If you’re looking for your next email marketing platform, and you’re curious if Kit is right for you, well, you’re in the right place! Here’s our comprehensive Kit review for 2024, which will cover:

• What Is Kit?
• Why do I need an email service provider (ESP)?
• The rebrand from ConvertKit to Kit
• Kit Features
• Kit Pricing
• Key Benefits of Kit
• Drawbacks of Kit
• Kit & Email Marketing: More Resources to Read, Listen & Learn

What is Kit?

Kit is an email service provider (ESP). Essentially, it’s a technology service that lets you send email campaigns to a list of subscribers. Kit is one of literally hundreds of ESPs out there, and—full disclosure—it happens to be the one we prefer and use at SPI.

Although we’re biased, we can still be objective! In this post, we’ll cover the features, benefits, and drawbacks of Kit as we see them, to help you decide if it’s the right ESP for your business.

Email marketing strategy: Why you need an ESP

If you’re reading this, you might already know what an ESP is and why you need one. But in case you don’t, an ESP is the most important piece of technology to support your email marketing strategy.

Email marketing is one of the most powerful methods to build relationships and market your products and services to your audience. Let’s talk about why that is.

In its most basic form, email marketing involves you sending emails to a group of people who’ve chosen to hear from you by “subscribing” to receive emails from you. You could technically use a simple email program like Gmail to accomplish this—but we don’t recommend it, because you’ll quickly find it insufficient (and because your personal email account will get flagged as spam if you send too many emails from it!).

As your business grows and more people subscribe to get your emails, you’ll want the ability to do more sophisticated things with your email marketing, like customizing the emails people get according to their interests, and using reports and analytics to determine what’s working well or not.

You also need to make sure you’re respecting people’s privacy and not spamming anyone. An email service provider also helps you to stay in compliance with government regulations around the world, such as the CAN-SPAM act in the United States, the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union (GDPR), and the Canada Anti-Spam Law (CASL).

Things can quickly get out of hand without the help of a dedicated email marketing platform. That’s where an ESP like Kit comes in.

Okay, let’s get into the nitty gritty of Kit’s features!

Psst… Want to grow your email list and learn powerful segmentation and automation strategies that allow your business to run on its own? Check out the Email Marketing Magic course.

Kit features

These are the key features of Kit, organized by how you’ll use them.

Sending emails

• Autoresponders/drip campaigns (sequences): Send a sequence of pre-written emails automatically to a specific segment of subscribers on your list, triggered by a specific event or action, with the aim of guiding them to take a specific action. 
• Broadcast emails: Send standard announcements or one-time emails to your subscribers on a specific date.
• CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CASL compliance: CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CASL are laws that set the rules and requirements for commercial email messages, and give recipients the right to have you stop emailing them—so compliance is crucial!
• Dynamic (personalized) email content: Your email content can display different text or images, according to your customer segmentation.
• Responsive email templates: Ready-to-go email designs, as well as the ability to create your own custom templates. Kit automatically formats your landing pages for various devices, such as desktop computers and mobile phones.
• WYSIWYG email editor: The built-in email editor lets you see how your email will look with your template’s styling applied while you’re composing it.

Collecting new subscribers

• Custom responsive landing pages: Use the included tool to quickly create a landing page to collect email addresses. Kit automatically formats your landing pages for various devices, such as desktop computers and mobile phones.
• Embeddable forms: Collect email subscribers anywhere on your website by dropping in a Javascript or HTML form, or by using the WordPress plugin.
• Site builder: Create a website directly on Kit to publish newsletters, host a digital storefront to collect payment for one-time or subscription products, and build custom pages. Set up a landing page and collect payment for one-time or subscription products right inside Kit.
• Visual automations: Kit allows you to create rule-based paths using if-then logic, so that when a subscriber takes a particular action, you can send them pre-defined emails or add them to a segment.

Learning about your subscribers

• A/B testing: Kit lets you test different subject lines for your emails, and automatically determines the winner based on their respective open rates.
• Reporting/analytics/ROI tracking: Learn how often your subscribers open your emails, click on links, and complete various actions.
• Segmentation/tagging: Segmenting your subscribers into different categories (similar to but more powerful than other programs’ “lists”) allows you to send them emails that are better tailored to their needs and interests.
• Polls. Add polls directly to emails to engage with and collect information about subscribers, which you can then use to build segments.

Growing your income

• In 2022, Kit Commerce was added to the platform, allowing users to try selling digital products to their subscribers by creating customized product pages that can be embedded in your emails, along with automated sales funnels.
• The current iteration of Kit also features a site builder. You can create a website directly on Kit to publish newsletters, host a digital storefront to collect payment for one-time or subscription products, and build custom pages.

Connecting with and supporting other creators: The Creator Network

• In 2023, Kit launched the Creator Network, which helps users guide their audience members to discover other creators and get discovered in turn.
• You can also get paid for Creator Network recommendations you make via the aptly named Paid Recommendations.

Expanding the platform’s capabilities: App store

• As part of the 2024 rebrand, they also launched an app store, where you can find custom apps to do more with Kit. The app store will launch with five apps: KitBoard (add CRM to your account), Wordsmith (turn YouTube videos into newsletters, SavvyCal (add booking widgets to emails), Mighty (connect your Mighty community and content with Kit), and SegMetrics (learn about how you gain, engage, and convert subscribers).
• Kit also offers a self-service app builder to create your own add-ons. (As of this writing, the service is currently in beta.)

Start your Kit account — free for your first 10,000 subscribers!

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From “ConvertKit” to “Kit”: Behind the rebrand

In summer 2024, the company previously known as ConvertKit officially became Kit. The new name was announced in July during the Craft + Commerce Creator Conference and went live in October. (They had previously rebranded to Seva in 2018, but considerable negative feedback to the new name caused them to revert to ConvertKit until this year.)

The change to Kit was more than a name change, though, because the company launched several big new capabilities to their platform as well. We covered some of the new features in the section above, but here are the highlights:

• An app store where developers can create add-ons to augment Kit’s capabilities
• A central data hub with enhanced reporting
• An expanded Creator Network to help users find new collaboration partners

Kit also made a point of rebranding in public by sharing information about the rebranding process through blog updates, live-streamed design sessions, and a four-part YouTube mini-documentary. This transparency gives an interesting insight into the company’s thinking. And we think it’s a smart move given how their previous rebrand went.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about pricing.

Kit pricing

For a long time, Kit only offered paid plans. But in December 2019, the company announced a new free tier if you have fewer than 1,000 subscribers. They recently expanded the free tier to include creators with up to 10,000 subscribers.

Here are Kit’s pricing options as of October 2024:

Kit Newsletter Plan

• $0/month for up to 10,000 subscribers

The Newsletter plan includes:

• 1 basic Visual Automation
• 1 email Sequence
• 1 user
• Unlimited landing pages, opt-in forms, and email broadcasts
• Audience tagging & segmentation
• Sell digital products
• Run paid newsletters & subscriptions
• Newsletter feed & website
• API Access
• Free Recommendations (required—at least one recommendation slot to grow your list by cross-promoting with other creators)
• Smart Recommendations (auto-recommendation of similar creators to help you grow your list)
• 24/7 support

Kit Creator Plan

• $9/month for up to 300 subscribers (paid annually; $15 if paid monthly)
• $25/month for up to 1,000 subscribers (paid annually; $29 if paid monthly)
• Tiered pricing up to $1,916/month (paid annually; $1,916 if paid monthly) for up to 400,000 subscribers

The Creator plan includes:

• All the features of the Newsletter plan
• Unlimited Visual Automations
• Unlimited email Sequences
• 2 users
• Free migration from another tool
• Free Recommendations
• Paid Recommendations
• Remove Kit branding
• Third-party integrations
• RSS campaigns
• Polls

Kit Creator Pro Plan

• $25/month for up to 300 subscribers (paid annually; $29 if paid monthly)
• $50/month for up to 1,000 subscribers (paid annually; $59 if paid monthly)
• Tiered pricing up to $2,166/month (paid annually; $2,599 paid monthly) for up to 400,000 subscribers

The Creator Pro plan includes:

• All the features of the Creator plan
• Unlimited Visual Automations
• Unlimited email Sequences
• Unlimited users
• Facebook custom audiences
• Newsletter referral system
• Edit links in sent broadcasts
• Subscriber engagement scoring
• Advanced deliverability reporting
• Insights dashboard
• 24/7 Priority support

Both the Creator and Creator Pro plans offer a 14-day free trial so you can see if it’s right for you before committing.

We’ll keep this post updated with the latest Kit pricing, but you can also visit the pricing page on the Kit website.

Let’s get into the reasons we like Kit next!

Benefits of Kit

We’ve used Kit to power Smart Passive Income’s email marketing for several years. In that time, we’ve found it to be the ideal ESP for our needs. We also think it’s a great solution for a range of entrepreneurs and digital creators looking for a robust, feature-rich email marketing platform.

The best email service provider for new entrepreneurs.

Easy to learn, powerful when you need it.

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From where we sit, the power of Kit falls into two main categories: user benefits, and audience benefits.

Kit benefits from the user’s standpoint

First, Kit has everything a business owner needs to get up and running quickly:

• You can collect emails.
• You can set up a simple landing page to collect emails.
• You can sell products (one-time purchase or subscription).

These features allow someone to start selling even while they are in the process of setting up a website somewhere else. It also makes it easy to execute on one of the main lessons in our Smart From Scratch course: using selling as a key step in the idea-validation process.

Second, the Kit team designed their platform to grow with the sophistication of the user. When you start, you probably just want to collect email addresses and send emails. But as you grow, you’ll want to start tailoring your message and segmenting your audience. At that point you can take advantage of things like automations and dynamic content. As you and your business become more advanced, the Creator Pro Plan is your next step—you won’t have to switch to a different email service provider five years down the road. This sets Kit apart from some other ESPs, particularly Mailchimp.

Some people find Kit a bit daunting (see Drawbacks below), but if you’re somewhat tech-savvy we think it’s pretty approachable. In particular, we like the accessibility of Kit’s automation builder, which lets you create automations in a straightforward, linear way.

We tried Infusionsoft for a year and found its automation builder innovative but overwhelming. You had to already understand how automations work, as well as the various symbols common in automation builders. We find Kit’s automation builder, on the other hand, makes it easy to string automations together in an advanced way. With multiple templates to choose from, setting up an automation for the first time is easy for any user.

We also like Kit’s approach to subscriber management. With Kit, all your subscribers go into one big pool; there are no lists. Instead, subscribers can be put into segments by assigning them attributes using tags and custom fields. These let you treat your subscribers as unique humans with different needs; not all subscribers are created equal. The other benefit of the way Kit treats subscribers? You’re only charged once for each unique subscriber, unlike some other ESPs.

Kit’s recently launched Creator Network is also a big plus in our eyes, from both a business-building and community-building perspective. It allows you to grow your subscriber base while also fostering connections with other entrepreneurs and creators.

Last but not least, if you’re moving from another ESP like Mailchimp or AWeber, Kit offers a free migration service that can take some of the headache out of switching.

Kit benefits for your audience

Kit gives you the opportunity to tailor your messaging to your audience. You can have as many forms and landing pages as you want. You can have as many tags, custom fields, and segments as you want. You can be as specific in talking to your audience as you want to be.

As you collect information about your audience, you can start to segment subscribers so you don’t bother people with things they aren’t interested in. Kit makes it easy to collect details about your audience along the way, and you aren’t penalized for that through higher costs, as you would be with a list-based email platform.

Drawbacks of Kit

No solution is perfect, of course. Here are some of the drawbacks we and other Kit users have noticed.

• Moderately steep learning curve. The interface can be a little overwhelming for a beginner. Taking full advantage of all of Kit’s features—like segmentation, tagging, and automations—requires some learning (and potentially coding). You can shorten this learning curve by following their Getting Started video series, as well as the rest of the content on their well-organized support site
• No list-based organization. Although we like the way Kit lets you organize subscribers using tags (and doesn’t charge you for duplicate subscribers, as we mentioned above), the lack of a list-based organization system can be confusing if you’re coming from other platforms. Over time, though, we think you’ll find this system more flexible than managing lists.
• Barebones email and landing page templates. Kit requires CSS coding to create custom advanced email templates and landing pages beyond the included options. Some users report that the email design tool can be buggy.
• Analytics could be more robust. The free and Creator plans don’t offer the same advanced deliverability reporting, subscriber scoring, and analytics features of the Insight feature that the Creator Pro plan offers, which makes sense but may be a bother to some users.

Thankfully, one of the previous drawbacks of Kit, that there was no free option, hasn’t been the case since 2019. This free tier makes Kit comparable at the entry level to other popular ESP options like Mailchimp.

Lastly, this is by no means a drawback, but as Kit continues to expand its offerings to include things like the Creator Network and Kit Commerce to its core email marketing capabilities, there’s a chance that the platform’s value could get spread thin. To be clear, we don’t think this is going to happen and have a lot of confidence in Nathan and the Kit team, but it’s worth keeping in mind.

Our big takeaway on Kit

With the recent updates, Kit is coming closer to being a one-stop shop for creators who want to grow, nurture, and sell to their audiences with a platform that’s largely ready to use and automatable. If you’re looking for your first or next email marketing platform, we think it’s a great solution for growing your audience and increasing your income while retaining creative control over what you put out into the world!

Kit & email marketing: More resources to read, listen & learn

So there you have it—our review of Kit’s email marketing platform! We’ll leave you with a few more resources if you’re curious about Kit, or want to dig further into email marketing.

