Within our email marketing platforms, as we as contacts that have opted in to receive notification or delivery of something, in addition to ongoing emails from us, there lies the decision of lists vs tags. Lists are used to manage an organize subscribers into separate groups based on broad criteria. The most highly recommended broad separation for lists are leads, clients, and past clients. All other segmentation is the job of a tag to show the hierarchy within each list; especially used to score individual leads. Let’s talk about 4 main segmentations for tags without getting too technical.
Lead magnets. This is usually how a lead gets into your email marketing world. They accepted your invitation to know more or receive something. Upon accepting the invitation, the trigger that starts an automation to give what was promised is tag. That tag should be specifically named for the lead magnet used and the lead should be placed on the client list. The next step is to nurture them in ways that help them progress through the lead pipeline to evidently become a client.
Behavior. As you are nurturing your list with tips, tools, conversation, information, etc… you should use calls to action (CTAs) in your emails. As your contacts are clicking on links or not clicking on links, they should be tagged to give them a status based on their behavior. General behaviors for tags are: interested/not interested (did they click the link to the offer), active/inactive (how many tags do they have), action/non-action (did they click at all), this type of interest/that type of interest (did they click one thing over another), etc… Based on their behavior to your email content you should be communicating in ways that influence behaviors indicate more and more interest, activity, etc… that will 1) create like, know, and trust and 2) encourage them further down the lead pipeline to become a client.
Attendance. A great show of interest is whether or not someone signed up for a virtual event and then whether or not they attended. Signing up is a behavior that could get them a tag such as action over non-action. But their actual attendance should be tagged as attendance, rather than non-attendance. Attendance at multiple virtual events should be a sign of a high lead score for sales conversion, conversion is toward the end of the lead pipeline.
Purchase. Ultimately we want all of our leads to become clients. If you have an offer ascension then they should be tagged for each purchase as they ascend the ladder of offers with communication that pushes them toward the top purchase. However, a purchase makes them a customer or client so they should also be removed from the leads lists and added to the client list after purchase. To go deeper and more technical with segmentation, you can use tags to identify what kind of customer or client: new customer, what level customer (based on your offer ascension ladder), active customer, and past customer (based on either end of service or length of time since last purchase). Now you can communicate with each segment based on their status to move clients to high levels of purchase, keep high-ticket clients happy, or recapture past clients.
Needs support infusing these new strategies into your email marketing, let’s talk. It’s FREE. ShaCannon.info/talk