Monica Pitts 0:00
Hello again. And welcome back to marketing with purpose. I was in a Facebook Live the other day and someone asked me if I had a magical email segmentation fairy that I could allow them to borrow. And I thought that was really funny. Then I realized,
light bulb went off, I should probably do a podcast about it. Yeah. Because there's a lot of ways actually that you can segment your emails that don't take you forever. And a lot of them involve prior planning, because like, if you've listened to me before, it seems like that's always what I'm talking about, right? Like thinking ahead of time. So I'm going to help you guys think ahead of time. But I'm also going to talk to you about some things that you can do to retrofit what you already have pretty easily and get your email segmented. Now, you might be asking yourself, like, why on earth? Would I or MIT? No, no, you could be asking yourself, what is email segmentation? All right, so let's start there. So email segmentation is when you group the people in your email list into like categories. And you might group them by whether they're customers or not, or by what products they've bought, or what things they appear to be interested in. And then your goal is to send them emails about things that interests them, the most things that would make them open the email and read it, because your goal through your email marketing is to develop a relationship with the person on the other end of the email. And in normal life, building a relationship with someone means that you get to know them, right? You don't just send them emails over and over and over again, without ever considering whether they're interested. You learn what they like and what they don't like. And that's how you develop a friendship with them. And so when you segment your emails, you are essentially doing a much better and more effective job of creating a relationship with the person on the other end of the line, because you're zeroing in on what they care about. And talking to them about that. It's really cool that we can even do this and email marketing because there's so many different forms of marketing that you just really don't have a choice. If you were going to put out radio ads, then you could segment by what they tell you, the listener demographics are, but you can't really only send a message to people who have kids, or who went to a specific event, or who live in a specific area, you just get whatever the listenership is. So it's really cool that you can use email to really zero in and talk to people about what they care about. Now, what happens when you start segmenting your emails is that you have an increase in your open rates, because people are more likely to open things that they're interested in, you also have an increase in your click through rates, because people are more likely to click on things that they're interested in, which means that you have an increase in conversion rates, because people are more likely to buy things that they're interested in, you have a decrease in your unsubscribes. And you also end up getting more of your emails into people's inboxes and keep them out of spam filters. Because you are effectively doing a job of building a relationship through your emails. So really segmenting your email is like setting up a plan for email success. But getting started in it can be like, you know a lot because there's just a whole bunch of people. And they're all just sitting out there and whatever email marketing software you're using, and you're probably like, yeah, so how the heck am I supposed to divide them into groups and do anything with this information? All right, friends, well, I got you. We're gonna talk about how you can start segmenting on intake. But we're also going to talk about how you can take the people that you already have, and break them into groups with the information that you already have and some different ways that you might go about doing that. So my friends, let's talk email segmentation. Let's get to business.
If you're a natural born marketer, You're one lucky son of a gun. If you're like most people, marketing, especially online marketing is about as appealing as standing in a police lineup. The may create team of creatives has transformed websites and digital marketing from craptastic to fantastic since 2005, our podcast marketing with purpose make sense of marketing so you can make purposeful decisions instead of carrying on with the same old crap you've been doing. And now your host Monica Pitts, founder of may create with another episode on how to make your marketing not suck.
I just realized that I was so excited to talk to you guys about email segmentation hacks that I didn't even introduce myself. Well, I guess I just introduced myself in that, you know, flirty, flirty thing with the music and stuff. But hey, I'm Monica Pitts. And this is marketing with purpose. So we're
starting over again. There you go. All right, so let's talk through these email segmentation hacks. Before I start throwing all kinds of different ways to segment your data at you, I want you to think about how you might want to categorize the people on your list. Some people want to categorize by location, like if you have multiple locations for your business, then you probably want to segment by location, because you might be running specials for one area and not another, you might need to know whether a contact is a client or not, because you send specific information out to clients, but you don't send it out to other people. I always like to know what people are interested in. Because some of the people that come into my email list are really interested in websites right now, while others just want to talk about social media. So that can be helpful to me, as I'm trying to segment my list and send emails, just the people who would really benefit from them. Taking some of that information can also help you make decisions about where people are in their buying cycle. Because if a person just downloaded a guide, that's what to put on your website, then they're probably thinking about building a website. But if they download a guide, that's telling them how to interpret the traffic data from their website, then they already have a website, and they probably want to figure out how to use it better. And those people would be interested in different types of information, because they're in different parts of the cycle. And I know that sometimes people overlap, so don't overthink it. Just ask yourself, how might you want to segment your visitors. I met with a local nonprofit awhile ago, and they wanted to segment their email list, because they promote a lot of events. And for them, it was important to be able to not email everyone about every single event because they have so many events running. But we talked about how they have different types of events. They have events that are very family friendly, they have events that are mostly adults, they have events that are specific different types of music. And so for them, it made sense that we figure out ways that we can segment people who are interested in family friendly events, and people who are interested in different types of music based on what they've done in the past with their nonprofit. So think through that for your organization. And just answer the question, How would you like to segment your information in a way that would be beneficial to you improving the relationship that you have with your subscribers? Once you've figured out how you need to segment them, then you can move on to figuring out how you're going to do that. So
