Have you heard? Big data is the new black.
How many times have you opened your inbox only to find a flood of new emails trying to sell you products or services you’re not in the market for? But sometimes, you come across that one email that hits the nail right on the head for what you’ve been looking for. This is where big data and email marketing go hand in hand.
Through the use of big data, marketers can gain a fuller understanding of what their prospects want and need. Big data is especially crucial if you’re looking to optimize your email marketing campaigns. Through careful analysis of your data, you can craft even more effective and targeted marketing emails that your prospects will find valuable.
While you may have heard of big data before, we’re going to walk through exactly what it is and how to implement it in order to improve your marketing efforts (and your organization as a whole).
What is Big Data?
Big data is a term used to describe the large amount of digital information that’s created on a daily basis. It might sound simple, but managing and analyzing these large datasets can be difficult. Despite the challenge, this type of data is extremely useful for businesses, as it paints a picture of trends, behaviors, and other valuable information that, when used effectively, can help businesses optimize their marketing strategies and achieve their goals.
Big data includes a wide variety of information about customer behavior, including email addresses, contact information, numerical datasets, webpage visits, and the types of ads they click.
Big Data Planning
How To Collect Big Data
Track website activities: Carefully analyze your landing pages to determine which are most visited, how much time is being spent on them, and what type of content is performing the best. This will help you identify the different areas that need optimization throughout your conversion path.
Implement lead magnet tools: You can use pop-ups, floating bars, exit intent pop-ups, sidebar forms, and slider boxes on your website to capture your prospects’ data, identify what kind of content they’re looking for, and support them through your funnel accordingly (Source).
Leverage your social media accounts: The insights and analytics provided on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram can help you pinpoint when your visitors are most active, what type of content they’re engaging with, and your audience reach and impressions for specific posts. With a proper read on these data points, you can enhance your content strategy and improve your overall audience engagement. If you’re looking to take it a step further, you can invest in a social listening tool that analyzes online conversations about your brand, a specific topic, your top competitors, or anything else that’s relevant to your company.
Use customer surveys: Surveys help you gather qualitative data about your customers, such as their purchase motivations, the value they see in your company, the quality of your customer service, and how likely they are to continue working with you or refer your company to others.
Research, research, research: With research reports and other industry-specific publications, there’s no shortage of information out there. This second-and third-party data can keep you up to date on a multitude of consumer behaviors.
Click here to learn more about implementing these five key strategies.
The Importance of Organizing Big Data
Analyzing your big data can seem impossible without a systematic approach. To organize your data, you need to fully understand it first. From there, you can perform a data audit and remove any outdated or irrelevant information in your system. It’s also important to set clear guidelines across your organization that explain how records will be stored, shared, and updated.
Dealing with this volume of data can be very overwhelming, so it might make sense to designate a gatekeeper for each specific dataset. Ideally, this should be someone in senior management who’s trustworthy and has a solid grasp of your company’s technology.
You should also consider your options for data storage software. Find a reliable and secure platform where you can easily collect and manage datasets across your organization without hours of manual input. You want software that will generate reports, provide data analytics, and make your life easier, not harder.
Why Big Data Analytics Matter
Without a strategy backed by data, you run the risk of losing out on new business to your competitors. Using big data in your email marketing campaigns helps you identify who your customers are, what they need, and when they need it. If you don’t have these insights, you’re basically taking a guess at who your ideal prospects are.
This could lead to a kerfuffle of conflicting opinions, since there’s no data to support your theory. Some of the main advantages of big data include:
- More efficient business operations
- A better understanding of what customers want and need
- Easily identify where your marketing efforts are falling short
- Happier customers and prospects who want to hear from you
- Inevitable future growth of your business and revenue
Big Data & Email Marketing
Email marketing is a top digital channel in terms of ROI, which is exactly why our inboxes are overflowing with prospecting emails on a daily basis. With big data, you can stand out in prospects’ inboxes and take your company’s email marketing strategy to the next level.
Here’s how to get the greatest benefit:
- Segment Your Audience
- Easily segment your audience and personalize your messaging to provide more relevant content in your email campaigns, which will convey to customers that you understand their needs
- Enhance Your Subject Lines
- Enhance your subject lines by including first names or the name of the company
- Automate Your Email Marketing
- Automate the email marketing process to send the most relevant information to your prospects throughout their buying journey
- Gain Campaign Insights
- Insights provide a pulse on which campaigns or marketing tactics are working for your business
- Insights into customer preferences can be combined with the effectiveness of specific campaigns to achieve the greatest ROI
Big data and email marketing go hand-in-hand in achieving better results from your marketing efforts. Not only will this combination give you a competitive advantage, but it also helps you convey a sense of connection between your brand and your audience.
Key Takeaways
While implementing big data can be timely and expensive, it can take your company to the next level. We’ve run the numbers, and the cost of the tools needed to gather this big data is higher than the cost of outsourcing your lead generation.
If all this sounds overwhelming, let us do the heavy lifting. At Sapper Consulting, we act as your big data experts, using our various technology platforms to create unique email marketing campaigns for your business that are proven to be effective. Contact us to learn more.
