Alyson Lex  0:00  

So Dominique is a love and relationship coach. She serves mostly women who are struggling in their current relationships or women who have been divorced and are looking for a new big love in their lives. But over the past year in her business, Dominic has run several webinars, some aimed at women who struggle to have their spouses understand them, like we all do, and to find that spark in their relationships again, and some of those webinars are actually geared toward women who are divorced and looking for love again, or another relationship. And really what that is, that's two different types of clients, women in relationships who need to rekindle that spark and divorced women looking for love. But if she was to email her list of divorce, women looking for love about mending their relationship with their significant others, they would be confused. They would wonder if she's got the right person if they were they signed up for this. And they wouldn't unsubscribe, because they would feel like Dominique doesn't know me very well. Mm hmm. Does that sound familiar? Like maybe something that you've had that happen to you, you sign up for one thing, and then all of a sudden you start getting messages about another thing that feel like they have nothing whatsoever to do with you. That's a segmentation problem.

What List Segmentation Is

Jennie Wright  1:22  

Absolutely. What is list segmentation? So what a great story to start off today's episode, simply to sort of illuminate why we need to segment our list. And if you've never segmented your list before, don't worry, we have got you. In today's episode, we are breaking it down into its best components and sharing the tips and tricks that are actually going to serve you very well in your list segmentation. So let's start off with what list segmentation is. If you haven't figured it out from our story about Dominique, you're going to realize it very very soon. So list segmentation is putting the right content in front of the right people in your email marketing system at the right time. It's personalizing your list experience with you, which is going to lead to better connection and increased trust, and honestly, higher sales. Which is our goal. emails that go to your entire list might help some people, but it's going to leave others very, very confused. Cue the head tilt. Right. Have you ever gotten that email? Just like Alyson was saying, Have you ever gotten that email? And you're like, what this makes no sense. No, I am not looking to get a timeshare in Florida. What's going on?

Alyson Lex  2:37  

You wonder if your information has been sold, or if they've been hacked, or, like I mentioned, you forget that you even signed up for them in the first place. And that's where you get those pesky spam complaints. And you don't want those.

Jennie Wright  2:49  

The more spam complaints you get, you can actually get banned from your email marketing provider like Aweber and Active Campaign, they'll actually shut you down. They'll shut you down fast. 

Alyson Lex  3:00  

And so a lot of times what happens is, we just can't be bothered. All right, I'm gonna play devil's advocate here for a second, we can't be bothered. Why not just send it to my whole list that way if there is someone who might be interested in that timeshare in Florida, even though they signed up for a divorced women's workshop. Hey, at least it's another sale. So why shouldn't I send every email to everyone?

Jennie Wright  3:30  

It's like throwing darts. It's like throwing 10 darts at a time and hoping one sticks. That makes no sense. 

Alyson Lex  3:40  

Wait, that's not how you play darts?

Jennie Wright  3:46  

Then again, I'm one of the people that hits the person that standing away from the dartboard but we won't get into that.

Alyson Lex  3:52  

I just don't play darts. It's a bad idea for me.

Why Segment Your List

Jennie Wright  3:55  

You get the gist, right. You've heard you know, you've heard like, everybody thinks if you cast a wide net but it's better and it's not you want to be so direct and speak to the right people. You even want to take take Dominic's story and take it a level deeper even to be like “women that are divorced that are looking for a new love that are over 40 that are single moms.” You could even nail it down even tighter This is about this is about niching in quite honestly, this is a conversation about taking your niche a bit deeper and tighter. And and speaking only to the people who need the exact thing that you're talking about. And when you do that, you get better results. It seems counterintuitive in the beginning of your business, but as you develop your business, you're going to see this is the way to go.

Alyson Lex  4:40  

Well and too, there are people who have evolved their business over the years where they may start as a generic relationship coach, but then they niche in to helping divorced women and then they go further into helping women over 40 and then they etc etc. So that is really segmenting your list between what my business is now and what my business is then… but there are other people who have two different offers, if you will. 

