Today I want to talk about a topic I’m seeing come up more and more in my coaching sessions.
I’ve been in business now for eight years with my online business. For the first several years I made the huge mistake of not segmenting the conversations that I had in my business.
When we segment, it’s going to lead to stronger relationships with people that you serve or want to serve.
When you segment, it’s going to serve them for where they are at, based on interests or their level of expertise, or whatever it is that you do in your niche.
It can increase open and click rates in your emails. It can increase sales. It can increase your repeat customer count. It can also bring in lost revenue from card abandonment.
There’s a whole bunch of benefits to segmenting. I think the biggest one is how it allows you to have the right conversation with the right person based on wherever they are at in their journey.
We’re going to cover all of this in today’s quick tip episode.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Which main categories to segment your audience into
- How to structure your email surveys for segmenting your audience
- Should you be using lead magnets?
- Different tools you can use to streamline your segmentation
- How to use your YouTube channel or podcast to segment your audience
- Why you need to tidy up your email list on a regular basis
Links & Resources:
- Community
- RightMessage
- 10XPRO
- DM me on Instagram
- Visit my YouTube channel
- The Art of Online Business clips
- The Art of Online Business website
- The Art of Online Business Podcast website
- Check out my Accelerator coaching program
*Disclosure: I only recommend products I use and love and all opinions expressed here are my own. This post may contain affiliate links that at no additional cost to you, I may earn a small commission.
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Other Episodes You’ll Enjoy:
5 Reasons a Personality Quiz Should Be Your Next Lead Magnet with Linda Sidhu
#168: How to Use Quizzes + Facebook Ads to Get Quality Leads with Chanti Zakariasen
[00:00:00] Rick:
Hey, my friend, before we get into today’s episode I want to let you know about the game changing tool that we started using in early 2021 for the backend of our business from a marketing perspective.
We started using 10XPRO.io, and I absolutely love it. It allowed us to consolidate tools that we were using for our online courses. Tools that we were using to create order forms.
[00:00:56]
Tools that we’re using to create landing pages, et cetera, et cetera.
Things get super complex and overwhelming very quickly. Not to mention super expensive when you add up all those tools.
10XPRO.io solved all of that. It’s an all-in-one tool. They’ve been around for about 10 years now, and I absolutely love them.
[00:01:17]
It is super simple. You can create your whole website in there if you want. Not to mention landing pages, funnels, pre-made marketing campaigns. Your online courses can be housed there.
You can create offers. You can do your membership in there. Forums. They have a built in affiliate center, and their online support is off the charts.
[00:01:36]
The link to check out 10XPRO.io is RickMulready.com/10XPRO. You can get a super, super inexpensive trial, it’s like a dollar. Check them out.
If you decide to go with them, I do get a small commission. So, thank you, in advance, for that. RickMulready.com/10XPRO.
[00:01:58]
Alright, my friend, let’s dive into today’s episode.
[00:01:59]
Hey, what’s up, my friends. Rick Mulready here. Welcome back to the podcast.
This is episode number 581 here on the show. This is another quick tip episode here on the podcast.
Today for the quick tip, I want to talk about a topic that I’m seeing coming up more and more in my coaching sessions.
[00:02:18]
This is something that I have not done a very good job in my business up until the last couple of years.
I’ve been in business now for eight years with my online business. For the first several years I made the huge mistake of not segmenting the conversations that I was having in my business. When we segment, it’s going to lead to stronger relationships with the people that you serve or that you want to serve.
[00:02:49]
Okay. When you segment, it’s going to serve them for where they are at. Based on interests or their level of expertise or whatever it is that you do in your niche. it can increase open and click rates and your emails. It can increase sales, it can, increase your repeat customers. It can, bring in lost revenue if you will, from like card abandonment.
[00:03:14]
And that sort of thing. There’s a whole bunch of benefits to segmenting. I think the biggest one is that it allows you to have the right conversation with the right person based on. You know, their interest or wherever they are at, in their journey or their level of expertise or whatever it might be in your specific niche.
[00:03:38]
Because if you’re not, if you’re having one conversation with your entire audience, with all the people in your audience, that’s not a conversation that is just, you know, a megaphone that you’re shouting from to everyone. And so it is key to segment as quickly as you possibly can in your business. When somebody comes into your business, if you will, whether it’s joins your email list or signs up for a webinar or watches a YouTube video, or listen to a podcast episode, whatever it might be, it’s so important to be segmented.
[00:04:19]
How you are delivering content because there’s so many benefits to it, right? It’s going to feel like people like, oh, this person really gets me rather than this is completely irrelevant to me. Right. And so the first thing you want to do in this whole process is to identify what the segments are in your business.
[00:04:43]
What are the segments. That you want us to be serving in your business and you might want to be serving one segment. You might want to be serving one audience in your business. And you know, I talk about that all the time here in the show. It’s the singularity of focus in your business. Having one flagship offer serving one audience.