Kit [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, we receive compensation if you purchase through this link.]

SPI 825: Behind the Scenes of a Major Rebrand & Lessons Learned After a Hard Fail—my conversation with Kit CEO Nathan Barry about setting his company’s sights on more ambitious goals with the rebrand.

What Is Email Marketing? + Best Practices:
An SPI How-to Guide

Email Marketing Magic Course

AP 0712: How Do I Migrate an Email List from AWeber to Kit? – Smart Passive Income

Why I Switched from Aweber to Infusionsoft to ConvertKitI hope this post has been helpful in deciding whether Kit is the right ESP for your business. Whatever email marketing platform you choose, nothing is more important than having the right email marketing strategy, so be sure to check out our essential guide to email marketing and consider the Email Marketing Magic course if you want more hands-on support with your email marketing, available inside the SPI Community. Good luck!

The post Kit Review 2024 appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

If you're running a business, you need an email list. And you need to send great emails, obviously. But if those great emails aren’t making it to people’s inboxes, then what's the point?

If you’ve been putting a lot of hard work into your email marketing but not seeing the results you want, then maybe your email deliverability could use some help. I’m going to share the four key factors that will help make sure more of your emails stay out of spam and land in the inbox.

And if you don’t have an email list yet, this will set you up for success right from the start!

The Four Pillars of Email Deliverability

When it comes to email, it’s all about deliverability. What is email deliverability? The simple definition is the likelihood that your emails are going to end up where you intend—into people's inboxes where they'll actually read them.

You can have the fanciest automations, the best copy, the best upsells, downsells, follow-ups… But if nobody's getting those emails in their inbox, then it's all for nothing.

This is where you’re up against the algorithms of the email giants that control more than 50 percent of the world’s inboxes: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!. You've got to understand what they're looking for—and play by their rules.

The good news is that it's not that difficult to stay on the good side of the algorithms. Anyone can avoid the spam folder as long as they follow a few key guidelines.

There are four main pillars of email deliverability, and they form the acronym RACE:

• Reputation
• Authentication
• Content
• Engagement

Pat and email deliverability expert Adrian Savage covered these four pillars in depth in SPI Podcast session 498:

Reputation

In business, as in everything, reputation matters. If you've got a lousy reputation, no one's going to want to listen to you. 

When it comes to email marketing, you need to focus on what’s known as your sending reputation. 

You see, the big mailbox providers are monitoring the emails you're sending, and most importantly, how people are reacting to them.

The more they see people marking your emails as spam or ignoring or deleting them, the more they're going to mark down your sending reputation. And they’re more likely to send your emails right to the spam folder.

That's the simple version, but it means that everything you do with your email marketing has to be focused on preserving and improving your sending reputation.

How to Improve Your Sending Reputation

So what can you do to improve and maintain your reputation with the big email services?

First, use common sense. If you feel like you’re gaming the system, you probably are—and you’re eventually going to get found out.

A (not so) great example is downloading lists of email addresses from the internet.

The only legitimate way to get ahead now with your email list is to send emails only to people who have specifically asked you to contact them. 

If you buy a list and start emailing people who haven't given you permission, you're much more likely to get spam complaints, which will hurt your sending reputation.

And what’s the only definition of spam that matters in the eyes of the mailbox providers? Whatever the recipient thinks it is. 

There are also businesses out there, like Spamhaus and Cloudmark, that operate email addresses called spam traps. If you send an email to a spam trap address, then you may be added to blocklists that tell the world you’re a low-reputation sender.

If you do decide to buy a list of addresses for some reason, make sure you really trust the person providing the data—it’s much better to control it yourself.

Next, you’ll want to clean your email list regularly. That way, you'll avoid hitting what's called a recycled spam trap.

Here’s how that works.

Suppose 10 years ago you had a Hotmail address that you’d stopped using, and Microsoft canceled your account. For the next few months, if anyone tried to email you, they'd receive an error saying the mailbox didn’t exist. But a few months later, Microsoft might reopen that address and repurpose it to catch senders who weren’t looking after the hygiene of their email list. 

Send enough emails to spam trap addresses, and you’ll end up on a blocklist.

So, only send emails to people who have said they want to hear from you, and keep your email list clean so you don’t get caught in recycled spam traps.

Authentication

Authentication is the second crucial piece of improving your email deliverability. 

It’s all about telling the world that you’re sending legitimate emails. 

You’ve probably received spam from someone spoofing an email address that isn’t theirs. It’s relatively easy to spoof an address you don’t own—what’s not so easy is to authenticate one.

Authentication is what sets you apart from the spammers, and there are two steps you need to take to authenticate your email address.

The good thing is, this is usually a one-time thing you do when you're setting up your email platform. 

The two authentication steps involve a couple of acronyms.

Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM)

The first one is domain keys identified mail, or DKIM. This is how you get your email platform to digitally sign every email that you send. 

You’ll need to look at your platform to determine how exactly to configure DKIM, because they all do it slightly differently. If you’re stuck, then find someone who can help you, because it is probably the most important single thing that will make the difference between hitting the spam folder and hitting the inbox. 

Here’s guidance on setting up DKIM with some of the most popular email service providers (ESPs):

• ConvertKit
• Aweber
• Constant Contact
• HubSpot

Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

The second side of authentication is something called sender policy framework, or SPF.

SPF helps identify which mail servers are allowed to send email on behalf of your domain. This communicates which platforms you trust to send emails on your behalf, which can reduce the incidence of email spoofing—people pretending to send mail as you. Like DKIM, it’s a one-time thing, but crucial.

Doing those two things—setting up your SPF and DKIM settings—is going to make a huge difference in deliverability. And don’t be afraid to seek help if you need it.

Here’s guidance on setting up SPF with the popular ESPs:

• ConvertKit
• Aweber
• Constant Contact
• HubSpot

Content

In the recent past, it was relatively easy to avoid the spam folder by being careful about the content in your emails: don’t use swear words, don’t mention Viagra, and don’t mention “free.”

Today’s spam filters are much more sophisticated, and the big email providers use a ton of artificial intelligence to figure out what’s junk and what’s legit.

In 2005, you might have gotten away with writing “free” as “fr.e–e” in an email, but today that’s a one-way ticket to the spam folder.

Making it to the inbox in 2022 is a lot more about being authentic with your email content. Here, another acronym comes in handy: WILF, which stands for:

• Words
• Images
• Links
• Frequency

Words

Words are important, obviously. And when it comes to email deliverability, it means writing emails the way you’d have a conversation with someone. 

Write like yourself. The more your emails sound like they’ve been coming from you, the more authentic it sounds, the more likely those big sophisticated algorithms are going to recognize it as authentic.

In most cases, shorter is also better. Don't cut it down at the expense of not getting your message across, but don’t waffle unnecessarily. Because, let's face it, people's attention spans are getting shorter.

At the same time, don’t stress too much about content either. There are no hard and fast rules here, and you don't want to follow a rule at the risk of ruining your message.

You can always send a few test emails and see what happens. Just remember, however, that email has evolved, and no two people have exactly the same email experience anymore. The same email might end up in Spongebob's inbox and Squidward's spam folder.

But you can still learn some things by looking at the big picture of what you’re sending over time. If you notice that emails written a certain way are getting delivered more often than others, use that as a data point to guide how to craft your email content going forward.

Images and Links

Here’s where things get even more interesting. To include images or not include images in your emails? And what about links? One? None? Many?

First, remember that there are exceptions to every rule. But in general—and testing bears this out—the more images you've got in an email, the more likely it’s headed to the junk folder. And the same goes for the number of links.

One of the quickest ways for an email to be viewed as a promotion by Google is if it has a graphical banner at the top, because that makes it look like a promo. So just cut to the chase with your message.

If you need images in the middle of the email to reinforce or illustrate things, that's a different story. But only include them if they're going to actually add value, not just for the sake of it. If you can manage three or fewer images in total, perfect.

It’s the same with links: the more you use, the more your email looks like a promotion. One of the biggest mistakes people make is using a bunch of little social media icons in their email signature. Before you know it, you’ve got five additional images with links in your email, you're in the promotions tab.

When it comes to links, also be careful about linking to websites you don't control. You can't always be certain whether the domain you’re linking to has a good domain reputation or not. It’s much better to only link to content that you're in control of—like the stuff on your own website.

Frequency

Finally, there’s frequency. The more frequently you send emails to the people who want to receive them, the better you're going to do. In the good old days, it was sufficient to send an email newsletter out once a month, but these days, mailbox providers are looking for consistency and engagement (which we'll talk about in a second).

The more frequently you send emails to the people that want to read them, the better it's going to look for your engagement. If you're sending out an email three times a week, then you're a lot more likely to reach more of your audience more quickly than if you're sending one email a month. 

That doesn’t mean you need to send an email every day—if you can, then great, if you've got enough to talk about—but the more frequently you can share some really cool value, the more people are going to love you, and more importantly, the more the mailbox providers will love you as well.

Engagement

While authentication is something you set up once and pretty much forget, engagement is something you need to pay attention to on an ongoing basis.

By engagement we're talking about, are people reading your emails? Are they opening them? Are they clicking the links? Are they actually reading them properly? Or are they just deleting it without reading?

One of the worst ways to hurt your engagement is when you send something out, it lands in the spam folder, and no one rescues it.

When someone signs up to your email list for the first time, that may be the only chance you've got to keep your emails out of their spam folder. So direct them to a thank-you page that instructs them to check the spam folder for your first email and move it to their inbox if need be. If they don't, they may never see another email from you in their inbox again.

That's the most important thing.

The other is maximizing the number of people engaging by improving your open rates. Here’s where it’s important to clean your email list regularly, so you’re only sending email to the people who are likely to read it. 

It can be scary to clean your email list regularly—because it means deleting people from your list—but it’s absolutely a great thing to do for your email engagement, and for the health of your email list.

Why? It will show Google and Microsoft and Yahoo! that what you’re sending is of greater interest to your subscribers. The higher they see your open rate, the more likely they are to increase your domain reputation. The better your reputation, guess what? The next email you send is more likely to land in the inbox. It’s a virtuous cycle.

More Email Marketing Resources to Improve Deliverability and More

If you’re just getting started building your email list, the best time to start thinking about and implementing these email deliverability best practices is now.

And if you’ve had a list for a while and things have gotten stagnant, the best time to start is… also now.

If you need more support with your email marketing, you’re in the right place! Here are a few more resources to help you build an audience and create more revenue with a robust email marketing practice:

• SPI 498: Step by Step: How to Make Sure Emails Don't End Up in Spam with Adrian Savage (a deeper dive on the concepts in this post!)
• Our three-part guide to cleaning your email list with ConvertKit: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
• Email Marketing Cheat Sheet
• What is Email Marketing + Best Practices and SPI How-to Guide
• Our Email Marketing Magic Course

The post How to Improve Email Deliverability appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

ConvertKit is now Kit!

Our recommended email service provider has changed their name to Kit. We're working to update our content to reflect this change. In the mean time, you may see us reference the product by either name—please know that our recommendation has not changed. You can read more about the name change here.

Welcome to the thrilling conclusion of our three-part series where we guide you through deleting cold subscribers from your email list. If this feels like a scary decision, fear not! Trust that you’re making a good choice for the health of your email list.

First, a Quick Recap

In the first blog post and video, we walked you through the thought process behind deleting a whole bunch of your email subscribers. In the second post and video, we guided you in setting up the automations and reengagement email sequence to identify the cold subscribers on your list.

In this third post and accompanying video, we’ll show you how to delete the final list of cold subscribers.

We’ll go through the process of looking at and interpreting the results of the reengagement email sequence, and then deleting the people who need to be deleted.

Mindy's video walks you through the process in detail:

Reviewing the Results of the Reengagement Email Sequence

Let’s start by looking at the results of the reengagement email sequence you built in ConvertKit.

Open up your sequence, and you should see something like this:

(You might find a small number of subscribers are “stuck,” and didn’t complete the sequence. Check out this part of Mindy’s video for detail on what to do if that’s the case.)

Next, we’re going to review the reports from the email sequence.

Click on the middle icon in your sequence (Email Maintenance: Cold List Pruning 2021-08 in the screenshot below), and click on Reports at the top. 

Here you can review how your reengagement sequence performed. 

You’ll see a list of the emails in the sequence, as well as their open and clickthrough rates and unsubscribes. You can click on each email to get more detail on how it performed.

Next, click into the individual emails to see the click rates for the incentives you offered in each email. This will tell you whether any incentive performed better than the others, which may be helpful in the future.

In our case, all of the emails’ open rates were very low—all less than 5%. For us, this was validation for undertaking the whole project.

Yes, we could keep these 91,000 people on our email list for vanity's sake because it makes us feel good to have a big list. But we're paying a lot of money for that vanity. And it’s dragging down our engagement. It makes it harder for us to predict how people will react to our emails. And it’s ruining our sending authority with Gmail, Apple Mail, Yahoo! Mail, and other email services.

Deleting vs. Unsubscribing

A side note: What’s the difference between deleting and unsubscribing someone from your list?

The difference between deleting and unsubscribing is that when you unsubscribe someone, they stay searchable in your list of subscribers so you can go back and access their data. When you delete somebody, though, you're removing them entirely, so you won't be able to look them up and see their history with you.

And why are we choosing to delete these subscribers rather than unsubscribe them? 

Perhaps the biggest reason is that ConvertKit doesn’t allow you to bulk-unsubscribe people; you have to do it manually. If your list is large, that would be an onerous task. Deleting subscribers, however, can be automated.