Me for example, I'm a copywriter, I have clients so those would be my done for you clients, but then I also have products and I'm developing some courses and so those would be my DIY clients. My done for us are not likely to buy my DIY and most of my DIY are not likely to buy my done for us. So, by segmenting, I can make offers to the right person with the right message at the right time. But I know there are other other reasons to segment. One of them would be to remove every possible barrier to get people to take action. If you followed me for any kind of time, or if you if you're going to continue, you're going to hear me say a lot, “We want to remove the obstacle to the purchase.” We want to remove those barriers, we want to get rid of those stumbling blocks. And by segmenting your list, avoiding that head tilt, by removing that barrier, you're going to get more of your people to take the action that you want them to take, whether that's registering, buying, clicking, joining, sharing, forwarding, replying, reading, watching more, whatever that action is that you want them to take from that email. The more targeted your emails are to their situation, the message they need to hear at the time they need to hear it, they're gonna do that more often.

Jennie Wright  6:38  

Oh, heck, yes. Abso-frickin-lutely. And also it seems more personal with when you do this, and you're going to help connect to people more deeply, which is what you want relationship building. You know, growing your email list isn't about vanity numbers, and we're going to talk about that a little bit later. But mostly, when you're trying to grow your list, you're trying to create relationships with people and that should be your goal, the more People know like and trust you, as they say, the easier it is for them to go, “Wow, Alyson really knows what she's talking about. I trust her as a copywriter. And I know that if she puts something out that she's got my best interests at heart, and I should look and see and go deeper with her and see if that's something that I actually want.” 

So it really, really helps people connect with you. It also helps you send really targeted emails to people on your list, like you can say, “oh, wow, you know what the people who joined my webinar back on January 4, those people were really distinctly like interested in x.” And I can target them and say, “Hey, you know what I know it's been a while since we talked or, you know, I hope you enjoyed that webinar that you that you were a part of back in the day. I have a new training that I think is really geared towards you. And if you're interested, come check it out.” 

So it really creates a lot of targeting. The more targeted you can get, the better it is and as you grow your business. Honestly the layers of targeting increase and increase and it helps you get super scoped in, which really, really helps.

How to work list segmentation with your messaging 

Alyson Lex  8:02  

And I love that example. Because what you said is not that we're not going to offer this new training to the other people on our list. It's just we're going to do it using different messaging. People who attended that January 4 webinar, they're going to get one message. And then people who attended the March 25 webinar might get a different message that's super personalized. Maybe the webinar on the 4th was about looking for love at the bar. And the webinar on March 25 is about looking for love online. And so we're just going to tweak those promotional messages to those particular topics because we know they're interested in it. [After all,] they registered for it. 

And they they get something that's hyper personalized, they feel seen. 

Jennie Wright  8:47  

Oh, yeah. They feel seen and heard. They feel like you care like you get them. And what do people do when they feel seen and heard and they feel like you get them, they continue to tune in. 

Alyson Lex  8:59  

They buy and they engage. And when you engage your people, it allows you to separate the engaged from the disengaged, that allows you to either send reactivation campaigns to get those people reengaged with you, or I think we'll talk about maybe an reengagement campaign, and then in a couple minutes, but you can also remove those inactives from your database.

Jennie Wright  9:27  

Oh, God, yeah, I'm gonna talk about the technicalities of that in just a sec. It's gonna be awesome. 

What Are Vanity Numbers?

Alyson Lex  9:31  

But then you're not paying to send emails to people who don't care. And you're not paying these premiums for vanity numbers. I have so many clients that are like, Oh, yeah, I have 10s or hundreds of thousands of people on my list, but only a small percentage of those people are actually engaged, or real or around or reading or clicking or anything. And so they're paying a really big premium for what essentially are vanity numbers so that you can walk around and say I have this many on my list. Okay, great.

Jennie Wright  10:03  

That's “awesome?” Makes no sense.

Alyson Lex  10:06  

Yeah. I mean, what's the point of having 65,000 people on your list if 17 people total register for a webinar that you host?

Jennie Wright  10:16  

We've seen that we've seen those numbers in the back end. And we've seen that and gone “We've got lack of engagement happening here and a list cleanup is a thing.”

And segmentation will actually help you do that. And you can do this. 

The Technical Side of List Segmentation

So let's talk about the technicals for a couple of minutes. And if you're not tech savvy, that's okay. Okay, understand that I'm just going to cover this point. Briefly. I'm not going to spend the rest of the episode talking about the technicals, which trust me, I could, but we're not going to do it. That's for a completely different training. Honestly, it would be better for a webinar versus talking about on a podcast. 

