Email marketing is both incredibly valuable and complex. It requires a very detailed funnel with many moving parts. Most successful marketers utilize both:
- Valuable, informative products to serve as a lead magnets
- Insights based on big data.
These two elements are often intertwined. Big data helps them create valuable informational products.
Here are some ways that smart marketers are combining the two.
Using big data to create unique informational products
White papers, e-books and other informational products are great tools for attracting email subscribers. However, the Internet is over saturated with them. Email marketers that want to create profitable funnels must provide something new. They need original information that hasn’t been repeated to death by everyone else.
Big data makes it easier for brands to make unique observations that can be included in their informational products. This helps them get better reviews, which increases their subscriber opt-in rate.
Split-Testing Conversions on Landing Pages
When you use an informational product to build your email list, you need a very strong landing page. There are a number of things that you need to test in order to create a profitable lead funnel:
- The traffic sources that you use to draw visitors to your landing page
- The images surrounding your call-to-action
- Your landing page headlines
- The ads that you use to draw traffic
- The call-to-action button
- The devices of the users looking at your landing pages
- The color of your subscriber opt-in form
All of these factors play a big role in your conversion rates. Comprehensive testing for all of these variables is now possible, thanks to big data.
A number of big data tools have made it easier to conduct split-tests. They allow you to simplify your testing processes, offer insights on what factors to test next, and help you identify which factors have the biggest impact on your conversion rate.
Split testing, or A/B testing is no longer a pain-staking manual endeavor. The days of logging into SQL databases to tally user counts is long gone. Instead, we can enjoy the power of comprehensive tools that automatically report how different landing pages are performing. And, depending on the variable you set, it’s possible to automatically have the winning landing pages shown more often, or permanently.
You might be surprised to find out that different site elements perform better for customers in different regions, or with different cultural biases. You can even setup automated split testing to compile data based on the region of the visitor. Then, you can configure your site to serve up your informational product to visitors in the format that performs best in their home region.
Determine Which Informational Products Have the Best Appeal
A great landing page that delivers a stellar UX is just the beginning. You need to make the sure product you’re offering is exciting, engaging and helpful for your target audience.
Developing an informational product requires a lot of time and research material. You want to make sure that your investment will be well spent. A few years ago, I created two informational products of my own. Unfortunately, I discovered that there was very little interest in the research I was presenting. And this was only after I had dedicated several labor-intensive months to each of these projects.
You don’t have to make the same mistake. Big data makes it much easier to determine which products people are most likely to be interested in. Here are some ways that big data can help you determine which informational products you should spend your time developing:
- Monitor hashtags and brand mentions on various social networking platforms. These factors are a good measure of the level of interest in a product, especially if you are going to be promoting your lead funnel through Facebook and other social media sites.
- Look at keyword volumes on AdWords or Bing. This is a good measure of how many interested buyers exist – specifically individuals with a high level of intent. Keyword volume is one of the best forms of market research available.
- Conduct polls on people in your target demographic. Sites like Survey Monkey have made it much easier to get feedback from lots of people all over the world. They also provide great tips on coming up with great surveys to get input from your customers.
- Using other services, like ICO Bounty Management to get information from interested participants.
Big data is critical to uncovering the topics people are most interested in. You can use your data to build highly valuable informational products that will draw lots of people into your lead funnel. The best informational products are so valuable, the visitor doesn’t think twice before entering their contact details – giving you a powerful lead generation tool that will provide opportunities to sell your products or services to highly motivated decision makers.