I know I always talk about planning, but the easiest way to start segmenting your email list is to segment them on intake. So how are they coming into your email list? Are they buying an event ticket? Are they buying a product? Are they
being entered into your customer database? Are they downloading a free resource? Okay. Now, at that point of contact when they're being entered into your list, that's when we need to start segmenting them. So ask yourself what are some assumptions that you can make based on things that you already know about them without having to ask them any additional questions. So for example, if they're signing up for an event, that's a family friendly event, you could tag that contact with family friendly. And then you would know, hey, these people are interested in family friendly events. If they're buying kids tickets to an event, you could tag them kids, because you know they've got kids because they bought kids tickets. Or if they're downloading a guide about websites, then I know they're interested in websites. Or if they're being put into the customer database for a specific service, like logo design, I know that they got logo design, and they didn't have to put in any information for me to make those assumptions, especially if they're signing themselves up for something and filling out a forum. We don't want to make them answer a bajillion questions about themselves because it's off putting and sometimes it actually deters them from doing the action that we really want them to do, which is download that thing or purchase this object, right. So instead, we need to make some educated guesses about who they are and what their lifestyle is like, and what they're interested in, based on things that they've already told us. So a few more examples that might help you along. Are if you're having people sign up for a 5k then they might be runners because they're signing up for a 5k so you could tag them, runner. Now, if you are having someone download a guide that's for a very specific industry like a nonprofit, then you could tag them as a nonprofit. Now I know I'm using the word tag a lot because in MailChimp, you tag people and in Active Campaign you tag people and that's a really nice way
Add to keep the information with the contact, when you put someone in a list, you are segmenting them. But if you delete the list, then you don't have that information anymore. If it's on a tag, then it's associated with the contact itself. If you deleted the tag, then obviously it would go away. But they can also be tagged and in the list. So I use both, I like to keep my lists much more tidy and clean, I don't have billions of lists. Instead, I use lots of tags to be able to segment people easier. That's just my methodology behind how I do it, you can do it whichever way is right for you. Now, there's other email marketing systems so that they don't have tags with them. So we used to use mailer light, and you can't use tags. And so we had to create custom fields in each user's user profile, to be able to mark what they've downloaded. So we could segment them that way. And that was a total pain. And I did not love that. But I really loved the user interface. I really do like mailer Lite, hey, if you're considering choosing MailChimp or mailer Lite, I actually did a whole podcast over it. And so you can hop on over to me create.com, which is spelled ma y e, CR, EA te.com. And if you click on our blog, you can search for mailer light, or MailChimp, and it will pop up and you can listen to that episode, I go into it, I have a clear favorite, but you know, whatever. Everybody has their own favorites for all the things, but there's definitely benefits to each system. Okay, so after you think through how you want to segment people, and then you adjust your like your email form or your intake process to be able to segment people automatically as they're added to your list, then maybe you want to go back and retrofit some of the people that you already have on your list. So I'm going to give you some ideas about how you might do that. I find that one of the easiest ways is to export people from an existing database that has information associated with their information. So if you have a billing database, or a CRM that is not connected to your email marketing software, I want you to start by exporting that data and seeing what you have. And what you might be able to draw some educated guesses about based on what you see. So for example, you probably have what service that they've paid for in the past, or what product that they've purchased in your point of sale, or your CRM or your billing database. And so you could probably segment that way, you can also likely segment by relationship, because clearly they're in your billing database, so they've probably paid you before. So they're your customer. use that information to create separate spreadsheets of your contacts. And then what you can do is you can re upload them into your system and tell the system to update the contact, don't add another one, you don't want to add them again, you want to update the contact, and you want to add a specific tag or add them to a specific list. by uploading them in mass, you're very quickly able to segment people into categories in your email marketing system, and you don't have to go through and do it each manually. Another quick way that might be handy to be able to segment people in your existing email database is to segment them by industry based on their domain. So for example, if they have an email and the domain at the end, is.gov, then they would be a government employee. If it's dot org, then they're probably a nonprofit, if it's dot com, then they probably work for a business. And so if it's important for you to segment into those groups, that's a super fast way to do that. Now another thing that you can do is you can guess sometimes a business's size by their email addresses. So what do I mean by this? I mean that most bigger businesses use their domains as part of their email address. So my email is Monica at me create.com Don't give that to spammers. Don't do it. You could email me though, I totally love it. If you email me, I'd love to hear from you. Monica may create.com. Remember to make create with an E M EY.
