#53 – After Segmenting My Email List

[0:00:14.3] Hey you guys, Stephen Esketzis here from Marketing on the Move and today I’m feeling a lot better than the last episode where I had a bit of food poisoning. Today I’m back on the road, fresh day which is awesome. And I wanted to talk to you guys a bit more about my autoresponder.

So I’ve kind of touched on it yesterday. And today, I wanted just to go in bit deep and tell you a little bit about what I’ve done with my autoresponder and what you should be doing too, and that is segmentation. One thing which I’ve learned a lot is segmenting your e-mail list is super important.

Segmenting them into the areas where people are actually interested. You don’t segment just to segment. You segment to keep your open rates and your reply rates and your click-through rates high.

The real reason to do that is because people open e-mails that they’re actually interested in. There’s no point sending things to people that they’re not interested in. it helps you and it helps the person reading.

[0:01:07.5] So what I’ve done with my new autoresponder and I’ll probably be doing a blog post about it shortly is I’ve split up my autoresponder in three categories.

And every industry is gonna be different. So let’s say for example you’re looking at, I don’t know, let’s say you’re a guitarist and you’re doing a guitar course and teaching people how to play the guitar.

Then, you might have three categories which is someone who has never picked up a guitar, someone who’s played a little bit with it, and someone who’s quite familiar.

So you’ve got your sort of introductory, your intermediate and your experts. They’re the three types of people that you’re gonna have to segment in your e-mail list if you’re teaching guitar.

Similarly on my end, if you’re learning to use a sales funnel or build a sales funnel or launch a sales funnel, you’ve got the same three segments and that’s what I used from my e-mail list is a beginner, expert, an intermediate. So they’re the three people that I’ll be targeting in my e-mail list that people that have never made money online, people that have made a little bit of money online with sales funnel, and other people who are very familiar with the sales funnels and have been profitable before.

So that’s what I’ve done with my e-mail list. Now, the way I’ve done this is after people joined my e-mail list, they requested to click one or three links, so they’ve actually bucket themselves based on how much money they have made using sales funnel and Internet marketing. Now, the reason I asked people to actually bucket themselves on how much money they have made rather than if they think they’re expert or a beginner is because people have different expectations if they’re a beginner or an expert.

So if I’m a beginner at something that might be different to what someone else thinks a “beginner” means. If I’ve made $500 with a sales funnel, that’s exactly the same amount across the board.

So you want something where the perception doesn’t change across the board, it’s actually the same. And for me, the amount you’re making money is the same. So let’s say we use the guitar niche as an

Now, the reason I asked people to actually bucket themselves on how much money they have made rather than if they think they’re expert or a beginner is because people have different expectations if they’re a beginner or an expert.

So if I’m a beginner at something that might be different to what someone else thinks a “beginner” means. If I’ve made $500 with a sales funnel, that’s exactly the same amount across the board. So you want something where the perception doesn’t change across the board, it’s actually the same.

And for me, the amount you’re making money is the same.

So let’s say we use the guitar niche as an example, if you’re saying someone who—have you played a certain type of music? Have you played something like, I don’t know, that’s gone for three minutes.

I don’t know, something—I don’t really know the industry but something that’s a higher level in the guitar industry so it’s not depending on what people think it is, they have done or they haven’t done it. And that’s a really good way to segment so there’s no perceptions involved.

There’s no opinions, it’s just black and white. So obviously, people can click something else and they can lie in things, but that’s up to them because then they’ll be receiving information that they prefer to be receiving which is completely fine as well, if they’ve obviously—like I think one of my questions when they join is “Have you made over $500 or less than $500?” I think that’s the one for the beginner a month online.

And what I’ve done is if people decide to go more than $500, then obviously they want some more advanced tactics and they think they’re up for that which is completely fine again. But I’m allowing them to segment themselves so they’re familiar with the content that they’re gonna get, now they’re gonna wanna open my e-mails more because they know that they’ve been bucketed.

They know that what they’re gonna get, they’ve actually signed up for, it’s not just a general list. And the thing is the more you segment, the more people will wanna read your content, the more accurate, the more personalized it is for them, so all that being is personalized and as native as possible, this whole advertising and marketing game.

The more native and the more personalized you can get, the better your ad, the better your copy, the better your landing page, the better your offer is going to be. And it’s really interesting because what it Gary Vaynerchuk does actually, if you notice he’s all about social media which is awesome because social media’s extremely native, so people don’t have to go far to find social media.

You don’t have to click and ad, it’s not a banner ad. It’s actually embedded in part of our social talking and what we’re doing. So when you’re watching one of Gary’s videos with his Gary V. Show, it doesn’t feel like you’re actually watching an ad, what you’re actually doing is consuming content and building rapport with him.

But in fact on his side, when you build rapport, essentially what he’s doing is he’s just building that relationship and advertising his brand to you in a less advertise-y way as most people would, so that’s more native. One thing he could probably do more of is segmented so he’s got a lot of fans which is obviously more switched on than others.

I haven’t seen him specifically segment his audience but I think if he try to do that, he’d probably get even better results. People that are agencies versus people who are just getting into business and talking about hustle.

I think he’s just trying to capture a wider audience which is fine but I think he’d get better results segmenting as well. So I found that really interesting and that’s something I’ve implemented in my business.

[0:05:49.8] And today, I’m driving to the office. I’m gonna be sending yet an e-mail to my existing list to make sure they’re all segmented. So one thing is if people join my e-mail list and they don’t segment themselves and they don’t bucket themselves. They’re not gonna receive any of my e-mails.

So then again, I think two reminders to segment themselves on your e-mail list. And if they don’t do that, they’re no longer part of my list. I don’t wanna actually keep in contact with them because they’re not people that I wanna be interacting with.

They’re not the type of people that I wanna have in my list that I wanna know about that I wanna talk to. They’re not part of my target market. So that’s something for you guys to keep in mind if you’re in a certain industry or if you’re building rapport or if you’re running advertising in a certain type of niche.

One thing is to keep in mind the segmentation, super important. You wanna build that rapport up as much possible. You wanna make it as easy as possible for them to open your content.

You want them to actually connect with you and segmentation is a really good way to do that with your e-mail autoresponder. It does take a while to setup. It took me ages to actually write those e-mails because what you actually have to do is you’ve gotta write content for each different segment.

The content is not all the same. And that’s what segmentation is, obviously there’s gonna be e-mails that I wanna send to everybody so if I wanna tell someone about a new tool for example, I’ve launched a new tool a 300 plus Internet marketing tools and software, links that I’ve put up on one of my pages.

I sent that out to everybody. I want everyone to know about that. But a lot of the time these things which I just wanna tell experts, right, I just want to tell beginners or I just wanna tell someone who’s been around there for a little while, so an intermediate. And then I’ve got my general content like blog posts and podcasts which I send to everyone anyway, so just keep that in mind, guys.

Keep that in mind that not everyone’s at the same level. You’re gonna get benefits from actually personalizing your content to where people are at and that will work differently in different industries.

So I hope that helps you guys a little bit about the autoresponder. I’m gonna try be doing this podcast more often. We’ve got a couple more interviews signed up shortly.

I’m gonna be hitting up a couple of e-mail marketing experts as well and bringing them on to have a chat with them. But until then, let me know what you think about the e-mail autoresponder, the segmentation.

Send me a reply to stephen@stephenesketzis.com. Let me know what you think of it and I’ll speak to you then.