Building an email list.
To create your list, your organization needs to earn user's interest. Consider trying to capture the interest of users through tradeshows, networking events, advertising, PPC, your website and by creating meaningful blog content that attracts the interest and attention of new prospects.
Why build an email list?
Not all contacts are ready to buy. Many B2B buyers are casually exploring new solutions and products. By capturing their email and employing behavioral segmentation to create distinct email lists, you can deliver meaningful and relevant content to interested subscribers. This list is a prospecting list from which leads are born for B2B marketing.
What kind of content?
Don't just bombard your email list with sales pitches and pleas. That is a clear turn-off, which will only lead to unsubscribes. Instead, create helpful, interesting, useful or entertaining content that your list will enjoy. Try to reduce the number of unsubscribes and increase the click through rate from your emails. By watching these simple metrics, you will get a sense of how your content and email subject lines are performing over time.
Where does behavioral segmentation come into play?
My using an analytics application that tracks the behavior of your contacts, you can identify some pretty interesting metrics on each contact:
Please give me an example of how I should segment my B2B marketing list
Here's an easy example. Let's say a prospect reaches out and answers a couple required questions on a contact form. If they give you a purpose for their inquiry (take a free trial, download a whitepaper, etc), then you can identify them as a lead. This may put them into a possible Lead list within your CRM.
However this data gets far more interesting when you rank all the potential answers within a point system and also assign points to website activities (downloading a whitepaper or clicking on a call-to-action). By compiling this information automatically based on their behavior and answers, you will have a very strong segmentation list for on-going email marketing. Leads with high ratings may be ready for sales content, whereas prospects with low points may need to be nurtured with more educational or general help content until they indicate their sales-ready stage.
Additionally, by building such segmentation lists, your B2B campaigns can identify the particular needs of your contacts. This will allow you to deliver more relevant content and drive them further into the buying process.