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[email protected]. Okay, anyway. So even though I don't have a huge business, I do, you know, sort of kind of run a tech company that does things like build websites. So of course, we have emails at our own domains. But really small businesses or smaller organizations tend to have email addresses that
[email protected] or aol.com, or yahoo.com. So if you do business to business sales, and you need to know who's a big business and who's a small business, you could make some assumptions and you could actually segment the users in your email database by the type of email address that they have. We actually use the type of email address that our subscribers have to segment our emails in a different way. We have a podcast that's called a
How to get an email with your company name. So anybody who enters into our email list with a Gmail address, they are sent a follow up email a few days later that promotes this podcast to them, because they clearly don't have an email at their company name. And I feel like they could have won, they just maybe don't know how. And that email sends everybody whether they subscribe to get on my blog list, or they didn't. And it does pretty good for me, I get about a 26% open rate, and my average is 25%. So I feel like you know, it's doing pretty good. It's a nice way to reach out and start building a relationship with the people that I just met by anticipating what they might be interested in, based on the information that they gave me. And some people actually respond to that email that I automate and send to them. And they're like, thank you so much for this information. And I'm like, wow, this is great. I just made a friend. Email marketing makes friends who knew? There you go. I'm full of tricks today, right? Okay, so the last email segmentation trick that I have for you, it takes a little bit longer, to be honest with you, because it depends on the way that your users behave, you can segment by the way that they've behaved in the past by whether or not they've opened an email. So if you send emails covering specific topics, and that topic is mentioned in the subject line of the email, then you can segment based on their opening of that email. Now, if the topic has not been mentioned in the subject line of the email, then it probably won't work. Because you can't, you can't guess what they're interested in just by whether they open the email or not, you would have to do a different method of segmentation based on what they click on. And I'll talk about that in just a second. So let's say that I sent an email that was talking about web design, and you opened the email, then I could assume that you're interested in web design. And I could add you to a list or add a tag to you because you open the email, if you have the ability to create automations in your email software, then you can even automate that process. If somebody opens the email, then tag them, or if somebody opens the email, then add them to this list. And then they would automatically be added. And some email service providers even offer you the capability to tag people. So segment them, or add them to a list based on what they click on in an email. And that can be really powerful too. But just remember that your open rate on your emails is going to be someplace between like, hopefully 10, and 30%. So it's a slower process to get this information from people that way. If you retrofit it, then you can get it faster. But moving forward, if you want to automate it, then it will take longer for you to be able to get everybody in your list segmented into different groups. And the click through rates on your emails are far lower, they're going to be someplace between like one and maybe 5%. So that not a lot. People are going to segment themselves pretty slowly. But it can be awesome to automate information this way. Because, for example, on the may create emails, I have a PS on a lot of the emails, it's like, Hey, if you're interested in web design, you can contact us at any time and we'll get you a quote. And if they click contact us, even if they don't submit the quote, form on my website, that person is entered into an automation that is filled with emails that talk about web design and share with them resources that can help them plan out their website and educate them about different ways that their website could help their business or solve their problems. Because by clicking on that link, they showed us that that's what they're interested in right now. And so I want to talk to them about the thing that they are most interested in. At the same time, Stacy gets a notification email about the person who just clicked on that button. And then Stacy goes and checks out their profile in our email marketing slash CRM software. And she says, Is this somebody that I feel like I should reach out to yes or no? And if the answer is yes, then she reaches out to them, especially if it's somebody that she knows, right? Because if it's somebody that she already has a relationship with, and this is just the piece of information that she needed, to be able to reach out to them and help them get the website that they deserve. And now you probably know, way too much about the secret magical weirdness behind my email marketing automations. And you might know why now you got the email about getting an email with your company name because you have a Gmail address. Or you might now know why you are getting emails from me about web design, because you showed me that that's what you were interested in. And I hope that you're not offended by those emails. I hope that I'm doing a good job of giving you information that you can use to help you solve your problems.
Just like this magnificent broadcast right here to help you also learn how to segment your emails. Okay, friends. So that was all I had for you today. And I hope now you have an idea of what email segmentation is and why you would do it. And I hope you also got just a few nuggets of inspiration as to ways that you can define how you might segment your emails, like what pieces of information would help you develop better relationships with your audience. And then I hope that you now have a few ideas of how you might go forth and maybe retrofit some of that information into your current email marketing contacts, and also get everybody in from the very beginning with everything that you need to foster an amazing relationship with them. Because here's the deal, friends, what marketing with purpose is all about is putting your audience first and helping them solve their problems, helping them get where they need to go, it's not about you selling something, if you put them first and you help them solve their problems, the money will follow the sales will follow. The goal in all of your marketing should be to create relationships with people in the most authentic way possible. And we do that through giving and we give by helping people solve their problems. And that's why I love this is why I love marketing because I can help people solve their problems. It really just deep down. I am a teacher's daughter, right? That's who I am. And that's what marketing with purpose is all about building relationships through helping others right. And email segmentation is just one more magical way that you can do that. So if you enjoyed this podcast or if you learned a thing or two Pretty pretty please leave me a review because that helps me meet more people just like you and I swear I can help them solve their marketing problems too. I really can they just have to meet me first and you can help me do that by leaving me a review. Now I challenge you to go employ your own magical email segmentation very which could actually be you now that you know all of this information and go forth and mark it with purpose.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
