B-to-B Insights : Build Your List

5 steps to building a large and responsive opt-in e-list of qualified B-to-B prospects

December 2008 By Robert W. Bly

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2. Calculate your maximum acceptable cost per new subscriber. When evaluating marketing methods for e-list building, you have to weigh the cost of acquiring the new name versus the value that new name has for your business.

To determine value, divide total annual revenues generated by your online subscriber list by the number of names on that list. Example: If your 20,000 online subscribers account for $600,000 in annual sales, your subscriber value is $30 per name per year.

Decide how much you are willing to spend to acquire a subscriber worth $30 per year. If uncertain, use this guideline: List-building campaigns should ideally pay back their costs within three to six months. Therefore, if your names are worth $30 per year each, you can afford to spend up to $15 per subscriber to acquire new names.

Say you drive traffic to a landing page where people can sign up for your e-list. The conversion rate is 50 percent; so for every two unique visitors you drive to your registration page, you get one new opt-in subscriber.
Using Google AdWords, you can drive traffic at a cost of $7 per click. Can you afford that? Yes, because that means you get one new subscriber for every two clicks you buy, which works out to $14 per subscriber—within your $15-per-new-name limit.

Would it make more sense to base the allowable acquisition cost per new name on the lifetime customer value (LCV) of online subscribers rather than just the average one-year revenue per name? Theoretically, yes. But you only can do that if you've been marketing online long enough to have reliable numbers on which to base LCV estimates. Until you do, stick with the revenue-per-year-per-name figure as the baseline.

3. Publish a free e-newsletter. The best way to build and regularly communicate with an opt-in list of B-to-B prospects is to publish and distribute a free e-newsletter on a specialized topic related to your product line of interest to your target prospects.

Publishing a free e-newsletter gives you two important benefits for your online marketing efforts. First, it gives you a standing free offer—a free subscription to your e-letter—you can use in your e-list building efforts. Second, having the e-newsletter ensures that you communicate with your opt-in subscribers on a regular basis. This regular communication builds your relationship with your online prospects while increasing the frequency of branding messages and online marketing opportunities.

4. Build a ‘free-on-free name squeeze page.' With a staggering number of free e-newsletters on the Internet competing for attention, it's not enough to have a simple sign-up box on your homepage for your free e-newsletter. You should offer an incentive for visitors to subscribe. The best incentive is a free special report the visitor can download as a PDF file in exchange for opting in to your e-list.

Drive traffic, not to your homepage or standard subscription form, but to a special "free-on-free name squeeze page"—a landing page highlighting this offer. It's called a "name squeeze page" because it extracts or "squeezes" new names for your list from Web traffic. "Free on free" means you are offering free content (the report) as an incentive to get the visitor to accept your primary free offer (the e-newsletter subscription).

5. Capture the e-mail addresses of site visitors who do not buy, subscribe or register. Put in place one or more mechanisms for capturing the e-mail addresses of site visitors who do not buy a product, subscribe to your free online newsletter or take other actions that opt them into your e-list.

When the visitor attempts to leave the site without purchasing or registering, have a window pop-up to capture his e-mail address. The headline says, "Wait! Don't leave without claiming your free report!"

Short copy explains he can get a free copy of your special report, by typing in his e-mail address in the blank space and clicking submit. If you are not proactively making an effort to capture e-mail addresses of site visitors who do not otherwise register, you are leaving money on the table.

Bob Bly is a freelance copywriter and the author of more than 70 books, including "The White Paper Marketing Handbook" (Racom). You can find him on the Web at www.bly.com, e-mail him at rwbly@bly.com or phone (201) 385-1220.

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