7 tips for building a targeted marketing list

18 October 2021

Did you know that 59% of B2B marketers pinpoint email as their top channel for revenue generation?

If your B2B organization is yet to begin building a targeted email list, the time to start is now.

B2B marketing emails experience a 23% higher click-to-open ratio than B2C emails and can drive growth, foster trust, and nurture relationships with leads.

However, before you invest time and money into building targeted marketing lists, it’s essential that you learn some of the best practices and tips around email list building for B2B. Otherwise, you might waste valuable time and resources on strategies that don’t pay and leads that don’t convert.

1. Identify your target customer

The first step to building a targeted marketing list is identifying your target customer. This is a crucial step, as having an untargeted list is generally ineffective and wastes time and marketing budget.

If your company already has an existing customer base, examine this and determine your list of target markets and what specific buyer groups you cater to. If yours is a new organization, without many customers, then you should also conduct industry research on your potential customers and audience.

While doing this, make sure that you define which decision-makers you wish to target within B2B organizations. This profiling will be invaluable when doing outbound marketing.

2. Practice inbound marketing

Once you have honed in on your target market, you can move on to implementing outbound and inbound marketing practices. Inbound marketing can be highly effective for generating quality leads.

Inbound marketing comprises a wide array of strategies and techniques. These include:

• Content marketing
• Social media marketing
• Search engine optimization
• Paid advertising

Keep in mind, however, that inbound marketing techniques are a slow build and take time to mature and yield results.

3. Get smart with lead magnets

Once you have attracted leads through inbound strategies, the next step in the sales funnel is to draw them into your targeted marketing list. Once again, there are a variety of ways you can do this.

To start, you should offer leads a chance to sign up for your email list at various points on your site. You should have prominent B2B lead capture forms displayed across your pages.

Besides this, you can also incentivize leads to give you their details through lead magnets and gated content. Lead magnetics are a great way to improve your B2B marketing funnel. Some examples of effective lead magnets include:

• Ebooks
• Guides
• White papers
• Checklists

All of these offerings can be powerful lead magnets. However, the success of your lead magnets will depend on their quality and relevance to the lead.

To increase sign-ups, invest time in tailoring lead magnets to specific types of leads. For instance, if a visitor is reading a blog post of yours on CRM software, then offering them a lead magnet that targets this area of information will perform better than something unrelated.

4. Implement the right signup forms

Wondering where and how to display your opt-in forms and lead magnets? There are various formats you can use to display opt-in lead capture forms. These include:

• Notification bar alerts
• Lightbox forms
• Fullscreen forms
• Sidebar forms
• 2-step yes/no popups

Additionally, you can also harvest email addresses from things like free trials and live chat. If you have live chat enabled on your B2B site, you can require leads to submit their email addresses before accessing the chat.

Another way to gather leads for your targeted marketing lists is through quizzes, surveys, or games.

Lastly, make sure that you don’t ask for too much information in your opt-in forms. Long forms can be discouraging and chase away potential signups to your targeted marketing list.

5. Engage in outbound marketing

Besides implementing inbound techniques, you’ll also want to engage in outbound marketing to build your targeted list.

Growing targeted email marketing lists through outbound techniques is quite labor-intensive. Therefore, it’s generally best to delegate the “manual” work.

Start off by referring to your B2B marketing plan and list of target markets. From here, you will need to manually look up B2B buyers and gather their contact information.

Some places to begin include LinkedIn business directories.

6. Purchase high-quality lead lists

As we mentioned earlier, inbound marketing techniques can take time to develop. Outbound marketing strategies can be labor-intensive. One of the best ways to supplement these strategies is by purchasing high-quality lead lists.

By investing in a lead list, you can start immediately marketing to new B2B prospects.

However, make sure you vet for quality when purchasing targeted email marketing lists. Ensure that you can set parameters on the lists you purchase, to guarantee that you get a truly targeted marketing list. Ideally, you should be able to target specific roles against specific campaigns.

Also, ensure that the lists you purchase are fully GDPR compliant.

Here at Kompass, we understand the importance, and value of a high-quality targeted list, which is why we offer you the chance to build targeted B2B marketing lists from our extensive range of industry segmented contacts.

7. Segment your list

Another important B2B marketing tip is to always segment your list. Research shows that 74% of people hate being shown irrelevant content.

List segmentation allows you to target B2B leads at different stages of the buyer journey, and send them relevant content.

Segmentation is usually best carried out immediately. After leads have joined your email list, it can be difficult to segment them accurately. One of the easiest ways to segment new leads is by lead magnet.

The type of lead magnet they show interest in can be a good indication of the type of content and communications they will find valuable.

Want to fast-track your targeted marketing list?

Building a thriving targeted marketing list takes time and diligence.

One of the most effective ways to fast-track this process is by purchasing premium lists.

If you want to kickstart your B2B marketing efforts with on-demand access to targeted leads, you’ve come to the right place.

As a global business directory and development partner, one of our missions is to connect B2B companies through our EasyList.

EasyList is a streamlined, on-demand tool that allows you to build personalized company lists from our global database of 59 million Companies. You can refine your search by 13 different parameters (including business or decision-making contact), and rest assured that you will remain in full GDPR compliance.

With decades of experience and a far-reaching international physical network, Kompass group is the B2B matchmaking and export service provider of choice for many governmental and private institutions around the world.

Take a look at EasyList today and start leveraging our vast network.

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