They were a wee bit of a dumpster fire
Segments and tagging are the primary way to divide subscribers into groups using the email list manager ConvertKit.
I've built up, and pared down, a mailing list over the course of more than a decade. I'd gone through several email list managers before settling on ConvertKit.
Lots of emails with no differentiation
A couple of months ago I rebranded the newsletter and refreshed it to be a short, frequent atomic newsletter. During that time I've sent out more emails and more regularly than I ever have before.
That's the whole point of having an email list, right? To send emails to the list, right?
For almost all of the emails I've sent from the very start, though, it's been one-size fits all.
Everyone gets the same email, and everyone gets all of them.
That's a very basic way to go about it, and to be fair, I could get by with a lot less capable service than ConvertKit to do this.
I can do better for the people who have trusted me with access to their inbox. (And in doing so, I should be able to do better for myself and my business.)
My main challenge is relating subscriber interest to the information.
I'll get to the tags themselves in the next section, but first a bit of history.
Most of the signups came from my main blog, MightyBargainHunter.com, over a number of years. The subscriber count was over 1,000 at one point. Now it's around 350. I've deleted inactive subscribers a couple of times, and not ported over subscribers when I switched mailing lists as a way to delete them.
Many of them subscribed because I gave a free ebook. Initially this ebook dealt with spending less (rebate sites, money-saving tips, and other frugal living ideas).
In the mid 2010's, I posted on fancy serial numbers, and in a short amount of time, that became one of the biggest sources of traffic on my site. It led me to create a thriving Facebook community and a YouTube channel to engage with that audience.
All great things.
However, I didn't carefully track interest during this time, or when I changed mailing list providers I dropped any information about them on the ground. So, I have a couple hundred subscribers for whom I don't really know why they signed up. They could have asked for the “spend less” ebook, or signed up to receive information about fancy serial numbers. I don't really know for many of them.
These two topics both involve money, but otherwise are kind of separate. Treating everyone the same could be alienating them more than I really need to, or want to.
Moving forward in ConvertKit, though, I've started to track based on the free ebook that I offered when they signed up. But the tags are a bit scattershot, so I'm looking to streamline them.
Here are the segments and tags I started with.
Here's a snapshot from my ConvertKit subscriber screen at the start:
First off, what's a tag and what's a segment?
A tag is a fixed identifier associated with a subscriber. Subscribers can have many tags associated with them.
A segment is a dynamic grouping of subscribers that meet certain conditions. For example, if I wanted a group of subscribers who like both cats and dogs, I could create a segment that includes all subscribers that have the “likes cats” tag and the “likes dogs” tag. In the future, any new subscribers that have both of these tags would automatically be included in the “likes cats and dogs” segment.
My two segments as they were didn't serve a purpose, so I deleted them.
The “Website – MBH” segment consisted only of people that had the “Mighty Bargain Hunter” tag. So I deleted that segment.
The “Likes Bundles” was a test segment I created some time ago, and consisted of people whose first name was John. I'm not kidding. I deleted that one too.
On to the tags.
The “Cool Serial” tag was a test I ran. I was the only subscriber tagged with that. I untagged myself and deleted it.
The “Onboarded” tag was generated when I was playing with an email series. I deleted it because no one was tagged with it.
Same thing with the “Has received an intro to the content” tag.
The “Medium” tag had one subscriber who signed up for my newsletter from a Medium splash page. I renamed the tag “Medium Splash Page” to make it more descriptive.
Pretty much every subscriber was tagged with “Mighty Bargain Hunter” when I brought the list over to ConvertKit. I guess that one is all right to keep.
The cryptic “2023-12-clkd-MYMUB” tag was a short list of people who clicked on a link to check out a product bundle. I sent one email out to them close to when the offer was done. I guess I can keep this.
The “MBH-49WaysSpendLess” tag subscribed to a form that offered a free downloaded of my ebook “49 Ways To Spend Less.” I'm keeping this for now.
The “CS-WhatIsMyBillWorth” tag subscribed to a form that offered a free downloaded of my serial number ebook “What is my bill worth?” I'm also keeping this one for now.
The “interest-cool-sernos” tag has people who indicated their interest by clicking on a particular link. It's staying.
Finally, creating a useful segment.
Here's a snapshot of the new segments and tags which are now a bit saner:
The last thing I did was to create a segment of subscribers that was interested in serial numbers (which is the “Serial Numbers” segment at the top).
I created the segment by including all subscribers that signed up using any of the forms that offered the free “What is my bill worth?” ebook, OR that had one of the serial number tags I mentioned above. It looks like this:
This is still redundant in some ways because of the rules I have for tagging subscribers, but that's okay for now.
Now, what I have is a segment of subscribers that have indicated some interest in serial numbers. I can feel comfortable sharing more serial number content with this group, as opposed to the entire list.
There's more to do, but this is a good step.
I use only a small fraction of what ConvertKit offers, and I'm working toward changing that.
Bringing some more order to my segments and tags was a first step in doing this.
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