How List Building Cuts Down Prospect Acquisition Cost

Author: Gautam Mane

B2B buyers of today are savvier. Fancy copies and propositions like “our business is better than ABC” to win sales do not work anymore. B2B buyers demand personalized offers and solutions to finalize business deals. Need more sales? Get personal. How? You build a list.

What is List Building?

In simple terms, list building refers to a continuous process of adding potential customers or prospects – who are interested in your products and services and have the means to afford them – to your list. When a person provides you with contact details via sign-ups, newsletter subscriptions, cold calls, etc., they essentially want to hear from your business.

Basically, your prospect list is your ideal audience or market. You can send exclusive offers, educational content, blog posts, newsletters, or free samples to the list in order to –

• Increase subscribers
• Acquire prospects
• Enhance brand awareness
• Convert prospects and
• Cultivate brand loyalty

Want to build an impressive opt-in list? Use these tips to make a start.

1. Offer Incentives

Most B2B buyers readily provide contact information in exchange for incentives such as –

• Newsletters
• E-books
• PDF checklists
• Free trials
• Free samples
• Tutorials
• Exclusive content
• Case studies
• Webinars
• Discount offers
• Educational content
• Infographics

Make sure to include attractive incentives like these on your website and email copies. For additional responses, you can also add incentives to your blog posts, perhaps in a pop-up form? Either way, remember to follow up with a “welcome” mail and deliver the promised incentive on time.

Offer incentives that add value to your prospects. All incentives should be easy-to-access and consume yet informative and solution-oriented. Most importantly, your incentive should amplify your services or unique value proposition for faster conversions.

2. Include Effective CTAs

To build your email list, you need to use impressive CTAs, especially in the “About Us” section of your website. Create witty CTA copies that offer value-based propositions. For instance, instead of “sign up for more”, you can use “sign up for weekly newsletters.”

The latter clearly states why a website visitor should sign up for your list but the former does not. Undoubtedly, the latter wins the visitor. By including a unique value proposition in your CTA copy, you can acquire more contacts for your list.

3. Use Pop-Up Forms

An easy way to convert website traffic into paying customers is via pop-up forms. Use pop-up forms to entice your website visitors with attractive CTAs. You can include timed pop-up forms that appear when a visitor has spent a certain amount of time on your page.

Or else, you can include exit pop-up forms that appear when visitors are leaving the page to be less intrusive. Make sure to add an incentive on the form. You can include free trials, templates, newsletters, or more to arrest visitors’ attention and collect their contact information.

How List Building Cuts down Prospect Acquisition Cost

With a list, you can access measurable response metrics to your campaigns. This includes –

• Interaction with your content
• Email deliverability
• Number of unsubscribes
• CTRs and open rates and
• Campaign engagement

Harness the data obtained with the list and use analytics to derive insights. Use these data insights to create a successful prospect acquisition strategy for effective B2B communication. You can easily build a list using relevant copies and content without any overhead costs. But, if you have the budget, you can invest in a marketing automation platform to optimize the efforts furthermore.

Here are some ways to use list building for prospect acquisition.

1. For Effective Email Communication

Most B2B emails remain “unread” in the inbox. The rest is delivered to unverifiable or incorrect email addresses. For assured email deliverability, you need a permission-based list, and list building provides you just that. You can analyze the response to your email campaigns and write better email copies.

But before you start your email copy, define your objectives – enhanced brand awareness, newsletter subscribers, website traffic, product promotion, and more. Based on the objective, you can craft relevant messages and CTAs personalized for your target audience and improve the response rate. This allows for more effective communication and prospect acquisition.

2. Use Customer Referrals

In the B2B landscape, buyers trust peer reviews more than ads. If you have loyal customers, you can offer incentives like free trials or exclusive products to ask them for referrals, also known as “trusted referrals.” They can promote your brand on their social media platforms or peer circles, and list building practices facilitate this.

When you send the promised incentive on time, you earn the trust of your opt-in contacts and customers alike. Once you solidify the relationship with your list of contacts/customers, you can exchange incentives for testimonies and reviews to enhance brand or product promotion. This results in a high number of prospects at relatively low costs.

To start a referral program, you can offer incentives such as –

• Early access to products/services
• Free promotion on your platforms
• Brand items like bags, mugs, etc.

3. Get a Wider Reach

Unlike social media, emails have a longer lifespan. And with a list, your email deliverables are also higher. But if you add social sharing links to your email copies, you can enhance the CTRs and open rates furthermore.

By social sharing, you can –

• Improve customer/prospect experience
• Drive more website traffic and
• Attract new prospects

If the customers/prospects on your list like your email content, they can use the social sharing link to share it. In fact, the ease of the process makes them more inclined to share the content. As more and more people share your content on social media, more traffic is driven back to your website, and your search ranking improves as well.

Lastly, as people share your content with peers and co-workers, you widen your reach and attract potential customers. Besides, email communication is cost-effective and quick. You can acquire new prospects at minimal expense.

As the market competition increases, so does the prospect acquisition cost. And, if your sales revenue is less than your prospect acquisition cost, your business suffers. For B2B business success, your acquisition costs must not exceed the revenue.

To make sure, you can harness tactics like promotional contests, pop-up surveys, social media platforms, and more to build a potent list of opt-in contacts. You can interact and connect with these contacts to attract new prospects and reduce the cost of prospect acquisition significantly.