B2B List Building: Ultimate Blueprint to Generate Contacts & Sales

What Is a B2B Contact List?

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.

The Importance of B2B Contact Lists

Why You Should Build an Email List

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.

What Makes a Great Email List?

A great email list has a few key attributes to it that make it stand out from the crowd.

• Great email lists are targeted: It doesn’t make sense to have someone from the electricity and power industry on your mailing list if you are offering training on food safety, for example! Ensuring that you optimize your user database to include only relevant contacts will significantly improve the success of your promotions.
  

• Great email lists have variety: If you are only sending emails to staff at one company, maybe you’ll get them to sign on with you — but there are other companies who would be interested in your product! Just be sure to do your research and only select contacts from relevant businesses.
  

• Great email lists target email addresses of decision-makers: The decision-makers are the ones who’ll have significant influence over the decision to sign on with your service or product. Therefore you want to make a point of contacting the right people. Examples could include CEOs, business owners, and senior managers.
  

• Great email lists are ethical and comply with CCPA and GDPR: Whatever choices you make, ensure that you are operating within the law. You’ll also be much less likely to upset anyone if you contact them at an email address you shouldn’t have access to…!

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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How to Build Your B2B Email List in 8 Steps

Highlight Your Subscription Box

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.

Include the “Opt-In” Option on All Web Forms

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.

Gate Your Best Content

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.

Offer a Discount

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.

Gamify Your Signup Forms

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.

Leverage Your Social Media Accounts

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: 

• Use URL shorteners to make it easy for people to type into search bars
• Add clickable links on posts or in bios
• Remove as many barriers to people making it to your sign-up form and onto your mailing list as possible.

Use Offline List-Building Tactics

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.

Work with a Data Provider

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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Creating an Effective B2B List: Tools to Streamline the Process

Create a Buyer Persona

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:

• Which state or city they’re in
• What their age might be
• What their industries might be
• Which job titles they’re from
• What their career goals or aspirations are.

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.

Identify Target Companies and Relevant Decision Makers

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.

Build Your List

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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Validate Your List

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.

The Best Way to Structure Your B2B Lead Lists

Use a Lead Scoring System

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:

• Identifying relevant characteristics of your target market
• Identifying indicators of interest that your leads may express
• Seeing how well each lead matches with these characteristics and indicators and assigning it a score.

Reach Out to Your Old Contacts

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).

Active and Inactive Categorization

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.

Sort by Specialization

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.

Identify Interests & Serve Needs Quickly

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.

Consider the Geographical Location

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.

B2B List Building FAQs

What is the difference between a B2B contact list and a B2B email list?

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.

How often should I update my B2B contact list?

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.

How can I ensure the quality of my B2B contact list?

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.

What You Need to Remember About B2B List Building

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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