by Jen Doyle, Senior Research Manager

Marketing Research Chart: Effectiveness of list building tactics

Q. Please indicate the level of effectiveness for each of the email list growth tactics your organization employs.

Click here to see a larger, printable version of this chart

Respondents to this year’s B2B Benchmark Survey rated email marketing the third-most effective lead generation tactic for 2012. However, email marketing is a broad practice, so we decided to take a closer look and learn exactly which approaches are achieving the greatest results.

In the above chart, we analyze the most effective tactics for improving the foundation of any successful email marketing campaign -- the list. Many marketers are interested in growing the volume of their house lists. Still, while this is a perfectly reasonable goal for email marketing campaigns, marketers must not sacrifice quality to achieve volume.

Having an enormous list of email subscribers can be beneficial, but it will only be an asset if these subscribers have an interest in what you are sending. As we discovered during this study, the most popular solution to the challenge of achieving both quality and quantity of email subscribers is to ask for registration during purchase.

In this scenario, organizations support quality because they know the subscriber is interested in their product or service, and would likely be interested in email content. In addition, organizations can support quantity with this tactic, as it is an ideal time to quickly gain an opt-in.

For additional data and insights about B2B tactics, join us in Orlando, August 27-30, for MarketingSherpa’s B2B Summit 2012, or download and read the free Executive Summary from MarketingSherpa’s 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report.

Useful links related to this research

MarketingSherpa’s 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report

List Building: The four questions every email capture page must answer

B2B Marketing: Building a quality list