Active Campaign – Automate Your List Building With Email Marketing

Email List Building Tips – Automate, Automate, Automate

So you want to build an email list? If you don’t I really want to know WHY.

What’s the biggest mistake most online marketers make?

Not building a list.

What’s the second biggest mistake most online marketers make?
Not building a list.

Building a list is you key to growing your business.

If you have a list you can interact and engage with your subscribers and customers.

You won’t know what your customers want, what their likes and dislikes are if you can’t communicate with them?

With Email you can personalise your engagement with your customers; build up trust with them.

With Email you get to know your customers and, they get to know you.

Many people will tell you that “the money’s in the list”. That’s not exactly true.

The money is in the engagement with the list.

What that means is that anyone can build a list. It’s a mechanical process.

Equally anyone can destroy a list by continual hard selling of rubbish products.

The first part of list building is getting subscribers on to your list. Once someone has subscribed to your list you’ll probably want to put them into a sequence of emails in your autoreponder.

Before I do that I like to make sure that it is a genuine subscriber and make the first contact.

Some do this sending what is known as a double optin. That is an email asking the subscriber to confirm that they do want to subscribe to you.

This is a bit impersonal and if they don’t respond where does that leave you?

Modern autoresponder services give you a wide range of automation options.

Use these to make your life so much easier and cut a lot of the donkey work (no offence meant to donkeys).

Active Campaign – Automate Your List Building

Automation #1: The Segmentation Automation

The first thing I do with a new subscriber is to place them into the correct segment.

At this stage I want to make sure that subscribers are separated into the correct segments for future emails and reports.

Imagine that my main interest is in video marketing. How I approach the subscriber will depend on the level of expertise they already possess.

There’s little point in sending basic information to someone who has some experience in this area.

I’d therefore offer three options on the subscribe page:

Option 1: Beginner – I don’t really know much about SEO for YouTube

Option 2: Intermediate – I’ve tried but had little success in ranking my videos

Option3: Experienced – I’ve ranked some videos but need to know more

When subscribers hit my Autoresponder they are already tagged Beginner, Intermediate or Experienced.

At this stage I have three almost identical automations – one for each tag type

All new subscribers enter into all three automations. Only subscribers with the correct tag proceed to the next stage.

So Beginners, Intermediates and Experienced all enter the Beginner Segmentation Automation.

Subscribers with Beginner tag are then entered into the next automation

Subscribers with the incorrect tag go no further.

Similarly Beginners, Intermediates and Experienced all enter the Intermediate Segmentation Automation with only those Tagged Intermediate progressing.

The same is repeated for the Experienced Segmentation Automation

This can seem a bit cumbersome to begin with.

But once you set it up you can forget it and your main list is split up into 3 defined segments.

The next automation ensures that we engage with the new subscriber.

Autmation #2: Subscriber Engagement Automation

One of these automations is required for each segment of your list.

In this automation we want to make the subscriber take action and get them engaged.

This is where I normally deliver whatever lead magnet I have offered to encourage the visitor to subscribe.

I always try and do this via email. There are those who advocate giving away the report/lead magnet on the thank you page.

It’s a waste of real estate to do this, as you could be using the thank you page to explain more about what you do to the subscriber.

Additionally if you deliver your report on the thank you page you have no guarantee that you’ve been given a valid email address by your subscriber.

There are those who only want the freebie and don’t want to trade their email address for it.

Delivering the report via the Subscriber Engagement Automation avoids this pitfall.

The subscriber enters the automation and is then delivered the report via email.

When the subscriber takes an action (clicking the link to download the report)  they satisfy the condition of having engaged and are passed on through the automation.

At this point you know you have been given you an active email address.

If after 1 day the engagement condition has not been met, the email is resent.

If after a further day the subscriber has not satisfied the condition of having clicked the link for the report, the automation ends

If the condition has been satisfied (clicked the link in the email) they move on through the automation.

Having done this, the only subscribers who move on to your next autoresponder sequence are engaged and in the appropriate segment of you list.

I know it can seem like a lot of effort to go to but consider:

1. The subscribers going into the next email sequence are receptive to your message and because they are segmented, will respond better to a more closely targeted message.
2. All you have to do is create one of each automation, and then copy and modify as appropriate.

Automation #3: The Reachable Automation

Once you implement the above two automations you have a large part of your list :

1. Confirmed engagement
2. Segmented into the appropriate groups.

However you may still have part of your list that has not responded to your emails.

You don’t really want these clogging up your list as they will probably not respond to further emails and will mess up your stats for your open rates etc.

You may still want to have these subscribers on a list somewhere but not on this particular list.

So, how do we isolate them?

This is achieved when we automate using what I call the Reachable Automation.

The process is quite straight forward. First ensure that every subscriber entering any of your lists is first tagged as Status – “Not Reachable”

The subscriber fulfils a condition you specify: opening and email or clicking a link

They then enter a simple automation where their status changes from “not reachable” to “reachable”.

Then on a regular basis you can move those with the status “not reachable” from your list and either delete or add to a another prospecting list.

By using these three automations you can really make your lists work much better for you.

You will know that that

The email address is active

The subscriber is engaged

The subscriber is reachable

This will vastly improve the effectiveness of your promotions and engagement with you lists.

I have built these automations using Active Campaign – Automate Your List Building, my favourite auto responder, but I’m sure you can achieve the same with your chosen provider.

If you’d like more information on Active Campaign – Automate Your List Building please click HERE and I’ll keep you updated with videos and posts of I how I try and maximise my use of it.