Remember back when people were predicting the end of email? Well, they’re still talking about it in 2015. And they’re still wrong.
According to recent stats, email marketing remains the best bang for your buck when it comes to combined inbound and outbound effectiveness. In fact, a 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center found that employees with any kind of online access ranked email the most important tool in their work shed—beating out landlines, smartphones, and (ironically) even the Internet itself.
Email is such a fundamentally important part of work as we know it that treating it as a necessary evil is incredibly shortsighted. Smart marketers don’t put email on the backburner— they do their best to find out what the competition is doing, and then do it even better.
That’s exactly why Notablist is such a breakthrough service.
What is Notablist?
Michael Johnston, CEO and founder of Notablist, realized something was bothering him about marketing research a few years ago. “It seemed ridiculous that I could search every kind of media but not email newsletters, among the most ubiquitous,” he said.
So he created Notablist, which launched in January. It’s a search engine for email newsletters that boats over four million campaigns from 400,000+ publishers. Users get to see email campaigns as they were intended to be seen in a target buyer persona’s inbox. Subscribers even get a daily digest of the previous day’s activities if they have custom saved searches enabled.
The best part? Notablist is totally free to use. But it might not stay that way. So here are 5 things you should be doing with Notablist right now:
1. Get a huge jump on the competition
All you have to do to sign up for a free Notablist account is click a button. If you have a Google or Facebook account, it will automatically sync with your info and create a profile and dashboard for you in a couple seconds. Once those seconds are up, you have at your disposal more competitive research on email marketing than most of your competitors could dream of.
Although it’s been around since January, it’s very likely that your competition hasn’t heard of Notablist yet. The less “online” their product or service, the less likely they are to know about the ace up your sleeve that will help you create email campaigns that blow theirs out of the water.
2. Discover competitors you didn’t know you had
Johnston lists scouting as one of Notablist’s most useful, but more non-intuitive features. “It’s useful for staying on top of competitors, of course, but it’s also useful for finding competitors you don’t realize you have.”
This is especially true for SMBs. Although the size of a small business varies by industry, it can include as many as 500 employees. And in 2010, there were 27.9 million small businesses in the U.S., according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In other words, over 50% of the working population (120 million people) worked in a small business, and approximately 543,000 small businesses were started every month.
If you want to keep track of all your far-flung competitors, especially businesses that might offer only one but not all of your services, Notablist is a good tool to have. The database is currently limited, but that should change in time.
3. Take advantage of inspiring design on tap
Notablist can’t tell you whether a given email drove sales by 400%, or whether a green call-to-action button worked better than a red call-to-action button for a specific campaign. But it can show you some pretty fantastic newsletter designs, and it gives you the tools to do some educated guesswork with its Alexa rank filter.
As recently as 2014, there wasn’t an easy way to really dive deep into great email campaign design by keyword or company rank. But now there is. Check out what a simple search for “holiday shopping” turns up:
I filtered by “All time” and “top 1,000” Alexa rank.
Designers, rejoice.
4. Learn To Write Better Sales Copy
Although inbound copy is far more visible than outbound copy in 2015, outbound copy is still what drives sales. And the problem with marketers who have gotten their chops in an inbound-heavy industry is that they are much better at writing inbound than outbound copy. They see inbound all the time, work with inbound all the time, and think inbound all the time.
To be fair, it was also a lot harder to research outbound copy effectively. Until now, that is.
Using the same Alexa rank filter, Notablist users can look up newsletters by keyword and by website rank. While higher Alexa-ranked websites aren’t guaranteed to have better copywriting, it’s a decent-enough litmus test for competitive marketing research on the fly.
5. You’ll Be Ready For Other Search Engines Like It
Not only is Notablist disrupting email marketing, it also has huge implications for content curation in general.
Although Johnston was right that email marketing research got the least amount of love before Notablist, it isn’t exactly easy to search for other types of media. As it stands, content curation isn’t so much an industry as it is a bonus output of search engines.
For example, if I want to write a blog post about content curation, all I have to do is type “content curation blog post” into the search bar and I’ll get a reasonable list of “curated” results in return. While this works fairly well for broad topics, it works much less well for niche topics.
And things start to break down when you want to find infographics or individual social media updates. If I really wanted to empirically determine the best way for a nonprofit to tweet out a major grant approval, I’d have to do it manually. But billions of updates are posted every day. Where’s my Notablist for social media?
In all likelihood, Notablist will trigger the appearance of new “research” search engines dedicated to specific types of content curation. And marketing will be better for it.
