Email Gating Your PDF Downloads
Email gating refers to requiring a visitor to provide their email address before accessing premium content like ebooks, whitepapers, reports, and other PDF downloads.
Key Marketing Benefits of Gating
This content marketing technique provides several key benefits:
Lead Generation: Email gating allows you to capture contact information and expand your email list. A larger qualified subscriber list helps nurture leads and increases sales potential. Visitors are often willing to exchange their email for valuable content. It’s not advantageous for you to give valuable information away to an anonymous audience.
It’s not advised to have all of your content gated so give a few things away without any requirement to build trust.
Engaged Audience: Those willing to share emails for content are more likely to have an existing interest or need related to the topic. This filters for higher intent visitors who engage more with your brand. This is a great way to pre-qualify a lead- “if they want to read, they are a good lead.”
Progressive Profiling: You can progressively profile subscribers over time by examining what content they consume. This reveals insights on interests to further personalize communications. If you keep track of which PDFs they download, you can create a lead scoring system in your Salesforce or other CRM.
Nurturing Leads: Once subscribed, the prospect can be automatically enrolled in email nurturing campaigns that educate, convert, and retain them over time. PDF downloads indicate areas of buyer interest or need. You can’t nurture them if you don’t know them so PDFs are that gate.
Marketing Automation: Email gating integrates nicely with marketing automation platforms. Workflows can deliver sequenced messages and offers tailored to the assets prospects have consumed. Think about how that PDF can affect your understanding or persona of that lead.
Reduced Bounce Rates: Email subscribers acquired through gated content have confirmed contact info and proven interest. This cuts down on inactive email addresses that bounce. Someone willing to give an email for a PDF tends to be a good source of website traffic.
PDF Gating Examples
For example, a SaaS company could offer gated PDFs on topics like “Optimizing Your Sales Funnel”, “Data Security Best Practices”, and “Evaluating SaaS Solutions”. Access to each download requires submitting an email.
A restaurant chain could gate recipe ebooks, kids activity books, and city guides behind email forms. Visitors exchange contact info for content relevant to them.
A financial advisor may gate market forecasts, retirement planning guides, and portfolio strategy reports behind email capture forms. Subscribers signal their interests for further nurturing.
Email Gating Marketing Powers!
When paired with compelling content, email gating provides a powerful mechanism to generate and nurture new leads in a scalable, automated manner. Prospects essentially raise their hands identifying topics of interest to support personalized marketing.
