How to Get a List of Email Addresses to Reach Your Target Audience

Attracting new customers through outbound emails is often very effective. To start reaching out to these potential customers, you need to start building a list of email addresses. Though these lists can be found in many places on the internet, it’s better to start collecting addresses yourself. This ensures that you are reaching the right people and will increase your success rate when selling through outbound emails. Using several marketing strategies, you can turn website visitors into email recipients. Once you have several recipients on your list, building relationships with these recipients is relatively easy. 

A list of email addresses can be built in many different ways. We see a lot of marketers publishing great content to increase the traffic to their blogs and websites. Once a visitor lands on the site, they are encouraged to leave their email address to stay updated or download a free content piece. Getting traffic to your website might seem hard. But once you get a nice amount of visitors to your site every day, people will start entering their email addresses. 

Using all types of tools, you can automatically add their information to your list of email addresses. From there on, automated drip campaigns will send them the right information at the right time. You can start building valuable relationships with people that might turn into lifelong customers. 

What is a list of email addresses?

A list of email addresses is often a spreadsheet filled with data. This data can consist of email addresses with no additional information. Most marketers try to get a bit more information about their prospects before they add them to their list. The additional information can help personalize the emails you send to your prospects and can include:

• First name

• Last name

• Company name

• Company size

• Their role within the company

• Their location

The additional information is saved in the spreadsheet or a database. It can be linked to the email address that the visitor provided. When you are sending out automated drip campaigns to the list of email addresses, the additional information can be included within the emails. 

Rather than sending emails starting with “Hi,” additional information can help turn that into “Hi Steve,”. It will make the emails look more professional. You want to establish a good relationship with a potential customer. Using their personal information is a great way to improve emails that would otherwise be generic. 

Though many consider building their list of email addresses a best practice, some people believe a good email list can be downloaded from the web. There are many websites on the internet that provide a wide variety of email lists. In most cases, this is not the right choice. The lists of email addresses are often outdated and might even hurt your online reputation. 

Should you download free lists of email addresses?

If you search the web for a free email list, you will get millions of pages that contain download links for a list of thousands if not millions of addresses. Though it might seem easier to download a list, it’s not the best way to go. When it comes to lists of email addresses, quality is the number one factor that you should focus on. 

Downloading a list that can be downloaded by anyone, the quality is low, and you are not reaching people’s inboxes. It’s hard to stand out in a mailbox that also contains dozens of other emails received that day because others are also reaching these recipients. 

We highly recommend that you do not download any free lists of email addresses. The addresses on these lists are of poor quality and will hurt your online reputation. In most cases, these lists are scraped from leaked databases. In recent years, many big websites have had millions of addresses leak out in the open, including passwords. This enabled others to scrape these email addresses and sell them like email marketing lists. Some even provided all these addresses for free. 

The internet provides all kinds of ways to get lists with millions of addresses with a single click on a download link. These addresses will most likely not buy any of your company’s products or services, primarily because most free downloadable lists of email addresses contain B2C addresses. 

The odds of hitting the jackpot and getting the email address of a CTO at a Fortune 500 company is relatively low. But if your target audience solely consists of CTO’s at Fortune 500 companies, you want to find the right way to reach them. We will cover how you can do that later on in this article.

Should you buy lists of email addresses?

Another way to get lists of email addresses is by buying them. Though it may seem like a wise investment, you’re probably buying a list of addresses that dozens of others have bought as well. The addresses on the list might already be outdated or are of such poor quality that you are not going to make up for your investment any time soon. 

Lists of email addresses can be bought for around $0,10 to $1 per contact. Though 5000 email addresses for just $500 may seem like a great deal at first, you will quickly see that a massive part of the list is no longer active. Even worse, the addresses that are still active might never see your email at all.

Pre-generated lists of email addresses for a small investment can be expensive assets once you realize that the quality is poor. Some of the addresses might not have existed in the first place. That’s why we recommend focusing on building your list of email addresses. It will help you to be more confident that the quality is high. It also avoids problems such as being listed on blacklists due to sending too many emails that end up bouncing once they reach the recipients’ email servers. It’s always better to build your own email list. You can use Anyleads’ Email Finder to create your own lists of valuable prospects.

How to build your list of email addresses

A list of email addresses that is purely focused on making your business grow is essential in today’s marketing and sales landscape. You want to be where your potential customers are. And that’s right in their inbox. 

But before you can send any mass emails, potential customers need to sign up for your list to receive valuable content such as your latest blog posts, whitepapers, and webinar invites. The value of a dedicated list of email addresses that is built for your company is often underestimated. 