However, how you do this technically is first you start with an email marketing provider. That makes segmentation easy now, some make it easy Make it really freaking challenging, okay, and there's some that are better than others. Now depending on your budget, I always say that you get what you pay for. So you know, if you're going to use MailChimp great, it does have list segmentation, it has tagging and all those things. And people you know, I might get some hate mail over this one, but I'm not a fan of MailChimp, because it doesn't allow me to do like visually, I'm a visual, I'm a visual builder, and email marketing. And it doesn't allow me to visually build with maps and things like that, that really helped me sort of see where everything's going, right. So if you're a MailChimp fan, have at it, love you. Just not my thing. My AWeber which I was with for six years!

Alyson Lex  11:44  

I'm so glad I gotcha away from that.

Jennie Wright  11:45  

Oh, thank Gosh.

AWeber just brought list segmentation and tagging, like tagging more or less on in the past like couple of years, but it's not gorgeous. It's not really easy to use a website. is all about building out separate lists. Here's the problem with that, when you have separate lists, and you know Allison's registered for every single webinar that I've ever done as an example, then when I promote something, she's in every single list, and when I hit send on an email that goes to everybody, she gets it seven times, or 15 times, right, because there's duplication in the list unless you know how to go into AWeber and go in there and create parsing

It's creating rules like if person is in list a then unsubscribe from list B. If person isn't list be unsubscribe, it's honestly to remember all the rules and you have to do in every single list. It's a pain in your in your checklist. don't recommend it if you want simplicity. If you want, you know, a real way to know your exact number of people on your list and the simplicity of creating segmentation, then out and I both recommend that you use a product called Active Campaign. Now, depending on where you are in your business Active Campaign may or may not be the thing for you. There's lots of email marketing providers out there. There's ConvertKit it does segmentation as well. There's You know, there's Infusionsoft Infusionsoft slash keep. But that's you know, that does segmentation too. But it comes with its own host of fun stuff.

Alyson Lex  13:23  

Ontraport, Maropost, more enterprise solutions… you have to pick the one that's right for you. We love Active Campaign. Yeah.

Jennie Wright  13:32  

And that's just the that's just that's just what it is. And so, you know, and this is, this is just what we've used through trial and error. Alyson's been in business for 12 years. I've been in business for eight years, and I'm sorry, 13. At the time of this recording, I've been in it for eight years at the time of this recording. You know, I've gone through several I've actually quite honestly, when I was a VA, I worked in almost every single one of them for my clients profusely and so I really got a handle on what we're And what didn't, and an Active Campaign ended up being the right one. 

So, that being said, here's how you do this technically. Okay? So one, you need an email marketing service that works and helps. We do recommend Active Campaign. It has a great user interface that makes things really, really simple. to segment your list you're going to create instead of having 30 lists, you want to use tagging an automation. What's a tag? A tag is simply saying, you know, Alyson registered for the March 25 webinar on relationships. So you've created a tag, March 25 Webby, let's just say, so anybody who registers for the March 25 webinar or the May 1 or the whatever date, gets the tag, date, whatever webinar training, okay, and if I want to, then I start to build this gorgeous looking database. As my list grows and as people opt in for more things, I get to see who's opted in for what. 

Now, tagging, you can use tagging for everything you can use tagging. If people open an email and click a link, clicked link an email from July 1, you can go really, really deep and have a lot of fun. Now, automation automations are just what they are. They're automated processes for your email marketing systems. So if somebody registers for a webinar, they get an automated email saying, hey, thanks. So glad you're here. Welcome to the webinar starts on such date at such date. And here's the time and here's your link to zoom right to join the webinar. And you can use automations to do those kinds of welcome series. Additionally, you can use automations to segment your list even more deeply. So, if you have a automation that says if person tagged with webinar, March 25 tag and opens nothing for three months, now they get tagged with a new tag: “inactive,” and they go into a -. That's where we get to talk about creating a brand new thing which is our reengagement campaigns. So you could tag them. And now they're segmented into this new area where it's like, “Hey, you know what? I haven't opened an email in three months. I'm not sure if they still want to stick with me. But before I delete them, I'm going to give it one last go.” 

Re-Engagement Campaigns from Your Segments

And this is where a reengagement campaign comes in. This is where Alyson totally flourishes and talks about this. But basically, the whole gist is now you can try and re engage them and then you can add another tag like say they go through the engagement campaign, and they still don't open now they get another tag. “Engagement campaign zero open.” So now you know, not only are they inactive but they did nothing from my reengagement campaign. These people are like, gone.