Subscribe to our companion email series for more detail on deleting vs. unsubscribing, including when you want to unsubscribe someone instead of deleting them.

Deleting Your Cold Subscribers—Almost!

Once you’ve reviewed all of the individual emails on the sequence overview report, let’s move on to the deletion process!

A Little Validation Doesn’t Hurt

If you want to make sure you don’t delete somebody who’s asked to stay on your list, Mindy goes over how to do that in her video.

This step helps you identify if you made a mistake anywhere in setting up the sequence. For instance, you might find some subscribers who got tagged to stay on the list, but also got the Email Maintenance: Cold List Pruning Complete tag. If that’s the case, you can make sure people have the correct tags before you move to the deletion step.

Once you’ve done that (or chosen to skip it), you can move on to one more optional step—exporting a backup list of subscribers to delete—before you actually get rid of them.

Backing Up Your List of Deleted Subscribers

This final step is optional, if you want to keep a record of who’s been deleted, just in case. ConvertKit offers the ability to export a CSV file with the names and addresses of those deleted subscribers.

Keep in mind you’re taking on some liability by having a spreadsheet with this information saved on your computer. We recommend only storing the file for a short period, maybe a few months, then deleting it. You also want to be diligent in how you secure the data, so someone can’t access the list if you lose your laptop or get hacked.

How to Exclude Subscribers from Your Backup

You should also consider excluding subscribers in areas with restrictive email marketing rules, such as the European Union, from your export list. Thankfully, ConvertKit makes it easy to do this by creating a segment and excluding it from the export.

1. Create a new segment and name it.
2. Under Select your subscribers, add the list of people subscribed to the Email Maintenance: Cold List Pruning Complete tag.
3. Add another filter Matching none of the following.
4. Select Within a country or region and type European Union.
5. Click Save.

Now you can export your backup list!

Once the list loads, check the Subscriber box in the top left to select everyone, go to Bulk Actions, and select Export.

ConvertKit will email you a CSV. If you're exporting a large list, it will take a while. Do not move on to the next step until you receive that CSV. 

Deleting Your Cold Subscribers—Finally!

Here we are—the final step! Once the CSV arrives, it’s time to delete those subscribers. 

You may feel some trepidation, but that’s okay. You know that you’re doing the right thing for the health of your email list.

1. Open your list of subscribers tagged for removal.
2. Check the Subscriber box in the top left to select everyone.
3. Click the link below the Subscriber checkbox to select the entire segment.
4. Go to Bulk Actions, and select Delete.
5. Fill out the form to confirm you want to delete these subscribers.

This process is going to take a while. This is a “start at the end of the day and walk away” sort of process. 

Once it’s done, reach out to ConvertKit to let them know you've deleted a substantial number of your subscribers. This will help them make sure that your bill is properly recalculated.

Congratulations! You have made a healthy choice for your email list, weighing performance over vanity. It’s not an easy choice to make, but it’s the right one. And remember, we have a companion email series that will provide you with extra support through this process! Access it at smartpassiveincome.com/cold.

The post Deleting Cold Subscribers from Your Email List Using ConvertKit appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

ConvertKit is now Kit!

Our recommended email service provider has changed their name to Kit. We're working to update our content to reflect this change. In the mean time, you may see us reference the product by either name—please know that our recommendation has not changed. You can read more about the name change here.

This is the second in our series of blog posts where we’ll take you along with us as we detail the process of cleaning our email list. In our case, this meant deleting a full 40% of subscribers from our list. 

In the previous blog post (and accompanying video), we explained the why behind pruning your email list. The short version is that it makes financial sense, by reducing the cost of maintaining a large list, and it can help boost your email sending authority.

In the long run, trimming your email list is going to be beneficial as well. By deleting subscribers who have not engaged with your content in the last six months or more, you end up with a more engaged audience.

You do that with a reengagement email sequence, and in this post I'll walk you through how to create one in ConvertKit.

Trust But Verify: How to Make Sure People Are “Cold” Subscribers

Before you go ahead and delete a bunch of subscribers, you need to make sure these people are truly not engaging with your content. Why? Because your email service provider isn’t foolproof, and it may not be able to tell with absolute certainty.

For instance, somebody could be opening and reading every email you send, but that information might not be making its way back into your email service provider (ESP). And some subscribers who aren’t reading your emails could just use a reminder—a gentle kick in the pants—of what they’re missing out on.

So today we’re going to cover how to set up a reengagement email sequence that gives cold subscribers an opportunity to reengage with your content.

In this post, we’ll go through all of the automations we have set up to do this in our ESP of choice, ConvertKit.

Creating a reengagement sequence can feel complicated, even overwhelming. I highly recommend reading the high-level overview in this post, then watching Mindy’s video on the topic, which provides just the right level of detail on the process. 

She shares a closer look at the email copy and automations we use for this sequence.

Here are the high-level steps of the process.

1. Identify everyone who may be a cold subscriber.
2. Set up an automation that will send a series of emails to these subscribers asking if they still want to be subscribed.
3. Write the emails in your reengagement sequence.
4. Create a second automation that keeps people on your list if they say they want to stay.

We'll cover the process of actually deleting your cold subscribers in the third post in this series. For now, let’s go over the four steps above in a little more detail!

Step 1: Identify Your Cold Subscribers

You first need to assemble the list of likely cold subscribers that you want to run through the automation.

Here are the steps to do that in ConvertKit.

1. Go to the Subscribers tab and create a new segment.
2. Under “Select your subscribers,” set “Matching any/all/none of the following” to “any” and click “Add a filter.”
3. Select “Engagement score,” set the minimums stars to 1 and maximum stars to 3, and click “Add Filter.”

Selecting subscribers between 1 and 3 stars lets us capture people who are less engaged in our email content.

Once you click Add Filter, you’ll see the number of subscribers who fit those criteria.

Hit Save on your new segment—we’ll come back to it in a little bit!

Step 2: Set Up an Automation to Run Your Reengagement Email Sequence

This is where we set up our automation.

Click on Automate at the top of the ConvertKit window and create a new automation that will be kicked off when a tag is added. We created a tag called “Email Maintenance: Cold List Pruning” that, when we add it to a subscriber, will enter them in our automation.

It’s a pretty simple automation, with just a couple of steps:

The first step is an email sequence. Everyone who completes that sequence will get a tag added to their profile called “Email Maintenance: Cold List Pruning Complete.”

These are the subscribers who make it all the way through the sequence without opting out—which means they're truly cold.

Let's dig into the emails in that sequence!

Step 3: Write the Emails in Your Reengagement Sequence

Our sequence is four emails sent over the course of two weeks.

There are different ways to approach building it. One strategy looks something like this:

• Email 1: “Hey! We’re going to unsubscribe you in 2 weeks.”
• Email 2: “Hey! We’re going to unsubscribe you in 10 weeks.”
• Email 3: “Hey! We’re going to unsubscribe you in 1 week.”
• Email 4: “Hey! We’re going to unsubscribe you in 1 day.”

You could do it that way—but we chose not to.

Instead, we crafted our reengagement sequence to share a ton of value and show people what they’ll be missing out on if they leave our list.

If they’re still not interested in staying after seeing the best of what we have to offer, then we know they’re not a good fit for us.

That’s why we decided to make the first three emails in our sequence as compelling as possible. 

And if the reader doesn’t take action and decide to stay after reading those three emails, then it’s best that we part ways.

Check out Mindy’s video to get a sneak peek at the emails. And if you want the full copy of all the emails in the sequence, go to smartpassiveincome.com/cold, where you can download them. You’ll also get access to the automation we used to drop into your own ConvertKit account, and links to resources for more reading on pruning cold subscribers.

In a nutshell, here’s what those emails look like:

• Email 1 invites them to a free audience-building event.
• Email 2 provides a bunch of free downloads (our best lead magnets).
• Email 3 offers access to a free course.
• Email 4 tells them they’ll be deleted tomorrow if they don’t take action.

Each email provides a way for the subscriber to stay subscribed. For the first three emails, it’s by registering for the event, downloading one of the lead magnets, or signing up for the course. 

Each email has a button that when clicked, keeps the subscriber on our list. Let’s go over how we set that up.

Step 4: Create a Second Automation That Keeps People on Your List

Next, we created a ConvertKit tag called “Email Maintenance: Stay on List.” If the reader clicks any of the links in the four emails, this tag will be added to their profile and they’ll be removed from the sequence. Cold no longer!

We do this with a second automation that removes the person from the sequence when the tag is added.

When you set up the link in each email, click “Tag subscribers who click this link” and select the “Email Maintenance: Stay on List” tag.

That’s the basic approach to building your reengagement email sequence! Mindy’s video will walk you through everything you need to set up and publish all four emails and push your sequence live.

Get the Exact Emails We Use to Reengage Cold Subscribers

We know that this process can feel scary and counterintuitive. You worked hard to get these people on your email list, and now you're just going to delete them?

That’s why we've put together an email series as a companion to these blog posts and videos that gives you more information about what goes into your reengagement email sequence. We give you the copy we use in the four emails to edit and use as you see fit, as well as links to ConvertKit automations you can add to your account.

Just go to smartpassiveincome.com/cold to grab all of that at no cost.

In the next and final blog post in this series, we’ll go over the results of the reengagement email sequence and how to delete the cold subscribers left after you’ve run everyone through the sequence.

The post How to Create a Reengagement Campaign for Cold Email Subscribers & Automate It appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

ConvertKit is now Kit!

Our recommended email service provider has changed their name to Kit. We're working to update our content to reflect this change. In the mean time, you may see us reference the product by either name—please know that our recommendation has not changed. You can read more about the name change here.

Late last year, we decided to delete 40 percent of our email subscribers. That’s approximately 90,000 people who’ll probably never get an email from us again. Why on earth did we do this? Today, I'll share the four key reasons—they might help you decide if cleaning your email list makes sense for you and your business.

This is the first in a three-part series on cleaning your email list using ConvertKit. Here's part 2 and part 3.

It’s Cold Out There (If You’re Not Reading Our Emails)

When I talk about deleting 40 percent of our email list, I don’t just mean a random 40 percent. This was a targeted trimming—we were focused on a set of subscribers we call our cold subscribers.

+ =

These were the people who hadn’t taken any action on our emails in a while. How long? In our case, we’ll refer to the dashboard of the email list management tool we use, ConvertKit.

ConvertKit uses a star rating system to score each person on your list. Here’s a breakdown of that scoring system:

• = Subscribers who have not engaged with your content in the past 9 months.
• = Subscribers who have engaged with your content in the past 9 months.
• = Subscribers who have engaged with your content in the past 6 months.
• = Subscribers who have engaged with your content in the past 90 days.
• = Subscribers who have engaged with your content in the past 30 days, or purchased one of your products.

Five-star subscribers are great, while one-star subscribers are not great.

You can see how our email audience broke down across these five categories in this screenshot of our ConvertKit dashboard.

We had a lot of highly engaged subscribers—that’s great! But also a lot of unengaged ones.

And so we decided to prune out the one-star subscribers, the ones who aren’t reading emails or taking action on our content.

Now, sometimes your email service provider's indication of whether someone is active or not can be inaccurate. We'll get to that toward the end of this post.

But first…

The Four Reasons We Decided to Clean Our Email List

Let's talk about the four main reasons we decided to prune cold subscribers from our email list, and why you might want to too.

#1: They were costing us money

First of all, we are paying for every subscriber on our list. That means the more subscribers we have, the more it’s costing us.

If we have a lot of subscribers sitting on our email list but not taking any action, essentially we're paying for them to not read our emails!

To be honest, that just doesn't sound like a great use of our money. So if these subscribers aren’t going to read our emails anyway, let's not include them on our list any longer.

#2: They were decreasing our open rates

Another reason we might want to prune our subscribers is that inactive list members are decreasing our email open rates.

Your open rate gives you a general sense of how many people are engaging with your email content.

What’s a good email open rate? It depends. The range across industries tends to be between 15 and 30 percent, and the average is usually around 20 percent. And what’s a good open rate for you depends, not surprisingly, on your business and your unique goals. 

Let's go back to that dashboard and look at SPI’s open rates before we cleaned our email list.

The average open rate across all of our emails was a little less than 18 percent. 

Again, this may or may not represent a low open rate for you and your business—but for us, it told us that we could be doing better.

Now there are a lot of factors that can affect your email open rate. And there are things that can make your open rate misleading. But as a rough measure of the health of our email list, 18 percent was a little lower than we wanted it to be.

#3: They were hurting our sending reputation

The third reason we care about cold subscribers and whether or not people are actually reading our emails is because they affect our sending reputation. Say what?

Sending reputation (or sender reputation) is a broad term for how email clients like Gmail judge us as a trustworthy email-sending entity (or not).

When an email comes in from our domain, is the receiver’s email client going to flag it as spam, or send it to the top of the inbox? Does it think the email is something the subscriber wants to read? Or is it going to shuttle it into the Promotions tab?

The more of our emails that get sent right to the inbox, the more they’ll get read. This will improve our sending reputation, which means that future emails are also more likely to make it to the inbox. It’s a positive feedback loop we want to feed.

But if emails are getting ignored, unsubscribed from, or marked as spam, then our sending reputation is going to suffer.

That’s another reason we want people on our email list to actually, you know, want to read our emails—and not let them flounder in their inbox, or worse, click unsubscribe or flag them as junk.

Sending reputation is a bit of a complicated situation, so check out ConvertKit’s Deliverability Defined podcast for more information for a deeper study of your sending authority and what that all means.