[00:05:07]
Well, you might not be starting out that way, or you might have a very successful business and you’re still serving different segments. Of an audience. That’s great. No problem. But you’ve got to be segmenting so that you can be having the right conversations that you can be making the appropriate offers to the right people, again, based on where they’re at, based on their level of extra expertise or whatever it is, and how you’re serving people in your, in your niche.
[00:05:34]
So what I mean by that is, let’s just use gardening as an example. What is your level of gardening expertise? Are you a beginner? Like you’ve never had a garden before, but you, you want a garden? Like, that’s like, that’s me. Right. I I’d love to have a garden in my backyard, even though I don’t have a backyard.
[00:05:54]
I’d love to have a backup. I’d love to have back here. I let it have back yard too. I would love to have a garden where I’m growing my own vegetables. Right. And so that is a very, if somebody, if I’m going to somebody for information around gardens, If they’re talking about advanced gardening texts and techniques, that is not for me.
[00:06:12]
That’s going to be way over my head. And so I want to be learning from somebody who, however you help people, whatever it is that you do in your business, your audience wants to know that they, that you get them, that you understand where they are. In their journey or in their level of expertise or whatever, it might be in their interests and having the conversation that serves them.
[00:06:37]
And so how do we do that? Well, that’s through segmentation. And so I want to share with you nine different ways to segment your audience. Now there’s a lot of different, other, other, other things you can do. And I’ll mention at the, at the very end as well, but primarily, This is going to be email marketing based.
[00:06:58]
All right. Because email marketing, we should absolutely still be building our email list a hundred percent. Okay. And so I’ll give you a few different other options as well, and sort of how I recommend thinking about this. But again, the more that you can segment your business is going to grow as a result.
[00:07:17]
And if you’re going back to the point about. If you’re serving one audience. Right? So for example, so I serve in my business. So we, in my accelerator coaching program established online course creators or online coaches, maybe they’re both or teacher entrepreneurs. And by established, that means people are either, you know, at least doing eight to $10,000 per month in revenue from their online business.
[00:07:47]
And they’re looking to. Right. Two multiple six, seven multiple seven figure businesses. So that is a very specific audience who we serve in the business. Also, who I speak to on this podcast. Right now, of course, there’s going to be other levels of people and you might be, that might be one who is not quite at that level in your business.
[00:08:13]
That’s completely fine. All of this information is super helpful for you, right. so our one offer in our business, that’s who this is. As I just mentioned, that’s who the program is for now, with that said you can, I can still use segmentation within that audience. Like I can subsegment even further, just as an example, I can subsegment people within my audience that we’re serving with accelerator, for example, that have an interest in starting a podcast or.
[00:08:44]
Are looking for, you know, a specific type of marketing tool in their back in their backend of the business or who are interested in starting a YouTube channel. Right. And so that’s a, just another way to. take advantage of the things I’m about to share with you. Okay. And so the first strategy is to simply segment within an email.
[00:09:06]
So you send an email to your email list. This is how most people segment. You send an email to your email list. Email list. And within your email, you ask people a simple question, right? Like which of the below best describes you or which of the below best describes your business or your level of gardening expertise or what have you, and you have links there, right?
[00:09:31]
So remember we’ve, we’ve identified what segments that we want to serve or what segments, you know, are coming up in our business. Right. Just going back to the gardening expertise. It’s like beginner, intermediate, and advanced gardeners. So those would be the three different segments. And then of course you can do additional sub segmentation within those audiences.
[00:09:54]
But in this example, here in our, in our first strategy, we would have three different links in the email, which of the below best describes your level of gardening expertise. I’m a beginner. And then you might have some qualifying language there to give some context as to how you define beginner, then I’m an intermediate again.
[00:10:14]
What does that mean? I’m an advanced. Okay. What does that mean? That’s it? You’ve got your three links there and then yeah, some additional texts in the, in the email, but you ask people to click based on their level of expertise. And depending on which link that they click on, you tag them accordingly in your email CRM.
[00:10:34]
Now you are building groups of people building segments so that you can have the proper conversation with the advanced Gardner, the proper conversation with the beginner, gardener, et cetera. So that’s number one, ask people within the. Right. Create some links tag, you know, based on what people click, make sure you tag them accordingly so that you can have the right conversation.
[00:10:57]
Number two. And this is super, super common, right. Is to do a quiz, right? So On my website and I do not do a good job of, that’s a whole other episode. I’m gonna talk about, I, I have a quiz, right? So we have a quiz on the, on the website that we’re helps you identify what are the areas and your business that you’re missing.