Alyson Lex  17:03  

Way dead.

Jennie Wright  17:05  

Now you can do another thing. Well, okay, now they've got this tag. And now you go through your tag and say, “oh, today I've got 15 people who are now tagged as, you know, engagement can reengagement campaign no open, I can boot them off my list and save myself some money.”

Identifying Hot Leads with List Segmentation

Alyson Lex  17:26  

And the funny thing is, there's a flip side to that too, right? If you have someone who opens every single email clicks, every single link, super interested in all the webinars that you have about meeting somebody in a bar (I'm still going with this Dominique example.) They're like super interested you could set up an automation using tags and segmentation to identify them as a hot lead. Yeah. And maybe we send them a personal email or reach out to them through our Facebook group or get in touch with them personally and try to get them on a sales call.

Jennie Wright  17:59  

Brilliant. Brilliant!

Alyson Lex  18:00  

Now we know that they're they're consuming all of our content, we know exactly what they're interested in, we can reach out to them personally to build that relationship further with the help of our automation, just because we're talking about building relationships, and being super personal, doesn't mean we don't want to use the tools that we have at our disposal to help us.

How to Get Started with List Segmentation

Jennie Wright  18:20  

Correct. Absolutely. All right. So you might ask, you might like wonder how you can get started with segmentation. Right? 

So here's a couple things that you can do that are going to make segmentation easy, because what if you already have a list of 200 people or 2000 people or 20,000 people and you're like Jennie, I've never segmented my list or haven't segmented enough. These simple things are going to work. Okay. If you employ these techniques, you're going to create segmentation. 

Using Surveys For List Segmentation

So, step number one is you can survey your list, you could send a very targeted survey. Targeted meaning really direct questions that ask the things that you need to know, that get people to respond in a way that tells you what they need, what they want, by the way, those can be two different things, and how they want to get it. Okay. The surveys that I usually send for my clients and also for my business and that Alyson knows, is usually, you know, where are you at right now? Okay, so, you know, choose ABCD or E, I'm ready for love. I'm not sure I'm lacking confidence for finding love. I just got out of a relationship and I need to heal. Right. So pick one of those. So where are you at?

What do you need? What do you want? And how do you want to get it? So some people learn through watching videos, some people learn through being an interactive classes, some people learn through coaching. Some people learn through passive learning like in a paid membership group, and things like that. So if you ask that question, you can create wonderful segmentation. And so the people who answered this question, there might my people who – I'm thinking of running a high level mastermind with these people who have been identifying that they learned through masterminds. Those are my hot leads, and then you can create a special campaign just for them. So surveys are awesome.

Alyson Lex  20:21  

And the one thing I want to mention about surveys from a copy perspective, just because I can't help myself, I always want to give them at least one open ended question. So an open ended question is where they provide their own answers. It's not a fill in the blank of true or false or multiple choice, anything like that. It's they fill in their answer in their words. You want to do that because it gives you the words that they like to use that you can then use to market to them. If you ask them hey, how do you want to get this information? And they say, I like to be in a small group environment. will now you know in your copy, make sure to mention small group environment. And it's going to reflect their words back to them. So that's my own thing about surveys.

The “Stick Around” Email Strategy

Jennie Wright  21:04  

Okay, so the next thing that you want to look at doing, you know, you've done a survey or you can just choose one of these things off this list is, I like this. Now, this is bold. Okay, it's called the “Do you want to stick around email?” Now you don't phrase it as lad, but basically the tenants of it are, “Hey, you know what you've been? Thanks for being on my you know, thanks for being a contact for so long. It's been great to have you on my list and stuff. I noticed that you haven't really been opening things or” you don't have to phrase it like that Alyson's a copywriter. But the the basic thing is, “Hey, I'm going to be doing this in the future. Or maybe I've done a pivot lately and this is my new direction. Do you want to stick around Round, you want to be part of this. And if you don't, no hard feelings, and I wish you, I wish you all the best of luck in the future. But if you do, then click here, right?” So in our email marketing services, the ones that, you know, allow this, we can do a one click tag. So if they click a link, the email marketing service can add a tag, which is fantastic. Yes, I want to stick around. No, I don't want to stick around. Okay, that makes it easy. Thank you so much. I love doing that email

How to Use Segmentation When You Sell Two Things

Alyson Lex  22:26  

A variation of that, too, is if you're not fully pivoting, but splitting. So I might send an email because I use this as an example before, I might send an email that says “hey, just curious. Are you more likely to hire a copywriter or learn to do copy yourself?” And so maybe I would do hire a copywriter as a link and learn to do copy yourself. As a link, they would get tagged appropriately and then I could actually drive them to a piece of content that says, “hey, thanks for your feedback, thought you might like this piece of content.” And for the for the done for you people it would be how to hire a copywriter. And for the DIY people it would be here's the best resource roundup of a where to learn copy that I've ever found.

