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Here’s how most email marketers, especially those who are new to the business, do email marketing.
They login to their autoresponder, click on their list and blast out an email to their entire list. And they do that every day! Have a webinar coming up? Hit blast. Promoting a new product? Hit blast. Have a free content video coming out? Hit blast.
Doing that leads to hitting the same segment. Every. Single. Time.
Now, it really isn’t the end of the world if you’re new to email marketing and mailing to a small list. However, this method becomes less and less effective the more subscribers you add to your list because the interests of your list change more and more as the list grows.
So, what you need to do if you’re someone who has a growing list is you need to start segmenting your list to reach different audiences more effectively. We’ve been doing it for years now, and I can tell you that segmenting easily doubles metrics like open rate, click-through-rate and conversions.
And, more importantly, it provides a better experience for your list and customers.
What I’m going to do in this post is give you five tips for how to start segmenting your list to get a 200% increase in your email marketing revenue.
Tip #1 Segment By Open, No Click & Unopened
The best (and easiest) place to start segmenting your email list is to look at the data from the email blasts you’ve been sending out to find two types of subscribers:
Those who opened but didn’t click your link
Those who didn’t open your email at all
Let’s start with the people who opened your email but didn’t click your link. These people are interesting because you clearly captured enough of their interest to get them to open your email, but you know you must’ve gone wrong somewhere in the copy of your email.
This is a good place to start because you’re definitely doing something right with these emails. Once you’ve pulled these subscribers out, you can start examining your copy and offer to see what you can change to make it more appealing.
Once you’ve played around with it, you have a list of people to email who you already know are interested in your emails enough to at least click them.
Next, pull out the people who didn’t open your email at all.
While this list is a little bit more difficult to analyze, you can get a lot of great information out of this. Maybe the most important thing to remember about this list of people is that it’s entirely possible they like your content but were on vacation, busy at work or otherwise distracted in some way and never got around to your email.
For those people, you could look at whether emailing them at different times would be better.
For others, you may want to start by playing around with your subject lines to see whether you can entice more of them to click your emails.
Either way, these two groups of people are the best place to start for anyone interested in starting to segment their list.
Tip #2 Segment By Open W/ Click
After analyzing the people who never actually clicked your email or link, you can move onto the people you had a bit more success with. This is a great list to have in front of you because you know you have enough of their attention that they actually clicked through to whatever your offer was.
For this list, you want to start thinking about why they clicked through and whether or not they actually ended up taking the desired action on the next page.
With this list, your primary goal is to continue optimizing your emails further to get them to continue clicking through and taking the desired action on the following page.
Tip #3 Don’t Be Afraid Of Double Mailing
One of the most common things I see in new email marketers is that they’re afraid of mailing their list too often each week because they think they’re bothering their list.
They forget that people signed up to their list because they WANTED to hear from them!
At Lurn, what we’ve found is that emailing our lists multiple times a week actually improves our metrics because our list likes for us to be in constant communication with them. They like hearing about our courses, events, offers, etc.
That’s why they signed up to be on our list in the first place.
In fact, if we have something very important coming up like a product launch or affiliate promotion, we’ll actually email people multiple times in a single day.
For example, say that we send out an email at 7am. We’ll look at our data and see who opened the emails and who didn’t. We’ll then segment the people who didn’t open the email at all into a list and we’ll email them again in the evening to ensure that they see the email.
On the first day or two of the launch or promotion, it’s incredibly important to get as many people into the funnel as possible. On the last day of the launch or promotion, it’s critical to let people know that it’s coming to a close and they need to take action before it ends.
With that said, avoid doing this every single time you’re mailing your list. We save this technique for important events.
Tip #4 Use Blind Subject Lines (Sparingly)
Imagine for a moment that I send out an email with the subject line, “7 Tips To Rank Higher On YouTube.” After sending out the email, I would give it some time and then check to see how many opens and clicks I got.
I’d then segment my list to target the group who didn’t open the email at all to see if I can fix the problem. Once I identify that group, I’d try sending them another email with a different, more interesting subject line that still include the word ‘YouTube’ to see if it’s the YouTube aspect they’re not interested in or something else.
After sending that email, I’d segment the list again by the people who STILL haven’t opened the email. What this tells me is that these people might THINK that they aren’t interested in YouTube, so I need to find a way to capture their attention and create interest.
That’s when I would try what I call a blind subject line.
What a blind subject line is when you send out an email with a subject like like, “Hey, Brian. Do You Have Minute?” or, “Hey, Brian. Anik here…” See, I don’t mention YouTube because I want them to click into the email to see what I’m messaging them about.
If I get them to click into the email, I can then use the copy to create interest in YouTube that wasn’t there prior to that email. While it’s definitely effective, I only do this about once a month when I have a key promotion and really want to get the word out.
So, use it sparingly and only when you really need it.
Tip #5 Nail Down Your Targeting
This tip really highlights the importance of segmenting as your list grows.
See, it’s ok to send out email blasts when you’re new to email marketing because you don’t have a lot of subscribers or promotions. You can safely promote your one or two products to your smaller list that likely has a lot of the same interests.
However, you’ll kill your business if you do this once you’ve grown.
Now that I’ve grown Lurn to what it is today, I have a ton of email subscribers and a lot of different promotions going on at one time. Do you think my advanced subscribers want emails about a course for beginners? Do you think the beginners want emails about an advanced course coming out?
No, people want content that’s highly relevant to them.
So, what I do is a exclude certain segments from emails depending on what the subject of the email is. If I’m sending out a promotion for an advanced course, I’ll exclude the beginners. If I’m sending out a promotion for a beginner course, I’ll exclude the advance subscribers.
This allows me to promote multiple products at once and serve my audience better, which results in more clicks, more engagement, more opens and more money.
When To Start Segmenting Your List
While this information isn’t quite as applicable to people with smaller lists, which is anything under 10,000 in this case, I do recommend that you at least start thinking about it no matter how big your list is.
It will only help you down the line as you start to grow and expand your business.
Remember, email marketing is all about relationship building. The best way to build relationships with your subscribers is to give them content that’s highly relevant and valuable to them.
If you do that, you’ll keep a healthy list.