MD14: Email List Segmentation in 3 Easy Steps

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Email list segmentation is the best way to create a stronger bond with your audience and your community, because the more relevant you keep the conversation and your messages, the more your subscribers will like and trust you.

Today’s episode is a solo session on email marketing segmentation. The last time I did a solo episode was at episode 7 where I discussed general audience segmentation.

Email is the absolute best form or channel of communication in online marketing. It allows you to take full control over when and how you communicate with your audience as opposed to putting your business at risk by depending on social media platforms that are actually private companies that could one day decide to shift their rules of engagement 180 degrees and leave you hanging from a tree.

In this episode you will learn

– Why email is the best way for increasing your community’s engagement

– Why you should be doing segmentation.

– The different factors that play a role when creating segmented lists.

– How to approach cultural segmentation and in what cases it can be more relevant than others.

– How to identify the stage of the funnel your subscribers ar at and what to do about it.

I hope you enjoy it and I would love to hear how you plan on doing this type of segmentation.

The Transcript

Today I’m going to show you how to create segmented email lists. Episode 14, let’s do it!

Hey, what’s up guys? Welcome back to the show! I’m super pumped for today’s episode. I have my Starbucks coffee right here, ready to go. I like my coffee black, no sugar. Actually, I don’t like it black, no sugar – but I drink it that way because it’s healthy. I prefer a – I don’t know, like a super creamy, white chocolate mocha. But that’s a bomb of fatness right there.

So today we have another solo session. We’re going to be talking about email list segmentation. Last time I did a solo session, I talked about audience segmentation, general audience segmentation. But a lot of you have been asking about email lists segmentation because it’s one of the most powerful ways that you can start segmenting your audience and communicate with your audience.

Now, why email lists? You have heard this a million times – and you will hear it another million times. If you’re serious about doing business online, you have to start building an email list. I would say that you would have to start building an email list before you even have a website. A lot of people come say that ‘Email list that, social media is gonna take over’, but guess what? All those social media platforms are private companies that can choose to do whatever they want with their platform in the future – like charging you for using their platform, or reducing the amount of people that see your content. The amount of followers and fans that see what you publish, which is already happening with Facebook.

But with an email list, you own that data. You own that content and those emails, and you have to power of communicating with those people whenever you want and however you want. You can export your data from your email provider and upload it again, either featuring another email provider, and you can do whatever you want with it, because those people give you permission to use their contact information to communicate with them.

Now, why segmenting your email lists? Well, the more relevant that you keep the conversation with your people, with your audience, the more they will like and trust you. This is why a lot of companies invest so much money into creating different messages, for different targets. For example, did you know that Coca Cola has a sweeter formula for people in Latin America, and they have different messages for people in Latin America, because they know, they have done the research and they know that people over there responded better to certain messages and certain information that makes them relate more to the brand.

The same way, you can do this with your list. I’m not saying that you have to spend millions of dollars on creating research, but just one simple email to one major segment of your audience. You could even only have two segments: people interested in topic A and people interested in topic B. And to each, very little things on your messages to make them more relevant to those topics – and boom! That would have such an impact on your conversion rates and such an impact on the engagement that people would have with your brand, because now you’re making things more personal. And this is also the reason that I make such an emphasis on every one of my episodes, with showing you guys how my guests know exactly who they are talking to. If you know who you’re talking to, the ins and outs of that ideal customer, you will know how to communicate with them. What to say, what not to say, what will keep them interested in your brand and in your content – because, at the end of the day, you have to make it about them. At the end of the day, people are selfish. In general, people want things that solve their problems. They don’t care about your achievements and about your success. Of course it’s important to manage and why you’re qualified to talk about what you’re talking about, but at the end of the day, people are interested in how you’re gonna solve their problems and make their life easier.

Doing email list segmentation is one way of showing people that you care. That you take the time to make your messages, your content, you efforts personalized and more relevant to that individual that is at the end of the screen, on the other side of the screen, reading your email, giving you time. I mean, we take time for granted. We say ‘Alright – money, I care about, assets…’ But we take time for granted. Time is money, time is value, time is life. And we have very limited time in this life and as you grow older, you realize how important time is. That’s why I thank you guys over and over in every episode and say thank you so much for your time, because I know that deciding to spend 45, 10 minutes, 15 minutes with me, listening to me while you’re driving, while you’re jogging, while you’re at the gym, it’s so important. And that’s also why I try to keep my content to the point and relevant and actionable and remove all the fluff from what I provide.

Now, having said that, let’s move on to talking about how you can actually segment your email lists. Now, let’s talk about types of segmentation. There’s different things that you can choose to divide and segment your list. For example, you can do this based on topic, your graphical location and culture, the length of time that people have been on your list, if they performed certain actions like clicking certain links inside your messages and your emails, the stage where they could be at or they’re at in your funnel. If they are subscribe, I mean if they are only subscribers or one time customers or repeated customers or customers of certain products, they have clicked and purchased products you are affiliated to, and you can create combinations of all of these factures to create even more segmented lists, which is what I try to do with my business. Combining the topic of interest with the geographical location and cultural background of my audience and other combinations that make my messages more relevant. And these can all be a little overwhelming.