#4: They were (probably) not interested in hearing from us

The fourth reason—and it’s an important one—is that we don't want to bother people who aren’t interested in getting our emails.

In SPI’s case, if somebody was interested in our content nine months ago, but then decided not to start an online business, we don't want to keep bugging them. There’s no reason to keep sending emails that are just going to stack up in their inbox.

So we can do them (and us) a kindness and unsubscribe them.

Are They Actually Cold Subscribers? It’s Worth Checking

So those are the four reasons we decided to prune out the cold subscribers from the SPI email list—and why you might want to do the same.

But before you go ahead and remove a bunch of people from your list, there’s one more important step you should consider. It gets to the question of whether or not those “cold” subscribers are actually cold.

You see, for any given subscriber, that designation might or might not be accurate. Your email service provider can’t always determine without a shadow of a doubt that an email has been read, for instance. Email is complicated!

That’s why it can be worth it to check with your subscribers first before booting them from your list. You can do this with a reengagement campaign—a series of emails that gives subscribers a chance to verify if they actually want to stick around before you give them the boot.

Want to Clean Your Email List? Let Us Help

If this whole process of identifying cold subscribers and running reengagement campaigns is starting to sound kind of complicated, have no fear.

Help with Cleaning Your Email List: The Video Series

Our three-video series on cleaning your email list covers everything you need to know and how to go about cleaning your email list.

Even More Help with Cleaning Your Email List: The Email Series

If you want even more support, check out SmartPassiveIncome.com/cold, where you can sign up to receive our three-part companion email series. 

This series includes:

• All the email copy we used in our reengagement sequence
• The ability to copy the automation into your own ConvertKit account
• Links to more resources on pruning cold subscribers

We’ll be talking more about email deliverability here on the blog later this year. In the meantime, we invite you to check out a few more handy resources:

• The SPI Email Marketing Best Practices and How-To Guide—everything you need to know to get started with email marketing
• ConvertKit’s guide to email deliverability—learn how to land your emails in the inbox
• Our unbiased review of ConvertKit
• Try ConvertKit (affiliate link)

The post Time to Clean Your Email List? Why We Deleted 40% of Our Subscribers appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

You're on the right page if you know you need to know how to start an email list and you want to get it done the right way—and fast.

After this step-by-step tutorial, you'll have an email list up and running, an autoresponder sequence laid out and ready to go, and even learn some more advanced stuff that'll help you stand out from your competitors, too.

Looking back at the first business I created back in 2008, not having an email list was like shooting myself in the foot. It was a huge mistake, because I sold products, but had no way of letting people—interested people —know that they existed.

Even here, on Smart Passive Income, I didn't collect my first email address until 1.5 years after I started the blog. Big mistake—and I made it twice!

That’s exactly what I want to help you with in this tutorial, because you need an email list so that you can grow your business, or even start one if you're right at the beginning stages of your online business journey.

Keep reading, and then get ready to take some notes, and take some action, too!

Contents

• What is an email list?
• Why email list building is essential
• First, find the best email service provider
• Email list building step by step video tutorials
• 25 pro tips on how to build an email list
• Mailing list growth do’s and don’ts
• Email list building tools
• Your mailing list questions answered: AskPat on email list building
• Grow your email list to the next level

What is an email list?

Put simply, an email list is a collection of subscribers who choose to receive content and updates from you via, you guessed it, email.

Sometimes people call email lists “subscribers lists” or “mailing lists.”

You can start an email list or grow your existing email list in several ways that we’ll cover later on.

First, let’s take a look at why email list building is essential for your online business.

Why email list building is essential

As much as email might seem like an internet marketing dinosaur, email marketing to this day brings the highest return on investment (ROI) for many businesses in the US according to the Direct Marketing Association.

For every $1 spent on email marketing, the average expected return is $42. 

Regardless of the size of your business, prospects on an email list are vital for successful marketing campaigns. 

Using the right email marketing software, you can get useful information such as email open rate, click-through rate and conversion rate to help you get real, data-driven insights into what works best for your business and audience.

Although a solid ROI is a great enough reason for me to recommend you adopt email list marketing, there are a few additional reasons why email list building is essential:

Email is personal

An email lands you directly in your audience members’ inboxes. There’s no ranking system or opaque algorithms here that limits your reach.

Email marketing is a direct and personal approach to communicating with your existing audience and potential customers.

Email is purposeful

People join your email list because they are interested in hearing directly from you.

You probably have them double opt-in to join as well (since you’re not building a spam list), and anyone doing that much work is definitely among the most interested in getting as much value from you as possible. 

Email is targeted

Especially if you layer in sophisticated tagging and segmenting into distinct lists and groups, email marketing allows you to have a clear idea of what different parts of your audience like based on what free downloads they’ve grabbed, what pages they’ve come from, what products they’ve purchased, etc.

This allows you to deliver highly relevant offers to get better results if you spend the time to think about and cater to their different needs.

Your email list is your own

Unlike Facebook page likes, Twitter followers, or Goggle visitors, you own the contact information in your email list.

Sometimes past social media growth campaigns and SEO efforts can go from very successful to completely shut down overnight when those platforms change their policies.

With a list of emails you’re in charge of, you’re business becomes sheltered from the changing winds of third party’s Terms of Service.

Email is a must-have for most people

There are a ton of eye-popping statistics for the number of monthly active users and total levels of engagement on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.

It’s not so easy to find stats for the number of people who use email every day, but we know just from our personal experiences living in the modern world that essentially everyone on the internet has an email address since they’re needed for any platform that requires creating an account and logging in.

In a recent study by Radicati, it was found that there are around 3.8 billion active email accounts.

That’s about half of the population on Earth, and having the potential to talk to half the planet this is why most smart business owners have an email list.

Download the FREE Email Marketing Cheat Sheet

You have your email list set up, but what should your emails say? The Email Marketing Cheat Sheet teaches you exactly what to send to your list, including 10 cut-and-paste-templates for the different types of emails your audience will look forward to.

That one time my email list saved the day

In March 2013 I was in San Francisco shooting promotional video for my book, Let Go, when hackers took my website down—for an entire week. I couldn’t log in to the site. Everyone who came to the site got an error screen, and the only way I could communicate with my audience was through my email list.

The email list I had built literally saved my business for a week. I was able to keep my audience up to date, I shared podcast episodes and YouTube videos that were coming, and kept my business up and running even though my blog was completely out of commission.

Your email list is a huge asset and the experience of not being able to use my main communication tool—my blog—hammered home the benefits of having a solid email list.

How creating an email list has helped me serve others

Since 2010 when I first started my email list, I’ve learned so much. Here are a few fun facts about my email list, and how it has been crucial for my business—and how it can be crucial for yours too:

• I’ve grown my email list to 200,000+ email addresses.
• Email has helped me discover the top pains and problems of my audience, which can then be used to craft content and product ideas to help alleviate those pains and problems.
• A single broadcast email once helped me earn over $60k in affiliate earnings.
• More than $1,000,000 in total earnings can be directly attributed to my email list.
• Email lists have proven to be versatile for driving new traffic to SPI by promoting new posts, and also resurfacing older posts. They also let me send out notifications when I add new information to an older post.
• Automated follow-up sequences have allowed me to serve my audience with additional content that allows me to keep in contact with people over time so that I end up with higher open and click through rates.
• My email segments let me send updates directly to the people on my list I know will be interested in a particular product or post, and skip notifying people who I know aren't ready for it yet.

First, find the best email service provider

Now, you may be thinking, “Why do I even need an email service provider? I’ve got a Gmail account and can just send emails to my friends and family that way.”

Here’s the thing: don’t send bulk business emails to your list through your free email service. Not only will you be breaking email marketing opt-in laws, you’ll also have no real way to grow your list.

When considering an email service provider, you’ll want to make sure you can:

• Build a database of subscribers
• Send emails to several people at the same time
• Setup automated follow-up sequences
• Place signup forms on your website and landing pages
• Tag or segment your users

Signing on with an email service provider (ESP) that’s built specifically to help you manage and grow your list is incredibly important and, in my opinion, ConvertKit is the way to go. I use it currently, and it’s especially friendly to those just starting out. [Full disclosure: I am a compensated advisor and affiliate for ConvertKit.]

Also, they're offering a 30-day free trial if you get started today!

You can use the strategies and tactics you learn in this tutorial with any ESP; however I’ve personally experimented with a lot of different ESPs over the years, and I recommend ConvertKit to you because it's the one that has everything I need to grow my business, while still being very intuitive and easy to use.

You can read more about my choice to switch over to ConvertKit (from two other providers) here in this post.

As I mentioned above, I want full disclosure here: I am a compensated advisor and an affiliate for ConvertKit, but that's because I believe it is the best email product on the market for online businesses. Here are just a few reasons why I love it:

• The platform is well designed and extremely easy to use. The names of the tools are clear and easy to understand: forms, automations, sequences, broadcasts, subscribers.
• Emails are delivered reliably and as expected.
• Their customer service team is super helpful, and they have 24 hour online chat available (a feature my team uses often when we have questions).
• The autoresponder sequences are easy to implement.
• It comes with powerful tagging and segmentation features.
• Visual automations make it easy to create complex “if this, then that” rules.
• It’s extremely easy to make changes and updates. For example, if you decide to change a tag’s name, that name automatically updates everywhere you’re using the tag.

Now, let’s get to the tutorial videos! These videos are a completely free resource for you, and they walk you through the process of setting up your list, step-by-step, right from the start.

Here’s what we’ll be covering, video-by-video:

• How to setup your list and place an opt-in form on your website.
• How to start getting email subscribers, including information about creating “lead magnets.”
• Advanced strategies people are using to scale the list building process.
• I'll show you ho to create a winning autoresponder series.
• How to send broadcast emails that get opened and clicked.
• How to start segmenting and tagging your email list so you can learn even more about your subscribers.

Let’s begin!

Email list building step by step video tutorials

25 pro tips on how to build an email list

How to build an email list using email

1. Create unique content

Emails that are entertaining, informative and uniquely valuable are naturally going to be a hit with your subscribers, as they’ll look forward to receiving emails from you and be inspired to share the content with others.

When you work hard to incorporate something special into each and every email you send, word of mouth exposure through recommendations by your existing audience is just a click of the “Forward” button away.

2. Make it easy for subscribers to share and forward your emails

Try to include social sharing buttons on your marketing emails and encourage current subscribers to share and forward your emails.

When they do, you’ll gain direct access to their friends, family, colleagues and networks to grow your email list.

3. Use segmented campaigns

Marketers who use segmented campaigns see as much as a 760% increase in revenue according to Campaign Monitor.

Why?

Because an email recipient is more likely to read an email that speaks to their specific needs, wants, and desires.

That’s why smart email marketers segment their list by products people buy, pages people have visited, which form they opted in from – anything that connects a subgroup within your list to a distinct form of value you can provide.

4. Breathe some life into an old email list

If you have an older email list that is almost dying, now’s the time to breathe some new life into it by creating a fresh, engaging re-opt-in message.

Encourage the people on the list to re-opt in and promise to remove all contacts who don’t respond.

It may not sound like a good idea to remove people from your list when you’re trying to grow it, but, emailing contacts that re-opt in can improve your deliverability and increase the odds of the email being shared with those outside your current subscriber base.

How to create an email list fast with new content

5. Create bonus content and lead-generation offers

Creating enticing offers like a free ebook or cheat sheet to include on dedicated landing pages or relevant blog posts is the number one way I and most others have grown our email lists.

Give visitors to your site a compelling reason to trade their email address with you and you’ll find your subscriber count rising in no time.

6. Create a free online tool or resource that requires users to sign up

A more sophisticated version of the above is to create some sort of free online tool that makes life easier for those who visit your website.

You can ask for an email address upfront or do like my friend Neil Patel does with his Ubersuggest SEO tool and let people use a limited version tool first, then sign up with their email address to get the full suite.

How to make an email list via social media

7. Host a free giveaway

Know of a cool product or service your audience would love to have for free?

Give it away as a giveaway prize to those who participate by going to your website and signing up by providing their email addresses. Facebook and Instagram even allow you to include forms right inside their apps to make this even easier.

Just be aware that this can add a lot of not-so-interested people to your list since some people will sign up just for the freebie.

8. Create a social media-specific lead gen offer 

Building a specific social media campaign around an ebook or other free resource can help grow your email list.

Think about those who are just at the beginning stages of solving the kinds of problems you help people with struggle with the most and craft an offer around that.

Then promote the heck out of it on all your channels by sending people to a special landing page that just requires them to trade their email for all that juicy value.

How to grow your email list using Facebook

9. Make a banner promoting your newsletter your cover photo

Facebook profile cover photos are great to call attention to something you care about – your newsletter included!

Just be sure your banner is high resolution, easy to understand in a second or two (not too much text), and clearly communicates the value you offer.

10. Place a CTA button at the top of your Facebook Business page

If you haven’t already, be sure to add a CTA button to your Facebook Business page that takes users to a landing page offering your free tool or resource in exchange for an email list sign-up.

11. Share previews of your newsletter on your feed

Create posts that showcase small snippets of the value you offer in your newsletter.

This is a great way to pique interest and get your audience to join your mailing list while also enabling you to leverage content you’ve already worked hard to create!

Grow your email list using YouTube

12. Take advantage of YouTube’s engagement features

Youtube offers creators various engagement tools that encourage viewers to take additional action after watching a video.

One such tool is a video outro that either tells viewers to click over to your website or to watch more videos on your channel.