Jennie Wright  23:20  

You're so smart.

Alyson Lex  23:22  

And so it's not necessarily a “Do you want to stick around email” but it is a split email use utilizing that same one click tag technology that allows you to just start filing people. That's the whole goal start start flagging them with the right color post it.

Segmenting With a Freebie or Lead Magnet

Jennie Wright  23:48  

Okay, so next thing is offering a freebie which sort of plays into what Alyson was just talking about with, you know, sending them to a piece of content, but it also can create some thing a little bit deeper. So maybe you have a checklist or a download, or, you know, a recording of something that you've done or training that you created. And you say, “Hey, you know what, if you're interested in X, head on over to click, you know, click the link here and register for this brand new training.” That starts segmentation really easy. Like if you've never done segmentation before, and a survey is feels daunting to you and the Do you want to stick around email kind of freaks you out a little bit, go ahead and create create a brand new freebie and get it in front of your list and have them segment themselves just based on whether or not they want it. It's a really great way to see who wants what.

Alyson Lex  24:41  

Absolutely. And that's also a really big part of a reengagement campaign. So a reengagement campaign really starts with offering them something for free, reminding them to get their free thing and then engaging with them once they've taken you up on it. If they don't take you up on it. You can try again with another little segment. Again, if I offered a DIY solution and they didn't take me up on it, then maybe I offer a discovery call or something. But the reengagement campaign that we set up automatically that we talked about earlier with all that tech speak the Jennie went into. That is really the whole goal is to get them opening and reading and clicking your emails again. Mm hmm. And action on them.

The Resource for Today’s Episode

Jennie Wright  25:31  

Correct. And if you guys want more, if you're listening to this, if you folks are listening to this and you want more information on segmentation, I'm just going to tell you right now that we actually have a download on this surprise. We have a really incredible worksheet that's broken down into three parts. It's going to make it really like hella simple for you guys to figure out segmentation. So you're going to want to go and grab that it's going to be in our notes section from today's episode, so head on over to systemtothrive.com/2 and it'll be right there in the notes for you to grab, it's really good download. This is something that's going to make segmentation super simple for you and help you out a lot. So I just want to mention that before we went on.

What Data To Look For With Your List Segmentation

Alyson Lex  26:18  

All right. So once we've got this segmentation thing all figured out, and we're kind of rocking and rolling, and we're implementing and we the tech stuff is confusing, but we're doing it anyway. What should we look for? What kind of data should we be looking for? And what are some good measurements of what to really expect there to know that we're doing it the right way?

The first one that I can think of is open rates. 

Your open rates go up if more people want your stuff.

Jennie Wright  26:55  

Absolutely. Absolutely. You if you go into your email, marketing, service, and all of them have some sort of reporting system in them. And every time you send an email, it'll tell you what your open rate is, versus your click through rate versus your bounce rate versus how many people have unsubscribed. Those are the four top numbers that people see when they're looking at the email marketing. Right? Those are the fourth thing. So those are the four things you really should at least understand and know about. So we're gonna explain it a little bit here. And then I really want you guys when you're when you're even listening to this, head on and like pop open your email marketing, you know, software and be looking at this in real time, because it actually helps. So open rates are really just the biggest, biggest, biggest indicator of your, your ability to connect with your list. You know, when they say, Oh, my list is dead. It's because their open rates can be really, really low. Now also, if you're not nation, if you know, perhaps you've pivoted over time, or you've changed over time. The subject line sock or your subject line sucks. open rates can be heavily affected open rates in analysis. And I think you'll agree with me. open rates tend to take a little bit of testing.

Alyson Lex  28:09  

Oh, frequent, consistent and always Yes, yeah.

