There are a lot of misconceptions around buying email lists. The truth is, buying a targeted B2B email list is a great step towards scaling up your leads.
The trick is figuring out how to go about it: identifying what sort of list to buy, where to get a good one, and what to do with it once you’ve got it.
That’s what we’re talking about today. Here’s everything you need to know about targeted B2B email lists.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
- Identifying your needs
- What makes a good list
- Where to get a good list
- Cleaning your list
- Sending cold campaigns
- Nurturing unconverted contacts
Identifying Your Needs
Before you run off to buy a list, it pays to consider what kind of list you need. Namely, what sort of contacts should be on it.
Naturally, they should match your target audience. It’s most important to know their job role and industry. If you aren’t clear on who you should be targeting, build a buyer persona or two first.
It’s okay to need multiple kinds of lists. For example, if your target audience includes people in both sales and marketing roles, you’ll probably end up with separate lists for each. That’s good, because it means you can write more targeted, specific campaigns.
What Makes a Good List
Not all targeted B2B email lists are created equal. There are some that are great, and some that are worse than useless – they can be harmful to your marketing.
A good list is full of addresses that belong to real people in the right target audience, gathered via aggregation over time.
A bad list is full of addresses that belong to random people, or bad data like non-existent emails, spam traps, and so on. These are typically gathered by a process called scraping.
In a nutshell, a scraping tool scours the internet for strings that look like emails, and collects those into lists. There’s no way you can verify that these are in fact real people at all, let alone the right target audience.
Never send to a scraped list. It’s just asking to have your IP and domain blacklisted, and if that happens, your future email campaigns are going to end up straight in junk folders.
Where to Get a Good List
Okay, knowing there are plenty of bad lists out there, the logical next question is where to get a good one.
The answer: reputable data providers who use aggregation instead of scraping. If you’re unsure where to find out, reach out to us – Clickback partners with a number of them and we can point you in their direction.
Cleaning Your List
Even the best lists need a good scrubbing before they can be used. That’s because every list decays over time as addresses become invalid or get repurposed as spam traps, or people change jobs, for example.
It’s critical that you have your list cleaned before you send to it. Generally speaking, that’s a third-party service you’ll have to pay for.
If you use Clickback to send your campaigns, however, your lists are automatically put through a rigorous series of cutting-edge hygiene checks and verifications that remove bad data and leave you with a sendable list.
Sending Cold Campaigns
Armed with a newly-cleaned, targeted list, you’re ready to start sending. What now?
This is where it can get very challenging. Typical email service providers don’t allow purchased or cold lists, so you won’t have much luck trying to send with something like Gmail or Outlook.
There are also a whole bundle of technical challenges besides list cleaning, such as IP reputation management and making sure your content isn’t going to send red flags to spam filters.
Luckily, you can solve all those problems at once by using Clickback’s Email Lead Generation software. It’s designed specifically for cold B2B campaigns and allows lists of any size.
Industry-leading deliverability gets your messages where they need to be. Clickback uses a dedicated pool of IPs and domains to send your campaigns, so your sender reputation is protected. It also has a real-time content checker that audits your message as you create it, notifying you of anything that might negatively impact deliverability.
When you don’t need to worry about the technical challenges, you’re free to focus on creating awesome emails.
Nurturing Unconverted Contacts
What about contacts that don’t end up converting? Do you just toss them back in the list for the next campaign and hope that one gets them?
Clickback’s proprietary Website Visitor Intelligence™ (WVI) technology, built right into the platform, offers a much better solution. It enables you to target and track unconverted contacts so you can nurture them separately.
WVI also tracks contacts’ activity on your website, so you can see how they engage and where. It’s ideal for conversion rate optimization, for example.
Nurturing unconverted contacts is a much more efficient way of bringing them closer to a conversion, especially since you can see what content on your site they’re spending the most time looking at.
For example, if you have a group of unconverted contacts that seem to spend a good bit of time on your pricing page, you might send them a campaign with a special offer.
When you combine a high-quality targeted B2B email list and Clickback’s industry-leading Email Lead Generation software, you’re ready to start scaling your leads in a big way.
