When you think about growing reach via email, you probably think about building the largest email list with the widest reach you can. For some organizations, like consumer retail ecommerce stores, this often makes sense. But when your product or service is more niche, which happens often in the B2B space, growing your email list can be challenging. Sometimes there just aren’t that many qualified people from which to build a large list.

As you can see, reach is not the same thing as audience size. When you think about growing your reach with email, don’t worry about the size of your list, especially at the start. Concern yourself with the quality of your list, and the quality of your messaging. The right content targeted at the right audience will produce results every time. With those results will come opportunities to grow your influence. It may or may not mean growth in your actual audience size, but it will bring the results, results that are likely more meaningful than just having a large list of names.

Here are 3 ways to ensure you’re maximizing your reach:

1. Define your audience. “Everybody” is not an audience. Emailing “everybody” will give you scattered results with little usable data from which to learn how to build engagement.
   

2. Articulate your message well. Be sure that your content is honed to provide the subscriber with valuable information and confidence in your brand.
   

3. Be a little altruistic. When creating your email marketing program, think about how you can give before you ask.

For more information on how to maximize the results of your email marketing programs, check out Precision Email: 7 Lessons In Engagement Strategy.