Jennie Wright  28:12  

Oh, like all the time, because open rates can be affected by the day of the week that you send your email or the time of day. Right? So if you live in the UK, but your entire audience is in the US on the East Coast, okay, then you're looking at a time difference of depending on the time of year, five or six hours, right. So if you are in the UK and you think sending an email at 7am uk, time is the right time to get an email in front of your East Coast, US customers. And unless they're unless they're night owls … unless you're trying to sell something to an audience of night owls, right. Like you're talking about, you know, infomercials? I don't know. It's the worldwide I can't sleep. What do I watch on TV.

Alyson Lex  29:01  

Oh, yeah.

Jennie Wright  29:02  

And so what I want you to think about is, when are you sending? Huh? What day are you sending? So I'll give you a couple hints. I never send my weekly emails on a Monday or a Friday. Okay, my crowd, my crowd are entrepreneurs and people who were just building their businesses or very established. And trust me when they come back from a weekend, Mondays, their inboxes look like insanity, mayhem, and they don't want to get you know, an email from me is going to get buried and it's not going to get seen. Also people on Fridays are like, weekend is here, right? And so yeah, kind of check it out. So really know your audience. So that's when you need to know when to send your emails and honestly, the only way you can do this and you can't just take my word for it or Alyson's, you need to test

Alyson Lex  29:50  

Yeah, every single person's audience is going to be different.

Jennie Wright  29:54  

Your list is alive. Your list actually is a living, breathing thing. It's full of it's full of people. It's filled with My gosh, English, it's filled with people. People with problems. Yep. So you need to react to your list as a human being, a living organism that has not wants and needs specific things it wants specific times of day. Active Campaign, if you look at the reports, it'll tell you, like, I used to send my emails at 7am Eastern, but my emails never got opened. And Alyson knows this because she looked at my data. Nobody opened my emails till 11am. So why the heck am I sending them at seven? They're gonna get buried.

Alyson Lex  30:37  

And did you change it and did the open rate increase?

Jennie Wright  30:40  

1045 girl 10:45am eastern standard time and when I sent a 1045 my open rates went Whoosh.

Alyson Lex  30:48  

Right. So that was the first indicator.

Jennie Wright  30:50  

Yeah, that was the first indicator open rates. Second indicator, is click through rates. Click through rates  is if you have a link in your email like register for this webinar, come check out the Facebook group, book your call whatever it is. But the click through rate is anybody who's clicked on that link. And the more targeted the email, the more likely people are to click the link and take action.

Alyson Lex  31:16  

I actually I love looking at click through rates even over open rates. So if I want to know how and this is because of the copy, right, so that's my, my place.

Jennie Wright  31:29  

It's your lens on it.

Alyson Lex  31:32  

So basically, you could have 100% open rate. Actually, you probably couldn't but if you had a 100% open rate and a zero percent click through rate you're still dead in the water. So now at the same time if you had a 1% open rate, but 100% click through rate, still kind of dead in the water because not a lot of people are opening, so they've really worked together, you want to get more opens, but at the same time, you want to get more clicks. 

How to Improve Open and Click Through Rates with Copy

And there are a couple ways to do that. They all pretty much have to do with copy. Okay, again, targeting the right message to the right person at the right time. If I'm talking to a bunch of people who would prefer to write their own copy, but I'm trying to pitch, a strategy call or discovery call to hire me to do it, I'm not going to get a lot of takers, I'm not going to get a lot of clicks. So targeting, you're also gonna want to make sure that you use the right good, you know, good copy. principles. There we go is the word I was looking for, but good copy principles for writing your email. I could talk about that for days. We're gonna have episodes about that in the future. But really take the time to look at your click through rates because as they increase, that means that you're honing in on what your audience wants to see and hear. The other thing is the offer itself. They may not be interested in that content, they may not be interested in that freebie, they may not be interested in that video. And so if you notice, like, hey, I've done three or four things on this one topic in the last few weeks, and I'm just not getting the clicks on this. Maybe don't do that topic for a while and bring something else in to see if it garners more interest. So there are a couple of things that you can really test with your click through rates, copy, the targeting, and the offer. That's all I wanted to say about that.

Jennie Wright  33:39  

So I think it's amazing. I think that was fantastic. The next data that the next data point you're going to look at is the unsubscribes. So when you're really targeted and you're using segmentation, each email that you send, there are going to be some unsubscribes. It's gonna happen. And the way you actually do this is if you're you're really targeted on what you're doing and you're using the segmentation, you should have lower unsubscribes because they're not going to go. Why is Alyson sending me this email? About DIY when I don't give a crap about DIY? I want to learn how to like write better copy, period, or hire. Like, I don't want that.

