You can send broadcast emails to everyone on your list. But what if you want to make them more relevant to the people receiving them?
The short answer is – use segments.
First up, what exactly is a segment?
Segments allow you to organise your subscribers into specific groups. Each group has something in common. When you create a segment, you can use tags or custom fields (or both) to decide who will be part of the segment.
For example, let’s say you add a Newsletter tag to everyone who you want to send your newsletter to. You can create a Newsletter segment by including anyone with that tag.
You might be thinking that tags do that anyway – they help you organise your subscribers. Which they do, however, segments take this a step further. Segments allow you to group by a combination of tags. They also allow you to segment by custom fields as well.
Examples of segments
If you are anything like me, you’ll find it easier to understand with examples. So let’s take a look at a few examples of using segment to group subscribers.
Interest
You could group your subscribers by what topics they are most interested in. Let’s say you run a wedding cake business and you have a diverse set of subscribers, including:
- couples getting married (potential customers)
- people who want to learn how to setup a wedding cake business (potential mentoring clients)
- other suppliers in the wedding industry (potential referral partners)
By tagging them with what they are most interested in, you can create a segment for each.
People ready to buy
One of the really powerful things about segments is that you can combine tags and custom fields. Taking the wedding cake design business example, let’s say you want to send emails to potential mentoring clients who you know are interested but have not yet purchased a mentoring session.
One way to know that they are interested is to set a tag if they click on a link to your mentoring service page. If they have that tag, you know that they have visited the service page and therefore have shown some interest. Let’s say this tag is called Interest - Mentoring
In the segment, you’ll use three criteria:
- Has
Interest - Mentoringtag - Does not have
Customertag
Therefore, this segment will include anyone who has shown an interest in your mentoring services, but are not yet a customer. The example below is using ConvertKit’s segment builder.
Location
You can use location to create segments. Let’s say you have a global audience, but you are running an event in one region. Rather than bombarding your entire list with emails about that event, you could create a segment for people are in that region.
Segments in subscriber settings
You’ll find the segments on the main subscribers page (click on Subscribers in the main menu).
You can pull up a list of everyone who belongs to a particular segment by clicking on the segment
Sending an email to a segment
Once you have your segments in place (even if it is just one), you can send an email to the subscribers who belong to it.
I’m going to use the wedding cake design business example again to illustrate this. In this example, I want to send an email to everyone who is a mentoring lead (they have shown an interest in mentoring and are not yet a customer).
On the second step when sending a broadcast email, you can select who the broadcast will be sent to by adding a filter.
To send to one of the segments:
- click on “Add Filter”
- choose “Within Segment”
- select the relevant segment. In this case, it will be
Mentoring Lead - click on the “Add Filter” button
And then carry on sending your email in the usual way.
That’s all there is to it. By setting up some basic segments, you are able to send much more targeted emails to your list that are more relevant to their needs and interests. That makes them much more likely to keep opening them and stay engaged with you.