The main goal here is to generate additional engagement and value for your business, so it makes sense to add links to relevant videos or a special landing page on your website offering a relevant downloadable or guide.

13. Use headers and images to promote your newsletter

Place a link to your newsletter sign-up landing page in your Youtube channel header.

This image is front and center on your profile and isn’t easily missed, so placing a key CTA link here calls a lot of attention to your best offer.

14. Promote your emails in your video descriptions

Youtube video descriptions should include details and keywords related to your video content to give viewers an idea of what to expect and help you rank in YouTube’s search engine.

But you can also promote your other social channels and value channels here with mentions and links – email lists included!

Grow your email list using Instagram

15. Include a CTA in your Instagram bio

Your Instagram bio is a great place for your audience to find information about you and your business.

Add a CTA in your bio that grabs attention and include a link to your email sign-up form.

16. Share posts that get users to click on the CTA in your bio

Share posts dealing with content that your audience is interested in and try to get them to click on the CTA in your bio.

If you offer products, you can post about how to use the product and then promise to deliver more information if they click on the link in your bio and sign up.

Or when you’ve got a juicy new piece of content in your latest email, tease it in a post then tell your followers they’ll get the full details if only they sign up for your email list.

17. Use the swipe up feature to share your signup page

Instagram Business profiles with more than 10K followers can add a clickable link to their stories, which is the perfect spot to place a link to your standard sign-up page or another offer that requires an email address.

18. Add an email button to your business profile

Adding an email button to your business profile is a more direct way to collect the emails of your followers by giving customers a chance to reach out for support or to ask questions.

Once satisfied you can send them a “want to join my email list” follow-up to keep growing!

Grow your email list using LinkedIn

19. Share links to your sign-up page in your conversations

Share links to your sign-up pages after having a conversation with members of your audience on LinkedIn

This way you’re giving customers a chance to continue the conversation and interaction

Links can be placed in InMail messages, comment threads or personal one-on-one messages.

20. Talk about your email newsletter

Don’t forget to post snippets on your email newsletter on LinkedIn!

Let your audience know that if they sign up, they’ll unlock more value from you by getting access to your best info.

21. Publish links to gated offers

Share posts containing high-quality information that your audience can benefit from, right on LinkedIn and encourage them to sign up for more on the topic or special offers.

You can also post links in relevant LinkedIn group discussions (just make sure your offer is in line with the topic or issue being discussed and that the group is okay with relevant promotional links).

How to build an email list for free with your website

22. Ask visitors for feedback on your content

Those who are most passionate about the topics you cover love to discuss them.

Obviously comment sections of blogs are a go-to for this, but you can also include the occasional “email me your thoughts” Call to Action to create a stronger connection with your audience and build your email list!

23. Create short lead-capturing forms

It may be tempting to create lead-capturing forms to collect as much information as possible, but adding too many fields on the form can create too much friction and reduce your lead captures.

If you don’t absolutely need more, try to create short forms with just 2 or 3 fields like name, email, and message.

Once you’ve gotten the conversation started in their inbox, you can collect more later if needed.

24. Add links to offers that collect email addresses

Be sure to place CTAs on relevant pages and posts of your website that link to special offers that visitors can benefit from if they sign up.

Secret ninja hack: your About page is a great place for your best offer as it gets a lot of traffic from the people most interested in you!

25. Include testimonials with your subscription forms

Ask your existing subscribers to share what they love most about your content, then post the best ones on your sign-up page and in your subscription forms.

This will give potential subscribers a better sense of the genuine value you offer and make them a lot more comfortable sharing their inbox with you.

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Mailing list growth do’s and don’ts

It's not about the money, it's about the people

Before we get into the meat of the tutorial here, a couple of things:

1. Thanks for reading through this, because seriously—most people miss this stuff and it's so important for your long-term success in email marketing.
2. So many people in the online business space will tell you that “The money is in the list.” While that’s not entirely untrue, I happen to think that it’s just a small (but still important) part of the picture.

You see, I believe that the money is in the list because that’s where the people are. That may seem obvious, but let’s break it down a little bit more.

When you create an email list, you’re allowing a group of fellow human beings to come together in one place where they expect to hear from you. You have a huge opportunity—responsibility, even—to provide value to them. When someone essentially says, “Hey, I like you enough to give you my email address,” you owe it to them to offer up everything you can to ensure that they make progress, stay informed, or are entertained.

It’s not all about money and it’s not all about the numbers, either.

I have so many people reach out and tell me that they feel discouraged with their small email lists. But, since we’ve already established that these are actual human beings, I like to take a much more visual approach. When you think about the 50 or 100 people on your list, think about having that many people in a single room to hear you speak. They’ve all shown up to hear whatever it is you have to say.

It can be frightening to think about, right? But that is exactly how I think email lists should be treated. When you think about it this way, you can begin treating your email list more like people in a room who are there waiting to hear what you have to say and, ultimately, continually deciding if you and the information you provide is still worth being in the room for. This approach will help you craft effective emails, build trust, and remember to treat your list with respect.

And, if generating an income is one of your goals, you’re likely to do very well.

Do provide lots of ways to opt-in

Make it easy for people to subscribe to your email list from as many pages on your site as make sense.

An easy way to do this is to include a form in your website’s footer so people who care most about your content (aka they make it to the bottom of a page) will have the opportunity to get more from you – wherever they may be in their journey through your content.

Don’t send emails without permission 

All email marketing should be opt-in, permission-based.

Don’t buy email lists and never dump a list of contacts you get from outside of your opt-in forms into your newsletter list without first sending an opt-in email.

Failing to do the above is a quick way to end up in spam folders and potentially end up blacklisted by the best email marketing services.

Do give subscribers a way out

Related to the above, give your subscribers an easy way to opt out of receiving your emails with an Unsubscribe link in each and every piece you send.

Not only is this critical for ensuring you’re only landing in the inboxes of people who really find value in what you offer (which is the ethical way to treat email marketing), it’s also essential for avoiding getting your domain flagged as a source of spam – which can lead to reduced deliverability and even getting kicked off of your email marketing platform.

Don’t discourage replies

Email communication from entrepreneurs like you should always feel personal and approachable to build the best relationship possible with your audience.

Don’t make your audience feel like you’re some mega corporation that’s cold and impersonal by using an email address like donotreply@yourcompanyname.com. Instead send your emails from yourname@yourwebsite.com and ask for replies at least every once in a while to keep your relationship growing!

Email list building tools

Wondering what cool software you can use to help automate your email list growth?

Here are a few top email list-building tools to further help you build a solid email marketing list.

Email marketing software tools

1. Klaviyo

Klaviyo is an email service provider designed to cater specifically to eCommerce businesses. 

Their services include A/B testing, list segmentation, intuitive marketing automation and others.

Klaviyo also offers a wide range of integrations with some of the biggest eCommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce to affiliate marketing platforms, social media channels, etc, designed to boost email opt-in rates.

2. Omnisend

Omnisend is another automated marketing platform for eCommerce.

They have a wide array of features to help build email lists including popups, landing pages, static forms, and more.

All the forms are fully customizable so you can collect other bits of information like phone numbers and SMS opt-in consent.

3. MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the top names in email marketing with a ton of features you can take advantage of when building your email list.

They offer complete customization and personalization of the emails that you send out, and include easy segmentation features as well so subscribers can be categorized into relevant campaigns based on their behavior.

4. ConvertKit

My go to email marketing tool (and an affiliate partner of mine) is ConverKit.

Built specifically for online content creators and businesses, their super easy to use suite of tools is perfect for musicians, authors, podcasters, and coaches looking to build a connection through through their email lists – without having to spend a ton of time learning to use their email marketing software.

Check out my full ConvertKit review here!

Landing page builders

5. Leadpages

Landing pages that are specifically designed to drive email opt-in rates are effective in growing your email list.

Leadpages is a top landing page builder that offers several newsletter sign-up templates designs to increase opt-in rates.

Their templates consist of interactive elements like countdown times, social proof, etc and they offer detailed analytics reports with real-time conversion optimization tips to help you maximize your conversion rates.

6. Instapage

Instapage is another landing page builder with over 100 optimized page templates – including email subscription pages.

Their simple drag and drop builder makes it easy to add items like buttons, headlines, images, videos and various forms to your pages to customize your offers and optimize your conversion rates.

Online survey and quiz builders

7. Typeform

Interactive content is a great way to boost lead generation efforts, which is where survey software like Typeform comes in.

Their web-based platform that specializes in providing interactive content whether it’s online form building, online surveys and quizzes – all without writing a single line of code.

And of course, they integrate with email marketing software and CRMs so you can tie your quizzes and surveys into your existing email subscriber lists.

8. Outgrow

Outgrow is an interactive content creation tool you can use to build online quizzes, polls, surveys, calculators and more.

Contests and giveaway apps

9. Rafflecopter

Rafflecopter is a unique mailing list-building tool that is focused on creating contests and giveaways on your website, social media, and email lists.

This email list-building tool include custom theme designs, email platform integrations and the ability to track metrics like the number of entries coming from all of your social media platforms.

Giveaways can be a great way to collect emails for your list since it’s common to ask for an email in exchange for entry.

Just be aware that you’ll get a lot of freebie chasers who aren’t really interested in your content if you promote your giveaway too far outside of your existing audience.

Overlay and pop-up shops

10. Sumo

Sumo is a free, super easy-to-use pop-up email capture tool used on over 906,350 sites.

Fully customizable, analytics included, ecommerce ready – Sumo’s a great, easy place to start if you want to experiment with email capture pop-ups without spending a ton of time messing with tools.

11. HelloBar

HelloBar is another pop-up tool that can help speed up the growth of your email list by allowing you to create exit-intent popups, timed popups, floating sign bars and others.

Ecommerce retailers can benefit greatly from these to recapture visitor attention by offering exclusive discounts, access to presales, etc.

HelloBar also provides access to a team of copywriters that can help review your website’s goals and suggest optimizations geared towards increasing your conversion rates.

12. Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads is an email list-building tool that offers ten types of signup forms including traditional options like embedded and inline form as well as Screen Filler Overlays, Content Locks and Scroll Mats.

The latter cover the entire page to remove any distractions so visitors' attention can be focused on taking action like subscribing.

Thrive Leads also includes a dashboard that reports important metrics so you can track the performance of your campaigns right inside your WordPress Dashboard.

Your mailing list questions answered: AskPat on email list building

The first 1000 episodes of the AskPat Podcast featured lots of questions on email list building. I am featuring many of those questions here because I think they’re issues you’re likely to encounter as you work through the advice above.

Promise me one thing: when you hit a question or a problem, you won’t let it stop you. Questions will come up. A great place to ask those questions is in the Smart Passive Income Community Facebook group. This closed Facebook group is made up of both new and established online entrepreneurs from the SPI audience. It’s welcoming and supportive—the perfect place to find help to keep you moving.

AP 0062: How do you get people from Facebook into your email list?

AP 0073: Email Marketing: How often should you send an email to your email list?

AP 0128: Is it worth starting an email list, even though I don’t have many visitors?

AP 0463: Why aren’t people subscribing to my email list?

AP 0574: I’m a musician. How can I grow my email list?

AP 0608: What should I do when my competitor joins my email list?

AP 0651: What content do I send to my podcast’s email list?

AP 0684: Should I worry about spam bots filling my email list?

AP 0800: How should I reach out to my audience to start growing my email list?

AP 0880: Is it better to have people find your email list organically or to use pop-ups?

Grow your email list to the next level

As my dear friend Amy Porterfield says, “The energy of your business is directly tied to your email list.”

Don't make the same mistakes I made. I recommend downloading the Email Marketing Cheat Sheet, my free ebook designed to make sure you never run out of email ideas.

The Email Marketing Cheat Sheet is designed to give you valuable insights into building a strong email practice. You’ll receive:

• A playbook designed to help you write ten different styles of emails.
• Advice on when to send each email style and what the call to action should include.
• A strong understanding of the difference between broadcast and autoresponder emails, so that you send the right email at the right time.
• My rules for what makes for a good email.

I want the energy of your business to thrive, and it’s why I recommend you read the Email Marketing Cheat Sheet. It’s free!

Click “Download It” below to get it sent straight to your inbox.

Download the FREE Email Marketing Cheat Sheet

You have your email list set up, but what should your emails say? The Email Marketing Cheat Sheet teaches you exactly what to send to your list, including 10 cut-and-paste-templates for the different types of emails your audience will look forward to.

The post How to Start and Build an Email List appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

ConvertKit is now Kit!

Our recommended email service provider has changed their name to Kit. We're working to update our content to reflect this change. In the mean time, you may see us reference the product by either name—please know that our recommendation has not changed. You can read more about the name change here.

“The energy of your business is directly tied to the strength of your email list.” Amy Porterfield has been giving us this advice for years—but how do you make sure your email list is strong? By “strong,” we mean that your subscribers are engaged in your emails, reading them and taking action on your suggestions and links. A foundational method for improving the strength of your email list is to start your subscribers off on the right foot with a useful email welcome sequence.

(And if you haven't started an email list yet, then what are you waiting for?!)

What Is an Email Welcome Sequence?

A welcome sequence introduces the subscriber to you, your brand, and what you have to offer them. It shows them why it’s worth their time to stay subscribed to you. It’s your opportunity to show off the best of your past content and teach them how you would like them to engage with you and your content.