Alyson Lex  34:17  

Right. I don't want to do it myself. I want to hire someone. I don't care.

What Your Unsubscribe Numbers Mean

Jennie Wright  34:21  

Exactly right. So you want to reduce the unsubscribes and the lower unsubscribe number that you have? That means that hey, you know what, you're giving a clear message. And people want it. The more unsubscribes you get, it means Whoa, okay, maybe did something a little off here. And it pissed people off. The other thing you need to look at with unsubscribes is if you hold a big event, like an online summit, where you're growing your list in a big way, like you're doing a list injection, then you need to have expectations that afterwards the tire kickers are going to leave. Okay, so that's okay. And that's okay. We want the tire kickers to go. Bye Felicia out of here, we would just have to like we want the core people. But so you have to look at that. I've had people literally build the list. And I did this guys, I really did this where I did a summit called the Dream Business Summit. It was horrible. By the way, go buy the URL if you want it, because I gave it up a long time ago. I did that summit. And then I was like, I'm gonna market my VA services to these people. Well, they didn't want my VA services. They wanted to build their own business, and they wanted different things. And I started getting massive amounts of unsubscribes. Because my summit was about one thing, but then my offer was about something completely different.

People were like, I don't give a crap about this.

Like, I'm outsies and they left, right. And I got a lot of spam complaints and everything and I was like, whoo, I'm screwing up big time. I'm having a problem. So I really had to take a look at that. And so my goal now is when I send an email, I do look at the unsubscribes just to see how how many there are and go, Oh, I only had four unsubscribes. Girl I did good on that email. Right? I have 15 unsubscribes. Whoops.

What You Can Learn About Your Email List

Alyson Lex  36:09  

Well, you learn too about your list like so, one thing I know about the list that Jennie has been building for her business over the past few years is that they really don't like a hard pitch.

So, you know, some of the traditional, like, Oh, you want to get this and much more and this and plus, there's more. That kind of style does not work for Jennie's audience from a copy perspective. Whereas the story style, the really, again, really transparent and personal style that we all clearly like that, like her list responds really well to that. And so, again, from the copy perspective, the unsubscribes are going to show you “Hey, I don't like it when you talk to me that way.”

Jennie Wright  36:59  

Exactly. And we've tested it we've done you know, and Alyson, with transparency Alyson does write a lot of copy for me because she's just better at it. And her copy works really well. And we've tried we've tried out the you know, “and you get this and more!” and it and it didn't work well with my list. It just doesn't go well like it flops. Open rates are low,  click throughs… you know, my people love a longer subject line.

That's more like hey, Jennie here, I got something I want to share with you like it's more chill, right? And the email has to start off more chill with a bit of a story. Maybe a little bit of a rant, maybe a little bit of a vulnerable share. Maybe a little “Hey, is this you?” and then the transition, but they cannot stand my list does not enjoy, and they'll unsubscribe if I hit them hard with anything. So these are really good. So unsubscribes Absolutely. That's a definite data marker.

Alyson Lex  37:59  

Yeah, and the last really big data point. And this is not something that you're going to find in your back end of your email marketing system, but is the conversion. Okay, so when those emails are targeted, when they're personalized, when they contain exactly what your people are looking for, then they see the decision to purchase register, engage, whatever, as an easy one like a no brainer. So if you're sending this webinar registration email, and your landing page is getting a 20% conversion, but then you segment your list and now all of a sudden your landing page is getting a 50% conversion. It's because you segmented, you change the messaging, you did all of that you sent it at the right time you did this. You learned more about your list you're gonna see increased conversions that's going to show up as free registrations for your webinars, your downloads, your whatevers and it's going to show up in sales

Jennie Wright  39:00  

Well, that pretty much wraps up our episode today all about lists of list segmentation and how the heck you can do it. Hopefully you found this to be helpful and useful. Now don't forget that we have a resource available to you to help you with list segmentation. And you can get it at systemtothrive.com/2, you'll see any of the resources that we talked about here Active Campaign, as well as the worksheet that we we have for you, and also the notes from today's episode so that you can go through them and you can pull stuff out. Now if you've enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and being a follower of ours. And don't forget we also have a Facebook group. And we would love to see you in there and it is Gosh, here's the awesome time when I try and remember 

Alyson Lex  39:56  

The Thrive Collaborative. Search for it on Facebook. And we'll also link it on the notes page.