Trend: Marketing Automation Spurs Demand for List Purchases

Really Dumb Moves By B2B Marketers

The B2B marketers who didn’t learn their lessons with traditional email marketing systems are making the same mistakes with marketing automation.  “Dripping out text messages to purchased lists from marketing automation systems will yield the same sub-par results” says Michael Weisel, Chief Technical Officer of Gold Lasso.  As a veteran in the email deliverability space, Michael thinks investing more money in better technology will have no effect on email deliverability and conversion rates for the long run.  By purchasing lists, B2B marketing executives are attempting to justify their latest technology purchases quickly.  This tactic often results in dire consequences that no business can afford such as email blocking, loss of software licensing and the squandering of a marketing budget.

Takeaway:  Don’t Let Time Pressures Fool You Into Buying An Email List
Often, the main excuse for purchasing email lists is to save time.  Unfortunately, this and many of the quickest list building tactics for B2B marketers also yield the worst responding lists.  Marketing automation systems are not meant for hard direct sales.  They work best for lead nurturing and efficiently gauging prospect interest over time.  

How To:  Start Building Your List The Right Way
There’s no way around the need to build your own list.  This process is a never-ending cycle since most lists will suffer at least 20% attrition annually if not more.   Aside from having an opt-in on your website and getting feeds from your sales staff, here are three ideas that are guaranteed to work:

1. Conduct periodic incentivized referral campaigns.  Your subscribers potentially know other people who would enjoy your information.  Remember to include incentives and reward your top referrers.
    
2. From a social media perspective, include an opt-in form on your Facebook page and periodically tweet a link to your opt-in form.  These are quite simple to do and you’ll be surprised that the crossover between your social media following and your house list is relatively small.
    
3. Carefully and methodically use co-registration to build your email list.  Co-registration is now used by some of the biggest most well respected companies to grow their lists.  However, there are many pitfalls you should be aware of.  Download this white paper to discover co-registration best practices and how to avoid costly mistakes.