Email is unquestionably one of the biggest marketing channels – even though it’s been around forever – and every marketer wants to grow their email list.

Whether you’re sending cold email lead generation (ELG) campaigns or trying to grow your subscriber base, there’s a lot you can do.

Here are our top strategies and tactics for rapidly growing your B2B email list.

Growing Your Cold List

If you’re looking for rapid lead growth via ELG, growing your list is actually very simple. All you have to do is head over to a reputable data provider and pick up a nice large list with the right targeting.

A reputable data provider will aggregate their data instead of scraping it. Scraped lists tend to be full of garbage emails and generally aren’t suitable for use. That’s because they just trawl the internet for strings that look like email addresses. Do yourself a favor and pick up a high-quality list.

Make Subscribing Easy

One of the best ways to organically grow your email list is by making it easy for people to opt in.

For example, if you’re looking for more blog subscribers, add a small form to the side of your blog that lets people plug in their email and submit right there on the page.

It should be unobtrusive enough that it doesn’t actually distract people when they’re trying to read your articles, but it should also draw the eye enough that it doesn’t get missed.

Sounds contradictory, right? One way you can do both is by making a more subtle form, but animating it just a little. Have the button wiggle slightly every so often to catch the reader’s eye.

Experiment with Exit-Intent Popups

This is a very common thing to see on B2B blogs: when you mouse up to the Back button or your address bar, or some other indication that you’re about to leave the post, suddenly a popup appears urging you to subscribe.

That’s a popup triggered by exit intent – namely, when your mouse position indicates that you’re about to exit the page.

There’s a reason these are everywhere. They work, and they’re far less intrusive than a popup that suddenly interrupts your reading halfway through the article. Add a form to this popup (again, keep it simple and easy).

Interrupt Their Reading Halfway Through

If you want to try all your options, you can implement a popup that appears at the 50% scroll point on your article.

These are somewhat out of fashion, as they tend to annoy people more than other methods. That said, they can get results, so they might be worth testing out. If you’re going to use one of these, compare your subscribe rate when you have a 50%-scroll popup and when you don’t.

You should also analyze its impact on your dwell time and general engagement. If it’s squeezing a couple subscribers out, but scaring away a lot of other readers, it’s probably not worth having.

That’s because people’s engagement (or lack thereof) on your site is a big factor for your Google rank and general SEO. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot for the sake of a couple more subscribers.

Create Great Content

Yup, it’s not all about where you put your subscription form. It’s not even mostly that. Sorry.

The vast majority of your subscribers will come about because your content convinced them to sign up. Not because you had a really clever exit intent popup.

If your content is consistently, genuinely valuable, people will want more of it, and will subscribe so they don’t miss out.

Writing engaging content is a deep topic, but here are our biggest tips:

• Help people. Your content should, first and foremost, help whoever’s reading it. It might outright help them solve a problem, give them new ideas or approaches for overcoming a challenge, or otherwise teach them something. When you’re helpful, you get more subscribers.
• Develop an engaging style. If your actual content is valuable, but it’s delivered in a boring way, people won’t take interest in it. They certainly won’t want more of it. Take your cues from your favorite B2B blogs and how they write. Avoid being stuffy and stilted – that old-fashioned B2B voice just doesn’t work anymore.
• Write well. This part gets underestimated sometimes, but when a piece of content is badly written, it gets bypassed. I’m a stickler for proper grammar and spelling, and when someone can’t keep “their” and “they’re” straight, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in whatever their article is trying to teach me.

Ask Them to Subscribe

Try this: outright ask people to subscribe if they found your article helpful. You see this constantly with YouTube content creators – “if you liked the video, like and subscribe!” The reason for that is because it shows people that you want them to come back. You care, so they should too.

Growing your email list isn’t difficult, but it is a slow process. If you’re not getting a large enough audience through organic growth, it’s worth considering email lead generation as a way to reach far more people, more rapidly.