The Original Conversion Copywriter, Joanna Wiebe
Shows You Why You Probably Need More Than 1 Email List

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TRANSCRIPT

Howdy. Joanna here from CopyHackers. Today we’re going to be talking about email lists. Not about building your lists but about having the right list set up so you can market effectively to different people who opt in to hear from you.

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Now if you already have lists set-up or you worked really hard at segmenting to get the right messages out to people then you don’t have to worry about today’s lesson. Tadda! Yey! But if you have maybe just one general list that you work with and you don’t really communicate with them very much or you don’t quite know what to say once our responders series is done or your drift campaign or micro course is done, this is going to be a really good lesson for you and it’s going to be important as you move forward into more email marketing for the next few days.

Okay. Let’s go right back to basics. What is a list? A list is the collection of email addresses that you have that people have opted in to give you. They have consciously said, “Here’s my email address so and so. Can you please send me important information, relevant information as it comes up. I want to hear from you.” They may not be customers yet. They may be customers. Not really that relevant if they are customers or not. The idea simply is that you’ve got this space where you’ve got a whole bunch of email addresses that you can then cultivate relationships with, use cultivated relationships with the people behind those email addresses, and as we’re going to talk about in the coming days, to sell to those people or to promote your products or to encourage them to share information about your business with other people within their network and things like that.

Now I say a list but in most cases you want to have more than one list set-up. We already looked at PPC landing pages and at retargeting. If you’re going to have different landing pages for different things then it follows, we’ll talk about this, it follows though that you should have different lists for those different landing pages that you’ve got people who are coming in through a PPC ad campaign where the headline or the called action is all around signing up to hear about when your product is available versus other PPC landing pages which maybe “Notify me when your course opens”. Two different things could be there.

Another one could be getting them on a regular newsletter lists. We could have three different lists right there. If you just put everybody into the same list, it would be very hard to use that list to market those people.

Now you maybe saying, “Well, with a list I can segment,” and you can. A segment is really when you take your list and you’re going to email that list but you don’t want to email everybody. You email based on what little you do know about the people who are on your list. You can find out how they behave, where they signed up, what their social profile is, how likely they are to have a Twitter account versus Facebook versus LinkedIn or all of the above. You can take your list, divide it up and communicate with people based on those different segments but those segments rarely tell you about what that person’s motivation is.

When we’re talking about converting people we are trying to get them to do something you want them to do where almost always going to be talking about speaking to them motivationally the things that they’re really interested in getting from you.

Someone who wants to get a free course that comes with your newsletter sign up may not want to hear anything about your new product launch. They may not want to hear anything about your course reopening but your list data won’t tell you that. Your general list in MailChimp won’t tell you what the motivations are for individual people. That’s why you want to setup different lists.

Now you hear a lot about this pressure that you have to grow your list. It’s good to have a lot of fresh new people on your list. The people who convert the most are those people who were the most recently signed up to hear from you. It’s good to keep bringing new people in and those who have a high activity rate with you. If they are highly engaged, they open your emails a lot, they click through them a lot, they may forward it to friends and things like that. Those are your engaged reader or subscribers and those are really good people to market to as well but you don’t need a list of 10,000, 20,000 or 100,000 people in order to get really awesome results for your small business or your growing business.

What you do need is the ability to communicate in meaningful ways with the different people who are signing up to hear from you and not to find two years into your business that you lumped everybody into a single newsletter list only to have 10,000 people on that list and you don’t really know much about them. You can survey them to find out but you’re likely to find out that they’re very different people on there with very different motivations. That’s why today we want to back up and assess what other list you may need to have and want to have.

Okay. Setting up lists isn’t a very hard thing to do as you’ll see. In addition to setting up those lists I want to walk you through a really basic spreadsheet that can help you keep track of your various lists that you may have and again you don’t want a million of them. It might start to sound like you want a lot. You just want a manageable amount that matches the different offerings that you have and will probably want to market to people.

Okay. Creating a list in MailChimp is really as easy as hitting Create Lists when you get to the lists tab. When you sign in hit Create List and then go to Create a List. Now they may say Create Groups. I find it really easy just to go with the list. There’s no max on how many lists you can have in MailChimp. If you feel better about creating a group that’s cool but I like to have individual distinct lists so I know exactly what’s going on with each one of those, probably because I’m a control freak.

Then to simply setup your new list give it a name. Make sure it’s a name that you can identify so that when you’re using a landing page tool like Unbounce or KickoffLabs to create a landing page where you’re creating email addresses that you’re hooking that tool up with the right list so that people people are moving in to the appropriate list, which is the whole point. Then follow a lot of the tips that Collin laid out for you around how to write frontlines and subject lines and things like that.

Okay. List setup is not the hard part. Clearly it’s filling in some forms in a really easy email platform. Knowing what list to have is again kind of another question but you do want lists that are designed to help you promote your products when the time comes.

Now when were talking about building those lists which we’ll do tomorrow and really managing those lists this is a spreadsheet that can come in handy. I’d like you to fill this in as part of your homework today and keep it up on an ongoing basis. As you see we have your list over to the left. Give your list those individual names that are easy to identify and list those out here – List A, List B list.

Then we want to manage where people are coming from. If we replace the page and forget to do a redirect or something we know why is it that suddenly people aren’t signing up in for that list anymore. For your general list you probably don’t need to mark down exactly where people signed up because it’s probably going to be all over your site if you do what we’re going to talk about tomorrow but then there are your other lists that we do want to track it for. If you have PPC landing pages or retargeting landing pages or other types of landing pages where you collect email addresses for those targeted list then you want to put those URLs in here.

What did they use to sign up? We have handy drop-downs here which we’ll go through again tomorrow so you’ll want to kind of keep building this in over the next few days. The different places on your site that you might be getting people to sign up just so that you know. There’s going to be a lot of cases where you have a lot of ways where people sign up especially for your general lists but for these more targeted lists you may want to just be able to mark down let’s say that you had embedded it in a page. There’s a sign up form in a page and that’s how they actually signed up.

If there’s a PPC ad that brought them there it’s really good to track that kind of stuff. If they’re given in an incentive to sign up like the micro course that Rob was talking about, mark down what that incentive was. If it’s for product launch and you said you were going to notify them within three weeks of launch or something like that then you’ll want to mark that down in the appropriate column.

It’s really just simply going through and then marking out the different topics for the emails that you’re sending to these people. Really so that at the end of the day you can simply track all the crap you’re going to have for emails so it doesn’t feel like you’re going to loose focus or loose steam because there’s so much going on. Don’t have a whole bunch of lists. Have the right number of lists to manage and then manage them using this spreadsheet. For the final two columns you’ll want to fill these in if and as you do any promotional mailings to the members of your list.

Okay. Cool. Well that is it for today. It’s now time for you to go do your assignment and we will see you again tomorrow.