In this post, I’ll walk you through both the how and the what of setting up your welcome sequence. First, I’ll show you how you set up the sequence. For demonstration purposes, I’ll be using our favorite email service provider, ConvertKit, but if you’re using a different ESP, the advice will still be helpful. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, we receive compensation if you purchase through this link.] Look for the “If you’re using a platform other than ConvertKit” for how to adapt this to your own email service provider.

Then, I’ll walk you through what to include in your welcome sequence—which elements your emails need and what topics they should cover. Let’s dive in!

How to Set Up an Evergreen Welcome Sequence

This blog post is based on a four-part video series on the new Team SPI YouTube channel, which is our channel specifically for in-depth tutorial videos and community events. We publish new tutorials every Wednesday and periodically host live events. [Subscribe to the channel to get notified about livestreams and get the new videos in your feed.]

To set up an evergreen welcome sequence in ConvertKit, we’ll start by using one of ConvertKit’s automation templates. If you are new to automations, these templates make getting started much easier, as ConvertKit sets up all of the elements that you’ll need. I walk you through the process in the beginning of this video.

Once you are signed into your ConvertKit account, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Automations section.
2. Click on New Automation.
3. Click on Browse Templates.
4. Choose the automation template named Evergreen Newsletter.

This will copy four elements into your automation:

1. A sign-up form
2. A tag (sometimes also referred to as a “link trigger”) << I’ll cover why for our purposes, we probably won’t use this option
3. A sign-up landing page
4. An email welcome sequence

If you’re using a platform other than ConvertKit

If you’re not using ConvertKit but your ESP has an automations builder (other terms to look for: workflow builder or recipe builder), you can recreate this template. Before trying to build this in your ESP, I recommend watching all of the videos in the rest of this post first, so that you’ll have an understanding of which options fit your purposes.

If your ESP doesn’t offer an automations builder, check the settings for your sign-up form to see if you are able to send a multiple-email series after someone signs up. If this isn’t allowed, I highly recommend switching email service providers. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, we receive compensation if you purchase through this link.]

Getting Subscribers into Your Welcome Sequence

With the ConvertKit template we are using, there are three ways to get a subscriber in to your evergreen email sequence:

1. A sign-up form
2. A tag
3. A sign-up landing page

There’s an interesting nuance with Welcome sequences versus any other type of evergreen email sequence, and that is that a Welcome sequence is the very first batch of emails that you are sending after someone joins your email list. Because these are the first emails you’re sending, you are unlikely to use a tag as a method of getting subscribers into your sequence.

If you are interested in the reasons behind this, I go into a lot more detail in this video. If the email sequence you’re setting up is not designed to be your subscriber’s first emails from you, then using a tag (or “link” trigger) may be relevant. See that video to learn how to use tags for this purpose.

With that in mind, you can delete the tag from this automation.

1. First, hover over the Trigger: Add to Newsletter item.
2. You should see the Edit Step button appear (red circle in the screenshot). Click on it.
3. In the editor, click on Delete Event (red arrow in the screenshot).

This leaves us with opt-in forms and landing pages as the two methods to get subscribers into our sequence.

Let’s talk about how to use each of them to get people to sign up for your email list so they can start receiving your welcome emails, and if you should use both methods or just one.

Customizing an Opt-In Form

At SPI, opt-in forms are our preferred method for collecting email addresses. These are small forms designed to collect first name and email address, along with any other custom fields you may choose to add. (No need to overthink it; we usually keep it to just those two.) ConvertKit gives you code so that you can embed the form into your existing website—anywhere that accepts HTML. At SPI, we use the forms on our own website, as well on our Teachable website. In the past, we’ve used them on Leadpages and other single-purpose landing pages as well.

I like using forms because I can easily drop them into my existing content. Depending on the template I choose, I can make them blend into the existing design or get them to stand out based on my specific needs at the time.

If you’ve been using ConvertKit for a while, you probably already have at least one email opt-in form set up. If so, there’s no need to build a new form just for this automation. Instead, you can update the automation to replace ConvertKit’s placeholder opt-in form with one of your choosing.

1. First, hover over the Sign up form item.
2. You should see the Edit Step button appear (red circle in the screenshot). Click on it.
3. In the editor, click on drop-down box and choose your existing form (red arrow in the screenshot).
4. Click Update Event to save your change.

If you are new to forms, this video walks you through the process of styling your form—and I show you how to deal with a styling problem that can crop up when using ConvertKit’s automation templates.

Once you have your form built, you need to configure your settings.

Customizing a Landing Page

A landing page is a good choice when you need a single, standalone page for your project. Maybe your website isn’t ready yet, but you want to start building up an email list before the launch—this is a great time to use one of ConvertKit’s landing pages.

Another great use for these pages is to test the market—perhaps you have an idea for a new product and you want to see if anyone in your audience is interested in it. With one of ConvertKit’s landing page templates, you can quickly put together an interest form, without having to spend a lot of time stuck in web design.

Watch this video to learn more about customizing landing pages.

Now that you’ve configured your automation entry points, you can delete any that you have chosen not to use. If I were using this automation template, I would keep Sign up form and delete both the Tag and the Sign up landing page. To delete:

1. Hover over the item and the Edit Step button will appear. Click it.
2. Click on Delete Event.

Let’s move on to the fun part—writing and configuring your welcome email sequence!

How to Build Your Welcome Sequence (and What to Include)

The first thing you need to do is access the ConvertKit sequence editor by clicking on the email sequence.

Okay, now you’re in. So what do you write about? That’s what we’ll tackle next.

There are three common questions people have about their welcome email sequence:

1. How many emails do I need?
2. How often should I send emails?
3. What should I write about?

The first two questions are kind of linked. You want to send people emails often enough that they remember you, but not so often that they are annoyed by you and unsubscribe (or worse, report your emails as spam).

And that balance can be a little hard to strike. I would suggest that initially you send a few emails right away, in the first week after they subscribe. This helps them remember who you are. After that, you may want to slow down the pacing of your emails to once or twice a week.

You’ll need to experiment a little, though, and over time, you'll learn what works best for you and your audience.

Related: AP 0949: How Do I Evaluate Email Success with ConvertKit?

You can of course use ConvertKit to automate your email welcome sequence based on your chosen timing. Check out the rest of the video to learn how to use ConvertKit editor to build your welcome email sequence and set the pacing of your emails.

This brings us to the final (and maybe most important) question: What should I write about? As you saw, ConvertKit offers some helpful advice on what to write about in your first few emails when you first opened the editor.

But what if you’re looking for more guidance?

Thankfully, we've got a great free resource for that: the Email Marketing Cheat Sheet. The cheat sheet gives you a framework for writing your emails so that they can both help your audience and assist you in achieving your goals for that email, whether it's to teach your audience who you are, to learn more about your audience so that you can serve them better in the future, or to introduce them to a product or resource that you have available for them.

The email marketing cheat sheet shows you 10 different types of emails you can include in your welcome sequence. You can grab it below.

Download the FREE Email Marketing Cheat Sheet

You have your email list set up, but what should your emails say? The Email Marketing Cheat Sheet teaches you exactly what to send to your list, including 10 cut-and-paste-templates for the different types of emails your audience will look forward to.

A Free Training to Help Make Your Email Marketing Easy

By the way, if you're trying to make your email marketing a little easier, then check out the free 1-hour training we're hosting this Thursday, September 9th at noon Pacific. It's both for beginners who have a small or no email list, and those who have started but are overwhelmed—or bored!—with email marketing.

You'll learn:

• Two powerful strategies to kickstart the rapid growth of your email list.
• Two little known ways to use your email list (because it's not just about growing your list).
• The email sequence Pat uses for launching for new products.
• How to use email marketing to automate your business.

And finally, don't forget to subscribe to the SPI Media YouTube channel!

The post How to Create an Automated Email Welcome Sequence in ConvertKit appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

ConvertKit is now Kit!

Our recommended email service provider has changed their name to Kit. We're working to update our content to reflect this change. In the mean time, you may see us reference the product by either name—please know that our recommendation has not changed. You can read more about the name change here.

If you’re looking for your next email marketing platform, and you’re curious if ConvertKit is right for you, well, you’re in the right place! Here’s our comprehensive ConvertKit review for 2021, which will cover:

• What Is ConvertKit?
• Why do I need an email service provider (ESP)?
• ConvertKit Features
• ConvertKit Pricing
• Key Benefits of ConvertKit
• Drawbacks of ConvertKit
• ConvertKit & Email Marketing: More Resources to Read, Listen & Learn

What Is ConvertKit?

ConvertKit is an email service provider (ESP). Essentially, it’s a technology service that lets you send email campaigns to a list of subscribers. ConvertKit is one of literally hundreds of ESPs out there, and—full disclosure—it happens to be the one we prefer and use at SPI.

Although we’re biased, in this post we’ll cover the features, benefits, and drawbacks of ConvertKit as we see them, to help you decide if it’s the right ESP for your business.

Email Marketing Strategy: Why You Need an ESP

If you’re reading this, you might already know what an ESP is and why you need one. But in case you don’t, an ESP is the most important piece of technology to support your email marketing strategy.

Email marketing is one of the most powerful methods to build relationships and market your products and services to your audience. Let’s talk about why that is.

In its most basic form, email marketing involves you sending emails to a group of people who’ve chosen to hear from you by “subscribing” to receive emails from you. You could technically use a simple email program like Gmail to accomplish this—but we don’t recommend it, because you’ll quickly find it insufficient (and because your personal email account will get flagged as spam if you send too many emails from it!).

As your business grows and more people subscribe to get your emails, you’ll want the ability to do more sophisticated things with your email marketing, like customizing the emails people get according to their interests, and using reports and analytics to determine what’s working well or not.

You also need to make sure you’re respecting people’s privacy and not spamming anyone. An email service provider also helps you to stay in compliance with government regulations around the world, such as the CAN-SPAM act in the United States, the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union (GDPR), and the Canada Anti-Spam Law (CASL).

Things can quickly get out of hand without the help of a dedicated email marketing platform. That’s where an ESP like ConvertKit comes in.

Okay, let’s get into the nitty gritty of ConvertKit’s features!

Psst… Want to grow your email list and learn powerful segmentation and automation strategies that allow your business to run on its own? Check out the Email Marketing Magic course.

ConvertKit Features

These are the key features of ConvertKit, organized by how you’ll use them.

Sending Emails

• Autoresponders/drip campaigns. Send a sequence of prewritten emails automatically to a specific segment of subscribers on your list, triggered by a specific event or action, with the aim of guiding them to take a specific action. 
• Broadcast emails. Send standard announcements or one-time emails to your subscribers on a specific date.
• CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CASL compliance. CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CASL are laws that set the rules and requirements for commercial email messages, and give recipients the right to have you stop emailing them—so compliance is crucial!
• Dynamic (personalized) email content. Your email content can display different text or images, according to your customer segmentation.
• Responsive email templates: Ready-to-go email designs, as well as the ability to create your own custom templates. ConvertKit automatically formats your landing pages for various devices, such as desktop computers and mobile phones.
• WYSIWYG email editor. The built-in email editor lets you see how your email will look with your template’s styling applied while you're composing it.

Collecting New Subscribers

• Custom responsive landing pages. Use the included tool to quickly create a landing page to collect email addresses. ConvertKit automatically formats your landing pages for various devices, such as desktop computers and mobile phones.
• Embeddable forms. Collect email subscribers anywhere on your website by dropping in a Javascript or HTML form, or by using the WordPress plugin.
• Sell products. Set up a landing page and collect payment for one-time or subscriptions products right inside ConvertKit
• Visual automations. ConvertKit allows you to create rule-based paths using if-then logic, so that when a subscriber takes a particular action, you can send them pre-defined emails or add them to a segment.

Learning about Your Subscribers

• A/B testing. ConvertKit lets you test different subject lines for your emails, and automatically determines the winner based on their respective open rates.
• Reporting/analytics/ROI tracking. Learn how often your subscribers open your emails, click on links, and complete various actions.
• Segmentation/tagging. Segmenting your subscribers into different categories (similar to but more powerful than other programs’ “lists”) allows you to send them emails that are better tailored to their needs and interests.

Next, let’s talk about pricing.

ConvertKit Pricing

For a long time, ConvertKit only offered paid plans. But in December 2019, the company announced a new free tier if you have fewer than 1,000 subscribers.

Here are ConvertKit’s pricing options as of March 2021:

ConvertKit Free Plan

• $0 /month for up to 1,000 subscribers

The Free plan includes:

• Unlimited landing pages & forms
• Send email broadcasts
• Sell digital products & subscriptions
• Email support

ConvertKit Creator Plan

• $29/month for up to 1,000 subscribers (paid monthly)
• $25/month for up to 1,000 subscribers (paid annually)
• Tiered pricing up to $2,299/month paid monthly (or $1,916/month paid annually) for up to 400,000 subscribers

The Creator plan includes:

• All the features of the Free plan
• Free migration from another tool
• Automated funnels & sequences

Convertkit Creator Pro Plan

• $59/month for up to 1,000 subscribers
• Tiered pricing up to $2,599/month paid monthly (or $2,166/month paid annually) for up to 400,000 subscribers

The Creator Pro plan includes:

• All the features of the Creator plan
• Facebook custom audiences
• Newsletter referral system
• Subscriber scoring
• Advanced reporting

We’ll keep this post updated with the latest ConvertKit pricing, but you can also visit the pricing page on the ConvertKit website.

With that out of the way, let’s get into the reasons we like ConvertKit!

Benefits of ConvertKit

We’ve used ConvertKit to power SPI Media’s email marketing for several years. In that time, we’ve found it to be the ideal ESP for our needs. From where we sit, the power of ConvertKit falls into two main categories: user benefits, and audience benefits.

