to be able to see how BookYourData can help you build your B2B contact list.
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If you don’t already have a subscription box on your website, put one in now! If you do already have one, it’s possible that it may not be the most effective depending on how you’ve implemented it.
Making sure that your subscription box is noticeable on your landing page or landing pages is a key part of ensuring that your potential customers can actually find it to sign up.
To make sure that your subscription box excels, place the elements prominently on the page, with a border or color scheme that will help it stand out.
You can also use pop-ups to help remind people to sign up, although don’t use too many — pop-ups can slow down your website and are often frowned upon by consumers if used in excess.
Whenever somebody is engaging in any kind of business with your company, you want to provide them the opportunity to sign up to your list — for example, a checkbox at the bottom of the form beside the submit button that says “sign me up for promotional offers and regular notices”.
That’s exactly what this is! It’s a great way to put things in front of your website visitors without necessarily making it feel pushy or too in-your-face.
If you’re already providing content for free on your web page, blog, or other platform, make sure you’re not giving away all your secrets!
Gating some of your best content behind an email list signup can increase the number of people who will sign up and drive an increase in website traffic.
You need to be careful about gating content — if you gate all of it, there’s no incentive for people to join your mailing list or read your newsletter about all the cool products and services you offer.
However, if you gate too little, people are unlikely to bother signing up in the first place.
Some strategies to help you identify which pieces of content to gate include looking for articles, blog posts, webinars, templates, ebooks, or any other piece of content that you offer, that extends upon another piece of content you currently have available.
You could also make a segment available, ie, the first few pages or minutes, but require sign-up for full access or customizability.
If you are already offering services through another platform (your website, social media, etc) you can entice people to sign up by offering a discount or free piece of material if they sign up.
Campaign platforms and software such as Salesforce (or even more bare-bones CRM applications that focus purely on emails) can allow you to send personalized emails to new subscribers.
This way, you can quickly get people invested in the tone of your emails, plus ensure that they engage with your initial email. This means that future emails are less likely to wind up in somebody’s spam.
Utilizing quizzes, “spin the wheel to get a free reward” minigames, bright colors, and animations can make your signup forms more appealing to use and more noticeable in general.
If people are interested in the signup form, they are more likely to follow through on the task and actually sign up, so gamifying your forms is a great way to increase interactions.
Your social media accounts can be a perfect way to grow a mailing list! If you have a large following, you already have significant access to a potential audience for your product.
Advertising your mailing list on your social media page is a perfect way to get people to sign up. However, it does come with some challenges — principally, getting people to click on the link to your sign-up form.
To ensure that you get results from advertising on social media, make sure you are utilizing best practices with your links:
Talk to your friends, existing clients, and contacts to garner more contacts by list building services! It’s easy to overlook the professional network you likely already have access to.
Don’t forget the age-old quid pro quo tactic — if you’ve done something similar for them in the past, they’re more likely to show their thanks and do the same for you. All you have to do is ask — you’re well within your rights to do so!
Ensuring that you use all of these offline options to improve your reach is a great way to fill out your list of prospects to contact.
Working with a data provider such as BookYourData is a great way to ensure that you have all the information required for a mailing list.
Working with data providers can provide you with a wealth of contact information including phone numbers, addresses and zip codes, fax numbers, and more — things you may struggle to find independently.
BookYourData guarantees a 97% accuracy on B2B prospecting, so you can be sure that the data you receive is trustworthy and will both reduce your bounce rates and increase conversion potential.
Not only that, the pay-as-you-go pricing model gives you tiered and volume options to cover you at every level of your business.
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A buyer persona is an idealized picture of your target audience. By creating an in-depth personality and interest profile of your target audience, you’ll get a much better idea of who you should be adding to your mailing list and how you want to structure your emails.
To create a general buyer persona, think about demographic information. This may include:
By referencing this persona as if it were a real person, you’ll be able to check whether a new contact is really an asset to your email list, plus write your promotional content in a more accessible way for your targets.