But here’s what you can do to get started and keep it simple. If you already have a website going, figure out what are the two most popular posts or pages in your website. Identify what those pages are about and just create two different lists, two different segments inside your email provider. My recommendation is AWebber, and my affiliate link for AWebber is rebelgrowth.com/awebber – thank you if you use it, of course. And you can use other programs that allow you to create lists; I’m not going to go into the specifics on how to actually use these programs. They have tutorials and information and learning content that will help you with that. Now, identify the two most popular pages in your website, create lists based on the two different topics of those pages and set up your autoresponders with emails and messages that are relevant to those topics of interest.

Now, moving forward once you have mastered these two topics and you have 4 or 5 or maybe just two autoresponder emails that automate your relationship building with people who sign up and subscribe, you can move forward to segmenting based on your graphical location. And this depends on what business you are on, what your topic is, what you blog about or what your website is about, because some industries won’t make a lot of difference. If people are from one location in the world or another location in the world.

Maybe you are a small business and you know that people who are subscribing to your list, are people from your community. And you know that in your community, there are different types of cultures, and there’s a couple of ways that you can identify these cultures. Perhaps you have pages that allow you to identify this. You can also ask people in your first couple of emails, and ask them if they’re interested in one topic or another and those topics, you set them up in a way that allows you to identify the culture of these people. Are you interested in this article about kimonos or something that allows you to identify that background? And be careful because, be careful with this, because whenever we’re talking about cultures and ethnicity, we can very easily cross a line and offend people, so just tread carefully on that.

You can also use features, your email program features, and just simply look at the IP location of your subscribers and manually create these segments. Now, in Money Diver and Smart Do which are two important assets in my business, there’s not a lot that I can do with the cultural background of my audience. But in another business that I own with my beautiful fiancée, it’s called BrainClue.com – it talks about parenting and teaching strategies. And we talk to people from a lot of different Spanish speaking countries where the culture makes a huge difference. There’s so many words that mean one thing in one country and they mean a completely different thing in another country. So in this case, it’s very helpful for us to put a lot of effort into cultural segmentation. And this helps us keep promotions and offers relevant to people. We can promote a preschool from Santiago de Chile or promote a preschool from Miami because we know people in that list are located in those places and we know that they are moms and teachers. And the way that I do this, that I identify this, is that I setup the cerebral plugin in BrainClue.com and it recognizes people that are coming from whatever and it displays different signup forms to those people and it sends them to these lists. So I now I know they’re interested in the topic that that blog post was talking about, and I also know where they are located, so that puts them, that puts people into a funnel, into an autoresponder that is relevant to those two factures.

You can also use Twitter for example. You can use Twitter lists. You can sort out your followers on Twitter and identify where they’re located because Twitter allows you to do this, and put them into a Twitter list and send specific tweets to those people, and those tweets may have links to specific pages and those pages have signup forms that drive people to these specific email lists.

Now, the second step that I would do in your email list segmentation efforts would be to create groups of people based on whether they are active or not, with your emails. Based on how many emails they open, how many clicks they perform, what kind of clicks they do. For example, if you click on all of my links or 90% of my links, I put you into an Ambassador’s list, which means is people that are very active and engaged with Money Diver or Brain Clue or SmartDo.com, and I can talk to those people and provide those people with gifts and thank you notes for being so active in my community. I can chose to put people that never click on my list on a cycle of emails that asks them if they want to continue or not on my list, because I am paying for those people to be on that list. So you might want to consider creating a segment of people who are not active at all. And after a certain period of time, they don’t perform any actions, you just delete them.

Another way that you can use this for is to put people that don’t take action into a list with different subject lines to figure out if the reason they’re not opening your emails is because of the subject lines that they’re getting, so you can change the communication and the message that you’re using in those subject lines. Now, some email programs or email software or email marketing autoresponder programs, whatever you want to call them, do not allow you to create segments based on clicks. But one alternative for this is you seeing lead pages with a feature that they have that’s called lead digits. And basically, what this feature does, is if people click on one link, they automatically get put into a certain list that you select, it’s that simple. And you can go to rebelgrowth.com/leadpages and check them out. That is my affiliate link; thank you so much if you use it.

And the third step that I would advise you use in your email list segmentation efforts is to figure out if people are just subscribers, or customers, or repeated customers. And based on that, put them into different lists that communicate in different ways and send different messages, because you don’t want to keep sending offers or messages or content that ends up in offers that people have already used and purchased and products that people have already bought. So might want to move those people to another list that talks about different things that keeps on providing value and building relationships with them and maybe offering other relevant products in the future, and keep communicating with people that are subscribers in a way that keeps providing these original offers to them.

Now, there’s things that you can do to create even more advanced segmentation, but I don’t want you guys to get overwhelmed. I want to see you taking action and asking for help on what I have mentioned so far. And in the future I’ll create another episode or another post about more advanced segmentation. Now, what I want you guys to do is head on over to Twitter. Use the hashtag #moneydiver14 and tell me what are the two most popular topics in your website, blog or business? Now, I want to remind you that once you have identified your segments, you can use the cerebral plugin to create different versions of your website for these segmented subscribers and we place those signup forms, they already use, with content that is relevant to them.

Once again guys, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for your time. Go out, segment those lists and keep on typing!