ConvertKit Benefits from the User’s Standpoint

First, ConvertKit has everything a business owner needs to get up and running quickly:

• You can collect emails.
• You can set up a simple landing page to collect emails.
• You can sell products (one-time purchase or subscription).

These features allow someone to start selling even while they are in the process of setting up a website somewhere else. It also makes it easy to execute on one of the main lessons in our Smart From Scratch course: using selling as a key step in the idea-validation process.

Second, the ConvertKit team designed their platform to grow with the sophistication of the user. When you start, you probably just want to collect email addresses and send emails. But as you grow, you’ll want to start tailoring your message and segmenting your audience. At that point you can take advantage of things like automations and dynamic content. As you become more sophisticated, ConvertKit grows with you—you won’t have to switch to a different email service provider five years down the road. This sets ConvertKit apart from some other ESPs, particularly Mailchimp.

Some people find ConvertKit a bit daunting (see Drawbacks below), but if you’re somewhat tech-savvy we think it’s pretty approachable. In particular, we like the accessibility of ConvertKit’s automation builder, which lets you create automations in a straightforward, linear way.

We tried Infusionsoft for a year and found its automation builder sophisticated but overwhelming. You had to already understand how automations work, as well as the various symbols common in automation builders. We find ConvertKit’s automation builder, on the other hand, makes it easy to string automations together in an advanced way.

We also like ConvertKit’s approach to subscriber management. With ConvertKit, all your subscribers go into one big pool; there are no lists. Instead, subscribers can be put into segments by assigning them attributes using tags and custom fields. These let you treat your subscribers as unique humans with different needs; not all subscribers are created equal.

ConvertKit Benefits for Your Audience

ConvertKit gives you the opportunity to tailor your messaging to your audience. You can have as many forms and landing pages as you want. You can have as many tags, custom fields, and segments as you want. You can be as specific in talking to your audience as you want to be.

As you collect information about your audience, you can start to segment subscribers so you don’t bother people with things they aren’t interested in. ConvertKit makes it easy to collect details about your audience along the way, and you aren’t penalized for that through higher costs, as you would be with a list-based email platform.

Drawbacks of ConvertKit

No solution is perfect, of course. Here are some of the drawbacks we and other ConvertKit users have noticed.

• Moderately steep learning curve. The interface can be a little overwhelming for a beginner. Taking full advantage of all of ConvertKit’s features—like segmentation, tagging, and automations—requires some learning (and potentially coding). You can shorten this learning curve by following their Getting Started video series.
• No list-based organization. Although we like the way ConvertKit lets you organize subscribers using tags (and doesn’t charge you for duplicate subscribers like some ESPs do), the lack of a list-based organization system can be confusing if you’re coming from other platforms. Over time, though, we think you’ll find this system more flexible than managing lists.
• Barebones email and landing page templates. Requires CSS coding to create custom advanced email templates and landing pages beyond the included options. Some users report that the email design tool can be buggy.
• Analytics could be more robust. The free version of ConvertKit doesn’t offer the same advanced reporting options as the Creator and Creator Pro options, which makes sense but can be a bother to some users.

Thankfully, one of the previous drawbacks of ConvertKit, that there was no free option, is no longer valid! In fact, this was probably the biggest reported downside of ConvertKit by contributors to the ConvertKit review page at Capterra.com. This free tier makes ConvertKit comparable at the entry level to other popular ESP options like Mailchimp.

ConvertKit & Email Marketing: More Resources to Read, Listen & Learn

So there you have it—our review of ConvertKit’s email marketing platform! We’ll leave you with a few more resources if you’re curious about ConvertKit, or want to dig further into email marketing.

ConvertKit [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, we receive compensation if you purchase through this link.]

The SPI Essential Guide to Email Marketing

Email Marketing Magic Course

Pat’s ConvertKit Demo & Tutorial

AP 0712: How Do I Migrate an Email List from AWeber to ConvertKit? – Smart Passive Income

Why I Switched from Aweber to Infusionsoft to Convertkit

I hope this post has been helpful in deciding whether ConvertKit is the right ESP for your business. Whatever email marketing platform you choose, nothing is more important than having the right email marketing strategy, so be sure to check out our essential guide to email marketing and consider the Email Marketing Magic course if you want more hands-on support with your email marketing. Good luck!

The post ConvertKit Review 2021 appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

Want to learn how to get more email subscribers? One of the best ways to do so is through a tried-and-true method: offering a lead magnet—a valuable piece of content—in exchange for someone’s email address.

Now, hopefully you’re not trying to get people to join your list by saying, “Hey, subscribe to my newsletter.” If you’re doing that, you’re basically just saying, “Hey, I'm going to send you more emails!” People don’t want more emails. People want something of value in exchange for joining your email list.

So what can you give them in exchange for their email address? Today I’m going to share seventeen ideas for lead magnets you can offer. (Yes, seventeen!)

How not to build your lead magnet

But before we get to that, I want to share an important tip. You see, times have changed. Back in the day, when I started building my email list, it was hip to offer the biggest, most comprehensive lead magnet possible—I’m talking a thirty-to-fifty-page ebook or PDF file. But this is no longer something people want to download. They don't want to spend their time slogging through fifty pages—they want the quick hits, the information that will let them hit the ground running.

With that in mind, here are seventeen quick-hit lead magnets you can offer right now to grow your audience.

#1: Resource list

People love lists of tools and resources they can use to gain an advantage or do something more conveniently. By creating a simple list of such items, you can deliver a lot of value and give people something they will happily exchange their email address to get. Let’s say you have a photography blog, for example. You could create a list of the five tools a photographer should be using to edit their files more quickly, or to get better lighting in their photos. Almost any kind of list will work; just create a simple one with valuable tips and tools, and people are going to want to trade their address for it. Clay Collins, founder of LeadPages, was a guest on SPI Podcast Session #78, where he talked in-depth about how to rapidly grow your email list. The episode comes complete with resources and tools, and his advice still continues to work strongly today.

#2: Quick-start guide

Teaching people something they can do quickly is another great way to get email addresses. If you're that photography blogger from above, you could offer a quick-start guide on how to use a particular kind of camera. Or a quick-start guide on using Photoshop or InDesign. Offering a quick start guide is a quick-start way to grow your email list.

#3: Cheat sheet

A cheat sheet is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a one- or two-page PDF file containing the top tips to help a person go through a specific process that would otherwise take them a lot longer. A cheat sheet is similar to a quick-start guide, but it’s usually more condensed. For example, I offer a cheat sheet for people who want to start a podcast. I also have one for affiliate marketing too.

For those of you who are old enough, cheat sheets remind me of the Game Genie, back when I played Nintendo. It was a device you plugged into your console and boom, you could walk through a level much faster, jump much higher, or start out a game with ninety-nine lives. So just like the Game Genie, you’re going to offer your audience a quick way to gain an advantage using your cheat sheet—and chances are they're going to be excited to exchange their email address for it. We use this same strategy on this landing page we created dedicated to the Podcast Cheat Sheet you can download for free here.

#4: Video answer

You can record a video answer to one of the most pressing questions your audience has. So for somebody who’s brand new to your website, what is likely their number one question? Answer that in a video, then give them access to that video after they subscribe to your list.

#5: Checklist

A checklist is another great lead magnet. Let's say you teach Facebook marketing. There's likely a set of specific steps a person needs to take to go from zero to running a successful Facebook ad campaign. You could, in exchange for their email address, offer a handy checklist of the twenty things they need to do to succeed with that campaign. Whether you’re an expert in Facebook marketing or something else, think about a process you know well, write down all the steps, then format the list with checkboxes so your readers can follow along and track their progress. Then give it away in exchange for an email subscription! Amy Porterfield is a great example of how to do this well. She provides her podcast audience with checklists as “content upgrades,” to help them learn and integrate everything she teaches on her show. She’s providing a ton of value, and collecting emails at the same time!

#6: Email scripts

If your area of expertise involves teaching people how to communicate via email, simply giving people email scripts they can copy and paste and tweak with their own voice can be very valuable. Writing emails is one of the hardest things to do for some people, and having a script to work from can save them time and anxiety. So make it easier for them by giving them a starting point.

#7: Mini-course

A mini-course is a short training that’s hosted on a platform like Teachable. [Full Disclosure: I'm a compensated advisor and an affiliate for Teachable.] It can be an entire short course, or a portion of a longer course you offer. Either way, the idea is to deliver a ton of value in a small package while showing the person that you’re serious about helping them learn. By giving away your mini-course for free, you’re showing them how much amazing value you have to offer, so that you can upsell them something bigger later on. A good example of this is from Caleb Wojcik, who does all my video production. On his website, CalebWojcik.com, he offers a free mini-course on how to use Adobe Premiere to edit videos, which he uses to collect email address while delivering a lot value and promoting his premium course to subscribers.

#8: Email mini-course

Instead of a mini-course that lives on a platform like Teachable, you can offer an email-based course. An email mini-course is a great option because it’s high value and easy to set up, as it lives right in your email system. After someone subscribes to your list, they’ll receive an email each day with one lesson from the course. You can find an example of this over at 100emails.com, where I teach people how to go from zero to one hundred email subscribers in just seventy-two hours using three daily email lessons. And I built it easily using ConvertKit, my email service provider. [Full Disclosure: I'm a compensated advisor and an affiliate for ConvertKit.]

Go from 0 to 100 email subscribers in three days!

You'll get one email each day for three days, giving you step-by-step instructions to help you finally build your list—even if you don't have a blog or business yet!

Sign up for the FREE 72-Hour Email List Building Challenge

Join 10,000+ other challenge participants!

#9: Book chapter

If you’ve written a book, or are thinking about writing one, you can offer your first chapter for free in exchange for someone’s address. Now, this is a really cool lead magnet idea, because people love books, and sending them a free chapter can give them a feel of what your book’s about—plus, if they like it, they might even want to buy the whole thing! And, you know, it’s also a great way to ask for their email address.

#10 Course module

In a similar way, if you have an online course, you can take a module from that course—maybe your favorite module, or just the first one—and make it available in exchange for an email address. It's a great way to show people exactly how you teach and what the course is like, which makes them potentially more likely to upgrade to the full course. And if they're not ready to do that yet, you still have the opportunity to nurture them because you've collected their email address.

#11: Quiz

You can also offer a quiz with results that will help people. A good example of this comes from Michael Hyatt, who at the end of each year offers his Best Year Ever course in exchange for joining his email list. I take this course every single year, and it’s a quiz—a “life score” assessment that helps you look at how you’re doing in all the different areas of your life, along with what you can do to get to the next level in areas where you want to improve. I love this lead magnet, because it’s interactive and provides a lot of value. It’s way different from something your subscribers just download; it’s something they can actually participate in, which makes it potentially great for driving email subscriptions. One of the entrepreneurs in my accelerator group, Monica Louie, uses a Facebook Ad Quiz to collect email addresses. The quiz helps people figure out what their next steps should be when it comes to creating Facebook ads, but she’s also building her list at the same time.

#12: Template

This next one is awesome for business owners who do a lot of teaching via platforms like YouTube: offering a template people can build on to create something. For example, if you teach podcasting, you could offer a free GarageBand file that contains a few audio elements in it that people can use to start building their own podcast episodes. You're giving them a headstart, which is always appreciated, and definitely worth trading an email address for.

#13: Transcript

If you do any video or podcasting, you can take your transcripts—the text files with the words you’ve recorded—and put them into a PDF file, then offer it in exchange for an email address. Some people aren’t going to be interested in listening to or watching something; they’ll want to read it instead. And also, because it’s in a handy file, they can print it out, and take notes on it if they like. James Schramko of SuperFastBusiness does this, by creating transcripts of his podcast episodes that are only accessible by joining his email list, and he’s told me that it’s helped a lot in growing his list.

#14: Bonus audio

Let's say you have a lot of written content on your blog. You can take some of it, and turn it into audio content—MP3 files that people can download and get access to after they give you their email address. This is another smart way of reusing your valuable content, because often people aren’t able to sit down and read, and just want to listen on the go.

#15: Contact list

Instead of a resource list of tools, you can tap into your Rolodex (remember those?) to create a list of people who are on your list who others should know about. By offering your contact list, it's almost like a way to get involved with the network you've built—and this works in both directions. You're providing a lot of value to your subscribers by connecting them with experts who can help them, and you’re also sending the people in your network new potential subscribers and clients of their own. So it's a win for everybody!

#16 Live training

I know a lot of people who teach a live training every week or month, and they’ll offer a free “seat” in that webinar in exchange for someone’s email address. So, pick a date in the future when you're going to teach something. Then invite people to register, whether it’s in your web page sidebar, at the bottom of a blog post, or on your Facebook page. Voilà! They’re on your list.

#17: Webinar recording

Instead of offering access to a live webinar, you can offer access to a prerecorded one. For this one, it can help to create a live training first (i.e., #16), then make the recording available for people afterward, so it's all automated.

There you have it—seventeen different lead magnets and incentives you can create to get more people on your email list! You now have no excuse not to do this. I think you’ll find that by offering something of real value—and not just a promise of more emails—people will be much happier to say yes to joining your list, and much more likely to open your future emails, too.

A challenge to get you started

If you need some help getting your first 100 email subscribers, try taking that challenge I mentioned!

Go from 0 to 100 email subscribers in three days!

You'll get one email each day for three days, giving you step-by-step instructions to help you finally build your list—even if you don't have a blog or business yet!