Even a handful of new email addresses a day can quickly turn your list into a goldmine if you learn how to engage with your audience correctly. Though there is a significant learning curve involved, adaptive marketers can quickly use all the knowledge from other marketing campaigns to create their email lists. For example, if you’ve been running Facebook ads for your company in the past, you already know what type of copy resonates with your target audience. By using that experience, your list of email addresses can grow significantly in a short period. 

Here’s a shortlist of exciting use cases for lists of email addresses.

Why you should build your list of email addresses

“The money is in the list” is a well-known phrase exclaimed by many online marketers. By creating your list, you control who you are reaching with your emails such as introduction emails, newsletters, or sales emails. Compared to buying a list or downloading a free list of email addresses, building your list is much more valuable:

• People already know about your brand

• They trust you to provide useful insights

• You will always reach the right person

• Your emails will have a higher open rate

People already know about your brand

If people sign up for your email list through events to download content on your website or because you’re actively hosting webinars, they know about your brand. When you download a list online, they won’t know who you are. 

Building your list of email addresses is extremely valuable as it allows people to get familiar with you. This will significantly increase your success rate down the road when you’re trying to turn your email subscribers into customers. The recipients understand that you know a lot about the market and that your product or service will align with that philosophy. 

They trust you to provide valuable insights

Trust is highly important in the B2B market. By sharing useful ideas with the recipients on your email list, you show that you’re an expert and are willing to share more insights to improve their job. When you gain a high level of trust, it’s much easier to sign the recipients as future clients once you reach out to them to talk about your product or service. A list that can be downloaded for free online or is offered for a few hundred dollars can never beat the level of trust that you’re building with your recipients. 

You will always reach the right person

When people provide their email address so you can reach out to them, you are confident that they are part of your target audience. If you send them valuable insights related to your market, they won’t sign up if it doesn’t appeal to them. 

Reaching CTO’s at Fortune 500 companies is a lot easier when you already have a list of email addresses of these points of contact within those companies. You have their business email address and can reach out to them whenever you want. 

Your emails will have a higher open rate

Sending emails to a list that you’ve downloaded for free, or invested a few hundred dollars in, will not guarantee that the recipients will open your email. But when they recognize your brand name, they are likely to open the email and read its contents. The average open rate of your emails is much higher, and people are more likely to engage with your emails. You want to avoid reaching hundreds of people that might never open your email. Focus on a few dozen of recipients with a high open-rate instead. 

Learning what your audience wants and needs

Building a list of email addresses is hard when you don’t offer something that your target audience truly cares about. You can’t just expect them to provide their personal information when they’re not getting anything in return. As a marketer, you need to wear the recipient’s goggles to understand what is happening in their day to day lives. 

Here are several examples of specific use cases in different industries

Every industry is different, so the types of content you publish to attract new subscribers for your list of email addresses will differ in every niche. On top of that, you also need to take into account what your competitors are currently doing to attract the same target audience. You want to stand out in a sea of competitors to gain the trust of your potential future customers. 

By establishing a sense of authority, people are more likely to trust whatever you are saying, even if it includes selling your product or service. It’s not easy to get your target audience to pay attention to you, but you need to get their attention long enough for them to sign up for your email list. Once they’re on your list, you can start popping up in their email inbox now and then to share more valuable insights about the market.

Useful tools when creating your list

When it comes to tools to improve the results from your list of email addresses, you want to pay attention to the following three categories:

• Tools that help you attract users to your website

• Tools that turn website visitors into email subscribers

• Tools that allow you to send emails automatically

Tools that help you attract users to your website

Once you’ve established the types of content you are going to use to encourage people to sign up for your email list, you want to launch marketing strategies that help attract these users. Your website is a great place to find valuable content, but you won’t get any visitors unless you promote said content. Part of your email marketing strategy is to focus on getting the right people to your website so they end up on your email list.

Tools that turn website visitors into email subscribers

To turn the traffic on your website into email subscribers, you need to add opt-in tools to your pages. An opt-in tool is a way of providing content behind a gateway. You can encourage your website visitors to sign up for your email list by sending them a whitepaper once they’ve entered their email address. There are many types of opt-in tools designed for specific use cases. If you’re using a landing page builder, opt-in tools are often included within the software and can be embedded on your landing page. Other tools are focused explicitly on Wordpress or Medium. When you use opt-in tools, make sure to use an email list template to store the data correctly.

Tools that allow you to send emails automatically

Sending automated emails can be an easy way to increase engagement within the audience on your list of email addresses. We recommend setting up drip campaigns that contain valuable insights for your target audience. Based on your recipient’s behavior, you can send specific emails or start sending additional emails regarding your product or service. Though drip campaigns do take some time to set up correctly by experimenting with email templates, they’re effective in turning your email list into potential customers.