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How to use your audience data to drive engagements and conversions

Last updated: September 22, 2024

Your audience gives you a game plan for engaging everyone in your audience — but only if you’re using it to its fullest potential across each stage of the subscription lifecycle.

In this post, learn how to use your audience data to maximize engagement and revenue, from subscriber acquisition to retention.  

6 high-impact ways to use your subscriber data  

1. Define and pursue target personas  

People take different paths to conversions, and often those patterns reveal themselves in your audience data. Optimizing your promotion strategy for those patterns will help your team realize better results in a fraction of the time.   

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Use your data to reveal the factors that predict a subscription: You might find that your newsletter readers are more likely to pay for a subscription than your website visitors, or that people with specific interests or job titles are more likely to sign up. With that information, you can tailor your promotional strategies to the audiences that are most likely to buy.   

Pro tip: This is a lot easier if you have a customer data platform. These platforms take in audience data from every touchpoint, so you can see how your non-subscribers and subscribers engage with you across every channel. (No need to transfer spreadsheets back and forth). You get a single profile for each person — and it’s updated in real time. Use this to see how your target audience engages across your website, email and other channels before they subscribe.  

2. Optimize your conversion funnel   

Buying a subscription seems simple. But a lot of things have to go right for someone to actually complete a purchase: Usually, they have to encounter a meter or paywall, believe your content has enough value to warrant a purchase, navigate to your payment platform, go through a multi-step payment process, then confirm. That gives them a lot of time to consider whether they really want another recurring charge on their card — and click out.  

So how can you prevent these bounces? Counter your audience’s most common pre-purchase objections and drive more conversions at each step of the conversion process. To do this, use your website analytics solution to evaluate each stage of your conversion funnel. See where prospects most frequently bounce and make educated guesses about what’s turning them away. ‘ 

For example: If you’re seeing a lot of bounces on your checkout page, consider adding more testimonials, social proof or cancellation instructions to remind readers why they were interested. Repeat across each stage of your funnel and don’t be afraid to experiment! (Learn how to perfect your customer experience roadmap here.)

PS: Also interview your customer success and sales teams to see what objections your audience has before purchasing and look to incorporate their feedback into your redesign as well.  

3. Experiment with pricing  

A perfect landing page won’t attract subscribers if your pricing doesn’t reflect your subscription’s value. Sure, there’s no six-step plan to perfect your pricing. But you can certainly improve your pricing strategy with your audience data.   

You could institute one flat price for all subscribers and see how it impacts numbers over time. Or you could use your data to institute dynamic pricing. In this model, different audience members receive different offers based on their engagement and purchase history. In recent years, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and other media companies have implemented dynamic pricing into their subscription package to considerable success.  

It’s hard to get this right, but when you do? You can drive incremental revenue from all those people willing to pay somewhere between full price and nothing for your publication. And all those people can add up over time.  

But exercise caution here: Overcharge the wrong audience and you’ll drive them away. So as you implement dynamic pricing, pay close attention to your conversion metrics and break down your results by audience segments. (Omeda tracks impressions and clicks from each meter and landing page, so you can get really granular here.)  If you see sudden performance dips, re-adjust your pricing accordingly.   

4. Identify untapped cross-sell opportunities  

Anyone can send someone a few articles per month. And a lot of them can even give them articles they want. But the best publishers are the ones that can introduce readers to resources they didn’t know they wanted. That’s the key to making yourself indispensable to your readers.

One of the simplest ways to do this: Use your audience data to cross-promote your content. Say that you’re looking to cross-promote your new beauty magazine to your other magazines’ subscribers. You’d query your database for people who have visited related web pages on your other sites, but aren’t subscribed to your beauty magazine. Then promote your new beauty mag via a triggered email.  

It’s a relatively simple but important workflow. And it becomes exponentially more valuable as you manage more audience members and publications.   

An example: Gardner Business Media has 350,000 print subscribers across 10+ different brands. After creating a single customer view with Omeda’s CDP, they could see how subscribers engaged with them across channels. Soon enough, they saw that people were reading about various topics, but weren’t always subscribed to the related publication.  

With this data, they targeted interested readers with ads using Omeda’s integrations and marketing services. For instance, the Gardner team created multiple personalizations that appeared on each of their websites, then used Omeda’s AdRoll integration to retarget that audience off-site. If the reader was “known” and interacted with the personalization, or read related content on any of their five sites, the Gardner team sent them a triggered email using Omeda’s marketing automation tool.   

See how they did it: Check out their success study here.   

5. Personalize recommendations and resources 

Personalization is becoming table stakes for publishers: 71% of consumers expect companies to tailor experiences to their needs.  

Anyone can put a merge variable into an email. But today’s winners are using their audience data to help people nurture their interest over time.  

Here’s how to do it:  

Use common subscriber journeys to create content series: If your audience primarily comes from social or digital, their experience is dictated by their algorithm. They click through the posts that come through their feed or inbox. And they might not seek anything out on your site, even if it’s aligned with their interests.   

But if articles are packaged together, and they’re promoted in a convenient place, your audience is more likely to see and engage with all of them. 

Here’s how to do it: Use your website analytics solution to see which paths your subscribers take on your site. What posts draw them in? What articles do they read together? If you use Omeda’s content recommendation widgets to recommend related articles to readers, are they yielding the expected traffic? Where do readers go next?  

From there, you can create different series of articles and resources, then promote them together. List them together on your site and/or stagger them week by week to your newsletter subscribers. Also consider combining them into a gated white paper or eBook so you can generate more first-party data from new readers (and use it to further improve your strategy!).   

Provide educational resources personalized to someone’s engagement history: Say that your newsletter provides a lot of beginner personal finance advice. That’s great, but as your audience builds knowledge, they’ll need more advanced knowledge. Get ahead of this by sending people a more advanced whitepaper, interview, or template once they click or read a certain number of articles. This encourages them to continue nurturing their interest — and further reinforces your value as a topical authority.  

6. Tailor your strategy to each individual’s engagement level  

Like any relationship, you need to read the room to keep your subscribers happy. You can’t spam someone into liking you. But if you want to build relationships with your audience, you can’t just remove everyone who skips an email from your list, either. 

Strike a happy medium by segmenting your audience by their engagement level. There are a few different ways to do this: If you use Omeda, you can segment your audience by their total engagement score or most recent engagement date, and even break it out by channel (last website visit v. last email open). Or you can use a lead scoring solution to qualify your audience. 

Whatever your chosen method, this helps you differentiate your outreach based on someone’s response. Often, that makes the difference between keeping a subscriber and getting a spam complaint.  

Take it from one of our customers: IRONMARKETS used its Omeda audience data to create three highly predictive engagement-based segments (“interested audience,” “core audience,” and “super-users”). With this, they could adjust their offerings and calls-to-action based on each individual’s interest level. And since the data encompassed each person’s activity across channels, these segments were as complete, current and actionable as possible. 

Besides increasing engagement across their whole audience, creating a dedicated “super-user” segment helped them focus their strategy and attract more valuable advertisers. 

The IRONMARKETS team targeted their identified ‘super-users” for focus groups, readership surveys and special event offers, as well as sales calls. They also created profile sheets with this group’s demographic, behavioral and contextual data, then shared it with their premium partners.  

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