In this series, we are focusing on helping you create the most effective B2B email newsletters to help grow your business. In this post, learn why your contact list will make or break your email campaign.
The Importance of B2B Email Lists
In B2B, your prospect list is your golden ticket to a prosperous future. So in turn, your email list is held with the same gentle and precious hands that your prospect list is held in. I don’t need to preach to the choir about prospect lists, but one thing typically goes unsaid: your email list, like your prospect list, has a value. We’ll get to how you calculate that value in this post, but if you can take my word for it, every email on your list has a dollar value assigned to it. And that makes the care, cleaning and protection of this list of paramount importance to any growing business.
Segmenting Your Email List
So, who do you send your emails to? 80% of the time, businesses answer this question with “everyone we possibly can.” Yet, as you grow in your experience, and as the depth and size of your list increase, you’ll likely implement something called “segmentation”, which is simply the sorting of the list by some particular features or attributes of the senders. In the very basics of your email list, you should have the following information.
- Name
- Email Address
- Client Status (Lead, Prospect, Customer, etc)
Yet, if you have a CRM, with more data available to you and a deeper email list (we use depth to talk about the amount of data available and size to describe the number of emails in your list), you can do more. There are so many ways to segment your list that it all really comes down to the message you are trying to send.
Other popular list segmentation attributes
- LTV
- Lead Origin
- Annual Revenue
- Open Frequency
- Demographic
- Psychographics
- Brand Affinity
- Product Line
- NPS Score
- Buying Stage
- Lead Age
- Time since last purchase
No matter how you look at it, before you hit send on any campaign, you need to think about who you are sending to and why you are sending to them. Segmenting your list helps you create an understanding of who, exactly, you are sending to.
Many of you will be sending one email newsletter to all of your customers, but as you expand your campaigns, you’ll be sending a few emails – and you may be sending different content to different customers based on your segmentation. Long-term, the more targeted you can be in matching your email content to the make up of your list, the more success you’ll have with email marketing.
Growing Your List
But what about growing your list? Many marketers and sales professionals don’t see a ton of value in just growing an email list. They look for sales that hit the numbers, not prospects that need to be nurtured. So most email lists grow from sales meetings, networking events, or past customers. They don’t take a proactive approach to email list building.
We’ve written more on using websites to grow emails lists here, but the main platform you have for growing your email list is your website. Yes, many of our customers collect 100’s of emails a year from their website, and those contacts are viable potential customers to market to. You must explore this method of expanding your list with the utmost efficiency. There are hundreds of plugins and code samples to add a simple sign form to your website, and you should put that on your site from Day One.
Be active in growing your email list. Every email you collect is part of a bigger picture of lead value that we’ll cover in our last part of this series. But for now, think of every email as being worth actual value towards your next sale. If you collect 100 emails from a conference and one of those converts into a 3K sale, those emails were, in effect, worth 30 dollars a piece. Would you walk past 30 dollars lying on a table?
Click here to read part 2 in the series, on creating email newsletter design.
Ready to see real value from your email marketing? Get in touch with us here, or at 240.575.5887. As an email marketing company in Frederick, Maryland, we’d love to have a conversation about how you can use your contact list to reach your customers.