[00:11:19]
Right? the things that you’re so close to in your business, that you are too close to see? Well, this quiz that we’ve created helps you identify what those areas are and. The payoff at the end of the quiz is an action plan. It’s like a three-step action plan to, okay, great. You’re this is what’s happening in your business and we’ve, we’ve created this quiz to be able to do that, to identify that for you.
[00:11:44]
And then this is the action plan. Well, that’s segment. Based on level of your business and based on what your big challenges are and your business, right? So you might have a quiz for example, that, again, let’s use the gardening example. You might have a fun quiz to help segment people based on their level of gardening expertise.
[00:12:05]
Right. And we’ve had episodes about quizzes here and the podcast, which we’ll link up in the show notes for today’s episode, but quizzes or surveys are a great example of things that you can do to again, segment people so that they’re self segmenting them. Quizzes are a great way to do that. Right. the third strategy is to have specific lead magnets.
[00:12:30]
Based on again, their level, their interests, whatever it might be. So if I have a lead magnet on creating a podcast, for example, and that’s going to be somebody it’s like how to create your first podcast. Right. Does it just, I don’t know, off the top of my head. Well, that is going to be somebody who has never created a podcast before.
[00:12:54]
That’s a very beginner person. From a podcasting perspective versus, nine ways to monetize your podcast. That is a different segment of people. So just based on which lead magnet they’re choosing to download, and yes, they could download both of them, but. Then you can use the tags and do exclusions and all that stuff.
[00:13:17]
That’s outside the scope of this episode here, but use specific lead magnets to segment your audience again, different lead magnets are going to serve different levels or different segments within your audience. Again, going back to what are the segments that you want to identify for your business? You can use lead magnets, you can do strategy.
[00:13:38]
Number four is. People who sign up, for example, for a webinar or a video training or a challenge or whatever it might be, which again, speaks to a specific level or a specific interest. or it might be like a specific grade level. Maybe you serve, you know, Sixth seventh and eighth graders.
[00:13:59]
And you serve the teachers who teach sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. Well, you might be do something that is only for sixth grade, sixth grade teachers. Okay, great. Well, you want to segment that conversation, right? And so these are different ways that you can be doing. Now, those are the, those are the most basic things that you can be, that you can be doing.
[00:14:19]
And there’s certainly other ways I wanted to give you quick, actionable things that you can go and do as soon as you finish this episode, the fifth strategy. And this is something that, is really more so if you’re getting some really good traffic to your website, and I am not an affiliate, for them, we do not use them, but I know the founder, I have several friends who use them and I, and really looking for looking at using them.
[00:14:48]
However, I don’t get a ton of traffic to my website, which is totally cool. anyway, the tool is called, right. Message. Right. R I G H T message MES, S S a G E. And again, I have no affiliation, with the company or anything like that. I just love what they do. And so they are, and you can go it down a big rabbit hole by the way, with right message.
[00:15:08]
It can, you can go very deep or you can do something as simple as when somebody visits your website. For example, you can have like a slider box that pops up that asks you you know, the person visiting the website, what level are you at? Obviously it’s based on whatever niche that you’re in or what have you, so right.
[00:15:26]
Message is something that can be super helpful and you can do this with other tools as well, but, right. Message is something that’s been on my radar for a few years now. So that’s another thing that you can do again, probably more advanced, but super, super powerful. The sixth strategy is text message.
[00:15:45]
Right. So you can use an app like community, for example, and create groups of people based around a specific interest or a specific level of expertise or whatever it might be. And you can be having conversations with the people that are within that segment that you’ve built. You know, via text messaging via an app, like community, for example.
[00:16:09]
Okay. And by the way, I’ll link all these, you know, these, again, I’m not affiliated in any way with community or right. Message or whatever, but I’ve used community and had great success with it. during a launch, for example, a couple of years ago, it was really, really effective and really liked it. I’ll link all these up in the show notes for today’s episode.
[00:16:27]
Another strategy I alluded to it earlier is you can be doing podcast episodes or YouTube videos on specific topics. So yes, people are not on your email list yet at that point, however, You can be doing a podcast episode about a specific topic, and then you can have, you know, you can offer a lead magnet or you can offer a free training or whatever it might be based on that topic that you’re talking about.
[00:16:57]
And if that topic is speaking to, if you are speaking to a specific segment of your audience, based on what you on the topic of your episode or your video, is there you go segmentation. So the idea there is to, again, I’m having the right conversation with the right level of people that you want to be serving and level of people.
[00:17:17]
Isn’t like, I don’t mean it like that. I just mean like, the segment of people that you are serving or you want to be identifying to be. the eighth strategy, look at what people have purchased from you in the past. So if you have different offers in your business, serving different levels of people, I just said that levels again.
[00:17:38]
I hopefully you understand what I mean by that is like, all I’m telling you is like, like I’ll go back to the gardening example. Right? All right. I’m a beginner gardener. Let’s call it level one. I’m an intermediate Gardner that’s level two, an expert Gardner level three. Okay. That’s what I’m talking about.
