Although the business of marketing may have moved on leaps and bounds in the 21st Century, email marketing remains one of the most competent strategies for lead generation. This is despite constant innovation within the area and the plethora of new techniques developed within the last 20 or so years.
However, leveraging the same email marketing strategies simply isn’t cut it in 2023. Email capture via sign-up forms and newsletters just isn’t enough in today's digital climate. Here are a few ways to collect B2B email addresses in 2023 and why email marketing is still vital for the survival of B2B companies.
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Why Email Marketing Still Matters for B2B
In the information era, it seems surprising that one method of digital marketing can stay relevant for so long - but that’s exactly the case when it comes to email marketing. Email marketing resides in the calm eye of the storm, algorithmic changes, third-party cookies, and AI revolutions. In a recent study, almost 75% of marketers reported that the effectiveness of their email marketing is either improving or unchanging.
For B2B companies, this is even more the case. Longer marketing funnels and more engagement with key decision makers mean direct access to leads is vital to success. Sales reps can connect personally with leads using email addresses without relying on broad social media adverts to target barely relevant prospects. Collecting email addresses allows you to cater to the needs of your leads directly and personally.
So without further ado, here are 8 strategies to collect more email addresses for your B2B business.
8 Strategies to Collect More Email Addresses
Now that you’re ready to go beyond the basics and leave old strategies behind, here are 8 more advanced email capture strategies that go beyond newsletter sign-up forms.
1. Offer data or unique reports
If you want a person to give you their email address, you need to offer some form of incentive. Literally, billions of emails are sent across the world over a single day, meaning if you want someone to give you their valuable time, you need to offer up something substantial in return.
Data and reports are a unique and original way to achieve this. Performing your own research and offering the results to your audience is a highly valuable method. Provide insights on growing trends within the industry, or highlight new technologies which businesses can leverage to get ahead of the competition.
As well as helping to gather email addresses and leads, unique research can support backlinks to improve your SEO and marketing efforts.
2. Create free tools or free trials
On some occasions, free guides and templates may not be enough to entice office workers who receive hundreds of emails a day to sign up for their email addresses. A different strategy - for those with the resources - would be to create a scaled-down, free version of your service in exchange for email addresses. This is likely one of the most effective ways to encourage email sign-ups since customers would get a free trial of your services for nothing more than an email address in exchange.
In terms of what this free service could be, at Leadfeeder, we know that estimating cost per lead is difficult for many of our customers. So to cater to this need, we created a tool that can calculate it for them in exchange for their email addresses.
3. Uses live chats and chatbots
Traditionally, live chat and chatbots have been used to answer questions or queries that visitors to your site may have. However, in the right context, you can also use them for lead generation. For example, imagine you have a chatbot that opens by asking a visitor what information they’re looking for or what service they’d be interested in. Immediately, this funnels them into a pre-designated segment which you can then use to direct them to immediately relevant resources.
Once the chatbot has fulfilled its primary function, it can then ask the visitor for their email address to keep them updated on content and services that are most relevant to them. This way, you can capture even more email addresses for people who have already been funneled into a certain segment. This means you can improve your customer service in essentially a single step, where most of the work has been done by an automated chatbot.
4. Provide templates and guides
As mentioned in point 1, you need to give people more than a newsletter for them to hand over their email addresses. Having said that, conducting your own unique research may be too much work for the results you might get. That’s where templates and guides come in.
Templates and guides are relatively simple to make, especially if you really know your industry and what matters to those who work in it. Anything that can make someone’s job easier is incredibly valuable.
5. Host Webinars
Webinars are an excellent way to get the email addresses of qualified and interested leads. This is because webinar signups are far more important and serious than asking anyone who visits your site to sign up with their email address. The very fact that a prospect would choose to sign up for a webinar indicates that they have a problem that could be solved using the solution provided by your company.
Additionally, webinars provide you with far more data than just email addresses. Insights such as watch times, comments, and video replays can all be collected from hosting webinars - giving you a wealth of information on your audience.
For those out there who don’t quite have the size, expertise, or money to host their own webinars, fear not! You can always sponsor a webinar with an industry source or related company.
6. Trigger pop-ups
If you’re currently reading this article, there’s a decent chance you already know the basics of email marketing. This would mean that you likely already have a form to collect newsletter subscribers on your website. A great way to prompt visitors to view and potentially fill out this form is through a pop-up that triggers after a certain time.
For example, you can set the pop-up to trigger when they’ve read two blog posts or after 5 minutes of reading an article. This means you can collect email addresses from users with a higher intent to purchase. This makes your email marketing more highly targeted to those already thinking about purchasing your product or service.
7. Create authoritative blogs
Blog content is well known to improve SEO and increase traffic to business websites, but creating authoritative blogs on topics (such as this one) and including an email signup button at the bottom is a great way to prompt interested prospects into signing up. After all, if they’ve reached the bottom of the blog post, it’s a good sign that they’ve read it in its entirety and are likely to be interested in your service.
It can also be a good idea to provide potential subscribers with a choice of how often they would like to be sent emails by your company. This way, prospective customers know they won’t be harassed by constant emails and can choose to receive however many they want. Most blog platforms have a plugin that allows you to do this automatically while offering access to additional insights and data.
8. Use B2C tactics for B2B
Although not all B2C tactics work in a B2B environment, contests and giveaways are one of the few which do. Once you know what your prospects need or would like from your business, you can make this a reality for a small proportion of your audience. Contests are a low-cost and high-reward way to improve sign-ups without having to provide rewards for every single person who submits their email address.
Examples of prizes could include a free subscription to whichever service you’re providing or even branded merchandise if this is something your business already does. Whatever the reward is, just make sure that it’s relevant to your audience to maximize email signups.
What About Visitors Who Don’t Sign Up?
It’s just a fact that not everyone who uses your site will want to fill out your email form, despite whatever you’re offering. And, the best part is that sometimes you don’t need them to!
You can try Leadfeeder, which will help you to identify which companies visit your website even if they don’t fill out any forms. The tool does this by using IP and domain data tracking to identify hidden site visitors and provide you with the company name and contact information of your anonymous web visitors.
We want to hear from experienced email marketers what IP targeting strategies they use to target specific demographics. Comment below with tips to incorporate IP targeting into your marketing game.