Using the buyer persona you just created, find companies that will be interested in your product. You can even target individual people with the buyer persona!
Locating decision-makers can be tricky, but if you have access to a company’s website it shouldn’t be too bad. Look for their “staff” or “about us” page to get an eye on the name of the person in the role you’re targeting, and see if any contact details are listed there.
If this doesn’t work, you could try using LinkedIn — now you have a name, you can message them on the platform, or directly email them if they list their address publicly.
Making sure that the companies and individuals you’ve identified meet the criteria you set out in your buyer persona is very important.
Use the techniques we talked about above to build your list efficiently and to ensure that things go as quickly as possible. You can also make use of existing email lists, databases, or services designed to help B2B marketers.
That’s where BookYourData comes in. The database contains over 500M+ profiles, 250M+ B2B contacts for exporting leads as ready-to-buy, 30M+ global companies, and 60k+ technologies. Those are all potential leads for you to build your B2B contact lists with.
Simply sign up for free with 10 free credits and you can start accessing your comprehensive data and target specific niches.
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Now that you’ve put together your email list, you should double-check that all of your email addresses are correct. It’s not much use having an email list if all your sales reps get when they send something is a “failed to deliver message” notification!
While you can use an online email checker or manually inspect for correct syntax, BookYourData provides a built-in realtime email verification with every export, ensuring you always have accurate and deliverable addresses without any extra effort.
Lead scoring is a process whereby you rank prospects by how well they match your target audience as well as how likely they are to be interested in your offering.
This allows you to ensure that you are contacting high-value leads first, which will lead to an increase in successful communication.
While there are many lead-scoring methods, they all boil down to:
If you’re setting up a new B2B lead or contact list, you can draw on previous lists you have made to see if this network remains interested.
You can do this by adding an introduction to the new email list in existing newsletters, or by directly discussing it with contacts in your network (either in person, over the phone, or online).
Segment out the inactive subscribers so that you can focus your attention on active contacts who are engaging with your brand. If you don't want to remove inactive users, try launching a re-engagement campaign. This will keep your email list clean, which will improve deliverability and engagement.
Categorizing the various contacts you have on your list by which specialized area of your target market they occupy is a great way to ensure that your B2B lead list is maximizing its deliverability.
This allows you to quickly and easily determine which of your contacts will be relevant to a particular offering, and send targeted emails throughout your list that will increase the amount of engagement you receive compared to the amount of effort you put in.
Making sure that you know the interests and needs of your leads is a great way to increase the effectiveness of your list — arguably this should take center stage!
By including this information in your lead list structure, you can accelerate the process of personalizing content delivered via email, and ensure you grab any promising leads before they slip away or are captured by a competitor.
By making sure you divide your B2B list by geographical location, you can optimize the send time of your emails to each region based on their timezone and when they are likely to read it.
The difference between a B2B contact list and an email list is in the name and application. A contact list merely lists all the leads you have but isn’t integrated into any particular platform. An email list takes the contact list and integrates it into an email or CRM platform.
You should update your B2B contact list as often as possible! Making sure your contact details are up-to-date is key to the success of any B2B contact list. In general, you should be updating the list at least once a quarter, but more is better.
Using an email checker can manually verify the emails you have — however, to make doubly sure of the quality of your list, you can use a list provider such as BookYourData. Ensure that your list provider meets privacy regulations such as CCPA and GDPR, and check that they have a good reputation for delivering quality contact details.
Creating a B2B email list is a key process for any business looking to market to other businesses. It accelerates the rate of lead conversion significantly and makes your sales teams more effective.
When creating one of these lists, ensure that you target it toward your ideal customer (or buyer persona), include some variety, and tag your contacts with a variety of useful identifiers such as location, specialization, particular interest, and so on.
For those seeking a streamlined approach to B2B contact list creation, BookYourData offers a trusted solution, as evidenced by its 100k+ users and 20k+ paying customers. By choosing BookYourData, individuals can access hassle-free, real-time verified list building, allowing them to concentrate on promoting their products or services.
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