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This is a problem I was just having on my lifestyle blog and since I just wrote about email marketing here, I decided to do a follow-up post on how I solved this problem.

Why You May Want to Segment Your Email Marketing List

On my lifestyle blog, some of the main themes are travel, natural hair and fashion. As I’m diving into email marketing to grow my blogging business, it dawned on me that some of my readers who are interested in fashion may not be interested in my natural hair posts any at all. Other readers who came for my travel or Jamaica posts may not be interested in anything to do with fashion or hair.

But I still wanted to find a way to get everybody on my email list and to keep them all engaged there without sending them information they may not be interested in.I found two ways to do this really simply, depending on how you’ve chosen to set up your email sequences. Keep reading to find out how ConvertKit can help you to do just that super easily. If you haven’t even begun to build your email list as yet, then you may want to sign up for my free email list-building course.

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Why I Chose ConvertKit As My Email Service Provider

Once upon a time, I used Convertkit on my lifestyle blog and Mailerlite on this blog. I kept both going to be able to compare them both since the blogging community goes hard for Convertkit even though Mailerlite is cheaper.

I get it now. Mailerlite is still very easy to use and you can’t beat free. But you get what you pay for. The features offered by Convertkit are so much more robust and honestly, the cost is paid for multiple times over if you’re using your email list to make money, as you should. (Even if you have no product to sell, sending your favourite affiliate links to your email list with honest feedback about the product should make you some dough.)

Convertkit also has an even higher percentage of making it to your subscriber’s email inbox as opposed to spam or promotions tab in Gmail and that’s where you want your emails to end up. I find that once my emails are stylised any at all with Mailerlite, meaning if I want to put an image or use a template for my emails, they end up in the promotions tab. I’ve been able to add my beautiful blog banner to all my Convertkit emails and still land in inboxes instead of spam and promotions tabs.

The bottom line is that Convertkit is very simple to use with much more powerful features and has an amazing support team. It is a beginner or middle-tier blogger’s dream. These features will be discussed further as we go along in this post.

How to Get Started With Your Email Campaign

This is the dashboard inside ConvertKit. Don’t you love how simple it is? Yes, I know, my subscribers were pitiful on my lifestyle blog. I couldn’t figure out for the longest while how to grow my email list there or what to send them until I realised I could simply segment my audience and send them each what they wanted to hear more about.

At the top of the dashboard, dash for short, you see everything you’ll need for your email marketing campaigns. It’s all laid out in pretty much the exact steps you need to take. There’s even a little drop down there with step-by-step instructions to take you through the whole set up. You can see mine is at zero. I bet if I had paid attention to this feature from the start, I wouldn’t have been struggling all along. It’s now at 100% 😉

Get started by taking these steps:

1. Create a freebie – here, you will first create a thing that your subscribers will receive in exchange for jumping on your email list. Gone are the days of “Subscribe here to get my new posts in your inbox.” Now, if you want to attract subscribers, you’ve got to give them something they want in return. This can be in the form of a checklist, printable, worksheet, even your post in PDF format if it’s a very valuable post.
2. Create a form – This is the actual thing that people will fill out with their name and email address in order to join your email list and receive your freebie.
3. Create an automation – here you’re setting up the response. This is what happens when I join your email list. I should get an email immediately from you with my freebie that I signed up for.
4. Sequence – Here’s where you create all the emails I receive after I’ve joined your email list. You pre-write these emails and set a delay between them so they go out automatically every other day or week or however long you set. Set and forget! You’ve filled them with your product info or your blog posts or your affiliate marketing links so you’re making money on auto-pilot.
5. Broadcasts – These are emails you go in and manually write and send to everyone (or a certain segment of your list) on whatever you want to update them on.
6. Subscribers – Here’s where you’re able to see all your subscribers. You can sort them by the freebie they signed up for, other interests they’ve been tagged into, segments etc.

For detailed information on how to do all of this, please consider joining my free 5-day email course! I walk you through the whys and hows of all these steps.

What Emails to Send to Your Email List

I find that a lot of bloggers struggle with what to send to their list. Some bloggers put off email marketing because they’re not yet established and others are simply scared, thinking they’ll be bothering their subscribers.

I however think you should get started on your list right away. The last thing you want to do is get comfortable as a blogger and then begin fumbling around with email marketing and come off as a newbie to your list. Get it right along with everything else you’re working on on your blog.

Remember that subscribers signed up to your list because they think you have value to offer. Go ahead and give them all that value in even more helpful and in-depth detail. Here are some emails you could send to your list after sending them the freebie:

• Complimentary information – send them something that’s directly related to the freebie they just received. If you sent them a meal plan then maybe you now want to send them a grocery list or a printable planner.
• Welcome email – welcome your new subscribers, tell them who you are and what kind of information they can expect to receive from you in your emails.
• Survey – You know that they’re interested in information related to whatever your freebie was about, here’s your chance to get to know them even better. Send a formal survey or simply ask them some questions in relation to problems they may be facing that has anything to do with either the freebie or other topics you blog about. This is a great way to get new post ideas and develop products.
• Your most important blog posts – You can package emails surrounding one or two posts that you think they may be interested in reading. Be sure to explain why these posts are helpful and what problems it will help them to solve.
• A link to your Facebook group, video or other resources you may have.
• Of course, you can begin to introduce them to your product if you have one.

Two Ways to Segment Your Subscriber List

If you’re just starting with your blog then the easy way to do it is simply to tag subscribers based on interests that they signed up for. For instance, you can tag anyone who signed up for a blogging freebie in your blogging sequence. Anyone who subscribed to your mommy freebies in a mom segment and so on and so forth.

Then, in your welcome email to these subscribers, you can have people opt-in to other topics they’re interested in hearing more about by simply clicking a link in your email. It would say something like: “Thank you for signing up for my mom planner. Starting a mom blog was one of the greatest things I did to boost my income as a SAHM. If this sounds like something you’re interested in, click here to get more information.”

If they click on the link, they’re tagged within ConvertKit into your blogging email sequence as well.

You could also do this in the reverse. This works well if you only have one email sequence and everybody is funnelled through that sequence but suddenly you need to send a bunch of emails and you want to have people be able to opt-out of them if they want to, without opting out of your whole list all-together.  What kind of scenario could cause this?

• Maybe you have an upcoming product launch and will be sending people emails every day for the next 5 days until the product either launches or closes. In your first email explaining the product, it’s awesome to let people know that you have a product coming out and will be sending them info over the next few days about it. If they’re not interested and would rather not get the emails about the specific product launch, they can opt-out from just the product launch, but will continue to receive your awesome weekly emails.
• Another scenario this works well for is if you do things like send daily emails around Black Friday with the latest deals or have an upcoming event. Anything where the frequency of your emails will increase, I like to give people the option to opt-out if they’re not interested in hearing about it.

You’ll do your full sales push first of course so people know all the details and then get a chance to decide if they want to hear more or opt-out at the end of your email.

I’d show you how to do all of this step-by-step, but Convertkit has more awesome how-to videos than I do so I’ll end here and remind you again that the free course gets your feet fully wet with Convertkit and you’ll be a pro at all this by the end of the course. Sign up below!

Do you segment your email list? How has this helped you out?

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