Sign up for the FREE 72-Hour Email List Building Challenge

Join 10,000+ other challenge participants!

The post How to Get More Email Subscribers (17 Lead Magnet Ideas) appeared first on Smart Passive Income.

ConvertKit is now Kit!

Our recommended email service provider has changed their name to Kit. We're working to update our content to reflect this change. In the mean time, you may see us reference the product by either name—please know that our recommendation has not changed. You can read more about the name change here.

One of the best compliments you can get from someone in your audience after you publish something is this:

“I felt like you created this just for me.”

If this is the type of feedback you’re getting from your content—awesome job! You understand your audience; you hit a “trigger point” that connects on an emotional level, and you’re likely to have that person follow through on your call-to-action.

When it comes to email marketing, however, generating this type of response from the majority of your list can be a huge challenge. Because email is so personal, it’s difficult to share a message that’s universal to your entire audience. Not only that, you’re delivering a personal message directly into their inbox that comes across more urgent, as opposed to a post or podcast episode that people can choose to consume on their own time.

If your email seems out of place, you risk unsubscribes or long-term inactive emails from those who just aren’t feelin’ it.

In an auto-responder email series, this is even more dangerous. Auto-responder emails are pre-written emails that are sent to individuals sequentially over time after they subscribe. The danger here is that because you set it up to be automatic, you’re more likely to forget about it.

I get it, though. That’s why you have an auto-responder series in the first place—to set up something once for automation down the road. However, all it takes is one email that doesn’t align with a subscriber to convince someone “this is not for me anymore,” and lead them to click unsubscribe.

And how many emails are we supposed to have in our auto-responder series?

I had thirty-five at one point, and based on what Steve Chou (SPI Podcast Session #143) and Dan Faggella (Session #159) said, the longer the email sequence, the better.

So, how do we solve the dilemma of sending more targeted emails to every subscriber on our list?

We segment our lists into groups, and write emails that actually matter to those groups.

The Basics of Email List Segmentation

Segmenting your list is exactly what it sounds like—you’re putting your email subscribers into different groups so that you can send emails that actually matter to them.

One of the most basic, but useful examples of email segmentation is this:

You have a single product to sell and an email list. You segment your email subscribers into two groups:

1. Non-buyers; and
2. Buyers

For group 1, you have specific kinds of emails that you send:

• Valuable, educational content to build trust and authority.
• Success stories to show proof of concept and build even more trust.
• Emails meant to drive sales.

If a subscriber from group 1 makes a purchase, they are no longer a part of the “non-buyer segment,” and have now entered the “buyer” segment, where they will get a different set of pre-written emails, such as:

• A thank you email for purchasing the product, along with important information about how to access their product.
• A follow up email two days later to make sure everything is running smoothly and to check up on their progress.
• A survey email fourteen days in to gauge what they like and dislike about their experience so far with your product.
• A free and unexpected gift twenty-eight days later as a thank you, which happens to be two days before they get billed for their membership. The gift reminds them how great the purchase was, and when they have to pay the next installment, they are more likely to be happy with it.
• A promotion for a secondary product or course you have for the same audience.

The non-buyer versus buyer example is simple and makes complete sense. Each group deserves different types of emails, and your buyers would hate to see an email pitching a product they’ve already purchased.

All of this can all be done automatically through most email service providers (ESPs). I’ll get more into the technical details of list segmentation later in this post.

When I started to research and learn from experts about how to segment my own email list, the number one piece of advice was this:

Keep it simple (at least at first).

You can create incredibly complex automation sequences and have hundreds of different segments in your email list, but when you’re first starting out, keep it simple. The non-buyer versus buyer segmentation is one of the simplest to understand, implement, and one of the most useful.

There are, of course, a lot more segmentation options within our email list, and it’s not always a “this or that” type of situation like in the above example.

Some people could be placed into two or more segments of your audience, depending on how you’d like to do it. For example, maybe they are a non-buyer, and they are also interested in a particular subtopic of your niche.

Let’s check out other segmentation options you could explore.

Segmenting Your Existing List

Most email service providers let you create and save new segments from the existing list of subscribers you already have without collecting any new data from your subscribers.

For example, you can extract a segment of your list based on when they subscribed.

Perhaps you’d like to create a segment of all the people who subscribed to your list last month, although this isn’t particularly useful in my opinion.

You can also segment your list based on geographical location. That can be useful for some businesses that geotarget certain email broadcasts and campaigns, but again we’re just scratching the surface of possibilities.

Segmentation truly becomes powerful when you begin to create groups of people based on their interests.

So the question is . . . how do you determine a person’s interest, and what do you do with that information?

Let’s keep going.

Interest-Based Email List Segmentation

Although your website targets a specific market (hopefully), there are likely sub-niches or specific interests within that market that you can and should be catering to.

And in all likelihood, you’ve done a lot of the heavy lifting already in terms of figuring out what those subtopics are. They may be reflected in the categories that you’ve created on your blog, or perhaps in a survey you conducted.

If you need help to figure out these subtopics, go into your analytics and find the most popular content you’ve published. You can also use BuzzSumo to help you even further to figure out what topics are of interest to your audience.

(Hint: You don’t have to type in your own website into BuzzSumo to see what’s hot.)

By conducting this research, in a short time you’ll discover a number of content types or subtopic “buckets” that live inside your audience.

In the health and fitness industry, for example, there are people who are interested primarily in losing weight, and there are others who are more interested in strength training. Within strength training, there are those who are interested in looking beefed up, while there are others who are in it to look lean.

In the photography space, there are those who are interested in wedding photography, newborn and family photography, and those who prefer corporate work (just to name a few sub-niches, because there are several).

If you had a site that catered to photographers, wouldn’t it also be useful to know whether or not a subscriber used a Canon or a Nikon camera—or something else?

It’s really up to you how you’d like to divide your audience, however when it comes to email segmentation, dividing your audience into two or three groups is the best way to start, because it can be entirely overwhelming (trust me).

Some ESPs allow you to “tag” people as well, which is helpful because you can mark them with a particular interest without having to worry about necessarily putting them into a completely separate email sequence. It’s like a second layer of segmentation, and you’re able to send broadcast emails to people with one or more tags associated with them.

In the case of the hypothetical photography site, I might have different segments (and therefore email sequences) for each type of photographer I wanted to target (wedding, family portraits, corporate), but also tag people over time with what kind of camera they use.

Within each segment, I can automate an email sequence that leads to an offer for a product related to that sub-segment, whether that’s my own product, or someone else’s product or service as an affiliate:

• Segment 1 (Wedding Photographers): Wedding Photography 101
• Segment 2 (Family / Newborn Photographers): Family Portraits Made Easy
• Segment 3 (Corporate Event Photographers): How to Land High-Paying Corporate Photography Gigs

The tagging could be useful because perhaps I get access to a special deal for a new Canon lens that just came to market. Well, it’s no use sending that to my Nikon photographers. So I’ll send an email broadcast with that special deal just to those who are tagged with a Canon tag only.

Do you see how this works and how powerful segmentation can be?

And at the same time, do you see how crazy and out of control this could get?

Start simple, and you can always further segment your audience later.

Now, let’s get into how you can segment your audience.

Formulas for Interest-Based Segmentation

I’m going to use the email service provider I’m currently with, ConvertKit, to demonstrate how segmentation is performed, however please know that several other email service providers provide segmentation options as well. [Full Disclosure: I'm a compensated advisor and an affiliate for ConvertKit and earn a commission through these Convertkit links.]

I use ConvertKit because it has the segmentation options I want and they are easy to implement. Although it’s not as robust and as powerful as, say, Infusionsoft, it’s just the right amount of automation and segmentation without all of the bells and whistles that quite honestly confused me on other platforms. [Full Disclosure: I'm a compensated advisor and an affiliate for ConvertKit.]

Here’s a recent post I published about why I switched from Aweber to Infusionsoft to Convertkit, in case you’re interested.

Let’s start with learning about how to figure out the interests of your existing subscribers.

How to Segment with a Survey

The easiest way to begin to segment the audience you already have on your list (i.e. a main list that you drop all subscribers into) is by getting them to click on a specific, specialized link.

That *click* will trigger the email service provider to put that person into a grouping that you’ve previously specified.

Here is that rule specified in ConvertKit:

A “course” in ConvertKit is simply a set of auto-responder emails that people in that course will receive over time. [Editor's Note: ConvertKit Courses are now called “Sequences.”]

After choosing these options, I can specify the link, as well as the course that this person who clicks this link will subscribe to:

Here, I’m creating a link for people to click on who have not yet started their business. I setup the automation rule so that when people click on this link, they will be moved from my main list into Level 0 – Nurture.

Level 0 – Nurture is just my own way of naming and categorizing this group, which is how this group is defined across my entire team. And of course, emails sent to this group over time all have to do with setting people up to start their own business for the first time.

I do the same for two other buckets that I’ve found in my audience — this allows me to have more targeted communication with each of these segments of my audience.

When I moved to ConvertKit, all I had was my main list because I wanted to start fresh with my segmentation, so I sent a broadcast email with this copy and instantly my audience began to segment themselves.

In addition to having this survey sent to my subscribers in a broadcast email, I have it included in the first follow-up email in my “New Subscriber – Unknown” group, which is the main list that people subscribe to if they haven’t come from a specialized opt-in form that automatically puts them into a segment, which I’ll talk about in the next section.

Additionally, using the automation rules in ConvertKit, I have it set up so that when people move to any one of these three segmented courses, they are taken off of my “New Subscriber – Unknown” group.

Again, the purpose of the main list is to get them to segment themselves, and I’ll try to make this happen over time in a number of emails that they receive—not just that first one, because some people don’t get the first email, or don’t click the link that time.

How to Segment Based on an Opt-In Form and/or Lead Magnet

Clicking on a link in an email is a great way to segment your audience, but we all know not everyone opens our emails (although you will experience higher open rates as a result of segmenting your list—yay!).

But an even better way to begin to segment your audience is to do it based on the actions people take on your website. Do this, and you can skip the step above and get right into content that matters for your audience.

The best way to explain this is through another example, so let’s go back to our photography website example.

You’ll recall that we broke down our photographer audience into a few buckets:

• wedding photography
• newborn and family photography
• corporate events

There are way more—but again—keep it simple.

We write a blog post titled: 5 Mistakes All Beginner Wedding Photographers Make.

At the end of the post, we include a form that automatically segments new subscribers on this page into the wedding photography segment.

We can assume that people who read this post and opt-in for this type of lead magnet will be interested in the wedding photography niche, so instead of sending them to our “New Subscriber – Unknown” Main List, we’re going to put them right into the wedding photography segment.

Here’s how that works in ConvertKit: each form that you create can have a number of specific options tied to it, such as what course you want to subscribe people on after they sign up, what page they arrive at after subscribing, and what lead magnet to deliver. Instead of the main list, we’re going directly to Wedding Photography 101, where new subscribers will receive relevant info and products around that particular interest.

Now, when people subscribe, they’ll automatically be sent content that is relevant to them.

How to Segment Based on a Product Purchase

Going back to keeping it simple, if you’re going to segment your audience in one way over the course of the life of your online business journey, you’re going to want to separate buyers and non-buyers.

A simple way to do this is to set up an automation rule for when people make a purchase:

If people buy product X, then they get put into an email sequence that corresponds to that product.

Other things could happen at the same time as the purchase—they are taken off of the non-buyer email sequence, and they are tagged as having purchased that product.

The latter makes sense, but the former might seem like a duplicate. But here’s why tagging a buyer is smart in addition to putting them into a specific email sequence.

Over the course of the life of a subscriber, they’ll go through various email sequences that you’ve setup. They’ll be put into one sequence or funnel, and then dropped into another one after taking certain actions or “leveling up,” if you will.

You could hypothetically have someone be a part of two or more automatic email drip sequences, but that’s a lot of emails and you want to keep that subscriber’s focus, not overwhelm them.

As people move throughout your various email sequences, it’s still nice to have a record that they’ve purchased something from you, so tagging them marks them as such. Then later when you come out with version 2.0 of the product, no matter where they are at in your emails you can send a broadcast to all purchasers informing them about the new version.

The technical set up for this in ConvertKit is rather easy. They are continually adding new integrations so check to see if your shopping cart, if you have one set up already, is compatible. They do integrate with Zapier, however, which can make it easy to connect any shopping cart and/or payment processor.

I’ve found that ConvertKit works especially well with Gumroad.com. Here’s a rule I set up so that when people get access to the free version of The Smart Podcast Player, it puts them into a sequence of emails specifically for those users, which includes valuable content for learning to use the software, educational information for podcasters, and offers to upgrade to the paid version.

With the books, products and courses coming out in the future here on SPI, this kind of simple segmentation and automation will be extremely useful, and I hope this post has been helpful for you, as well.

Is Email Segmentation a Requirement?

Segmentation isn’t mandatory, but I highly recommend it—if anything—for the purpose of delivering better value to your audience.

To reiterate for the n’teenth time, start simple. As you begin to grow your email list, you’ll discover certain segments that make sense to cater to, but start out simple and you can always grow and expand segmentation from there.

If you’ve done any segmentation in the past, please leave a comment below about your experience. Did you mess up like me and try to do too much too fast? What segmentation areas are really working for you?

And if you haven’t done any yet, I’m hoping this post was a helpful introduction for you. I’m excited to see where you take it. And like I said, most email service providers will allow you to do this, but if you’d like more information on ConvertKit, check out my demo here.

Cheers, thanks, and here’s to you and your success!

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