[00:17:54]
And so maybe I can look at, oh, people here are all the here’s the segment of people that have purchased the beginner gardening, course that I have. Okay, amazing. Now I want to offer my level two course. Or membership or whatever it is that you’ve got to, all the people who have purchased level one. And it has been like 60 days since they purchased it or something, I’m just making this up.
[00:18:23]
Right. Well, you can create a segment of those people and have the right conversation with them because you know that they purchased the level one gardening course that you have. Okay. So again, look at what people have purchased in the past. This is your opportunity to cross. And offer people, the right offer or add additional value to people based on where they are at.
[00:18:49]
Okay. the ninth strategy and I’ve got a couple, I’ve got another, another one at on throw a bonus one in here for you. So number nine is some tools and email CRMs have integrations where you can segment people based on the activity that they’re taking on your website. So again, if you don’t get much traffic to your site, a.
[00:19:11]
This isn’t going to be super helpful, but if you get a lot of traffic to your site, this could be super helpful because you could be creating segments, based on the pages that people are visiting on your site. So and so forth. And again, emailing them accordingly. Right. And another example of that might be a cart abandonment, email sequence.
[00:19:30]
So people who have, you know, clicked your ad to cart or buy now, or what have you. And then they didn’t end up purchasing. Well, you have a tag for people who click, you’ve got a tag for people who purchased, and then you exclude the people who purchased and target the people. That clicked, you know, by now and now you can send an email to those people automatically.
[00:19:52]
This can be all automated. you know, like, Hey, notice you were interested in this and, you went to purchase it. Just want to make sure that there wasn’t a problem, or maybe you can offer them a discount, whatever it might be. Cart abandonment, email sequence can vastly. Increase sales on an automated basis.
[00:20:10]
Right? another, just a couple of bonus things here. Another obvious one that you should be Emma, do a whole other episode about this coming up here, because I think it’s, it’s pretty funny. So I recently did, an email list cleanup, right. I try to do this every quarter and you’d be so surprised. I’m just going to tease you right now with, with this, right.
[00:20:31]
It’d be really surprised at the size of my email list. So many people are like really Rick with the scope of your business. Like that’s all, I have a very small email list, but it’s not about, you know, it’s not about quantity of people on your list about the quality of the people on your list. Long gone are the days that I used to get upset.
[00:20:50]
Around, you know, size of the email list or comparing myself to others and cause it’s very easy to do, right? Like, Hey, I did that for so many years. but anyway, my point being is that you want to segment people based on, and every email CRM has their own definition of. But you want to segment people based on lack of engagement on your emails.
[00:21:11]
So you want to clean people out who are not engaging with anything on your way when you send emails out over a period of time. And so that’s really important because again, We want to be having the right conversation with people who actually want to hear from us who want to learn from us. So segmentation allows us to clear out our email list of those non engagers.
[00:21:37]
And then lastly, outside of email, obviously we can do a lot of segmentation from an ads perspective, right? Like. Again, if you’re getting a lot of traffic to your site, you can build audiences of people based on what, you know, sections of the site that they’re visiting. Again, it is vastly, effected by ILS privacy and all that stuff, but there’s just a whole bunch of different ways that you can do that, from an advertising perspective.
[00:22:04]
Okay. Hopefully the idea I just gave you, 10 different ways to be segmenting your audience—nine different ways and a couple of bonus ones—what I want you to do is just take one and start with it. The easiest thing that you can do is that first strategy that I mentioned; you can segment your email list, send them an email and simply include the line,
[00:22:27]
“Hey, do me a favor and answer which of the following best describes you or your business,” or your level of expertise, or whatever. It might be, “Click the link that best describes…” and then you’re tagging based on which one they click. That can put them into a specific
[00:22:46]
segment, and you can let them know, “Look, I want to be serving you and give you content and helping you for exactly where you are at. Can you help me by choosing which option below best describes you?” Super simple email, but yet super, super, super, powerful. My daughter has been watching “Super simple songs,” every day.
[00:23:07]
It’s amazing, but it’s a super simple strategy that you can do to segment.
So again, if you’re not segmenting, you’re missing a huge opportunity to build stronger relationships with the people you want to be serving. You’re missing out on an opportunity to serve them for where they are at.
[00:23:29]
It’s going to increase your open rates, your click rate. It’s going to increase your sales, because you’re having the right conversation with the right person. It can give you repeat customers, et cetera. The list of benefits goes on.
Hopefully you will go and segment your email list and the content that you’re creating right now. Again, just choose one from today.
[00:23:53]
I’ll link the tools up that I mentioned on the show notes for today’s episode, but, Hey my friend, thank you so much as always for listening. Super appreciate you. I’ll see you right back here for the next episode of the Art of Online Business podcast.