How to Handle B2B Leads with Personal Email Addresses

Potential leads who only provide their personal email addresses from free email providers like Gmail, Outlook/Hotmail, 163, and Yahoo when using web forms to contact B2B companies create both challenges and opportunities. While leads who reveal their work email addresses are more easily verifiable and generally considered higher quality, the reality is that many prospects opt to provide personal email addresses instead. By understanding why B2B leads use personal email addresses and the risks associated with ignoring these leads, B2B companies can implement a few simple lead qualification procedures to handle these potentially valuable leads efficiently.

Why B2B Leads Use Personal Email Addresses

Potential buyers may use personal email addresses rather than work email addresses in B2B interactions for a variety of reasons:

Avoidance of Spam or Marketing Emails: Work email addresses are often inundated with a high volume of emails, including marketing messages and spam. By using personal email addresses, leads can keep their work inboxes clean, especially when it’s early in the buyer journey and a trust relationship has not yet been established with the supplier.

Some Businesses Don’t Have Company Emails: In some small and medium-sized businesses, employees use personal email addresses when a business email domain is not available. In some countries, this practice is so prevalent that it’s even common for businesses to display email addresses from free email providers in their main contact details.

Consultant for Another Company: Many agents or consultants do not have work email addresses for their clients’ email domains or may prefer to use their own personal email address for the sake of practicality.

Flexibility and Remote Work: The rise of remote work and flexible arrangements in recent years has blurred the lines between personal and professional communication channels, leading more professionals to use personal email addresses for business purposes.

The Risks of Ignoring Personal Email Addresses

Considering there are so many valid reasons for leads to use their personal email addresses, is it wise for B2B companies to ignore leads with personal email addresses or ban leads from using personal email addresses on web forms altogether? While personal email addresses may raise concerns about poor lead quality and wasted marketing and sales resources, dismissing these leads entirely could result in missed opportunities.

Research from 2017 by MarketingSherpa suggests that a significant portion of B2B leads prefer to use their personal email addresses on web forms, ranging from 28% of directors at businesses with over 5,000 employees to 83% of students at businesses with 0-99 employees. The research also shows that certain industries use personal email addresses on B2B lead forms more than others, such as the agriculture industry, at a whopping 71% of workers using personal email addresses. And keep in mind this research was done prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, when the lines between personal and professional lives became even more blurred.

The research shows that requiring personal email addresses on web forms could reduce leads by more than half in some cases. It also shows that a significant amount of B2B leads using personal email addresses are valid and, in fact, hold positions with decision-making power at companies of varying sizes.

What’s a B2B Supplier to Do?

In light of the significant amount of B2B leads using personal email addresses for perfectly valid reasons when filling out contact forms, we recommend B2B companies to allow personal email addresses on their web forms. Lead generation is challenging enough. No use restricting the way a potentially valuable lead gets in touch by adding an unnecessary barrier that could send them straight into the hands of a competitor.

And what about the potential time drain associated with allowing B2B leads to use personal email addresses? There are a few ways to efficiently manage these leads so they do not become a burden on your sales & marketing resources:

1. Do the math: First and foremost, crunch the numbers to find out if your leads with work email addresses actually convert better than leads with personal addresses. If there’s not much of a difference, there may be nothing to worry about after all. If personal email addresses don’t convert as well, keep reading.

2. Ask for a work email address on contact forms: Simply asking leads for a work email address will reduce the percentage of leads using personal email addresses without scaring away those who have good reasons for using one.

3. Incorporate lead verification into your lead qualification procedure: Before sending leads to your sales team, have your marketing team verify leads with personal email addresses. This can be achieved through a quick Google search on the lead’s name and/or company; scanning the message field of your forms for clues, e.g., the level of technical detail and/or languages used by the lead; or employing one of many automated lead verification tools on the market.

4. Score your leads and treat them accordingly: Assign leads with personal email addresses a lower lead score so that your sales team gets to higher priority leads first, or you may decide to nurture leads with personal email addresses a bit further before sending them to sales.

Apply These Concepts to your XPRT Leads

While we encourage buyers using XPRT marketplaces (Environmental XPRT, Energy XPRT, Agriculture XPRT & Medical XPRT) to use their work email addresses, your XPRT profile will generate some leads with personal email addresses. By applying the recommendations in this post and asking the right qualification questions, you can efficiently move valuable leads through the sales funnel and ensure you spend as little time as possible on leads unlikely to convert.

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