Segmenting Your Email List is the New Gold Standard

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Allea Grummert (00:12.066)
Hey there, welcome to Happy Subscribers, a podcast that explores how bloggers and content creators can create more purposeful relationships with your audience through email marketing. I’m Allie Grimmert, email marketing strategist, copywriter, email platform expert, and founder of the done for you email marketing agency, Duet. I started as a personal finance blogger in 2016 and have since helped hundreds of bloggers and creators like you maximize your email marketing for more impact, more traffic, and a better connection with your subscribers.

Be prepared for some advanced email talk, as well as tactical tips to help get your valuable content into the hands of your audience faster and easier. I’m excited you’re here, so let’s do it. We can create a deeper, more meaningful connection with the community you love and serve through email.

Allea Grummert (00:59.918)
All right, let’s talk about segmentation. I believe that segmentation is the gold standard for email marketing. If I could segment who saw certain things on my Instagram, I would love segmentation, but I can’t. I can’t with Instagram, I can’t with Pinterest, but with email, I can. Today, we’re not gonna talk about the how of segmentation. I do have a short free paid workshop on that. It’s an hour of your time to learn how to segment your own list.

But today I want to talk about why it matters. Because once you understand why segmentation matters for your business and for your audience, the how just becomes so much easier to prioritize and actually implement. And while there are so many different ways you can segment your list, trust me, we can segment too far. If you didn’t know that was possible, it is possible. But I want to talk about segmentation because to me, segmentation is just a techie word for personalization.

The way that I receive different messages from different friends in my real life relationships, we can apply that to email marketing. So I have my friend Joanna, who just calls me out of the blue and I answer every stinking time because I love getting to talk to her. Whereas like, I don’t talk to some of my best friends from college more than a few times a year on the phone. But those relationships are still maintained just at a frequency and in a style that I’m used to.

whereas Joanna might call me once a week and I still answer because I want to talk to her, right? And it doesn’t mean that my love and appreciation for these people is any different. It’s just that our communication patterns just vary based on different life circumstances. Some of my best friends have three children. Yeah, I’m not talking to them on the phone as much. Or if I am, it’s after 830 at night. Then I’ve got my friends that I have on Instagram. I’m sure you’ve seen the memes where you’re like, no, I haven’t talked to my friend in weeks, but I know she’s fine because she sent me 17 reels today.

And I’m like, yeah, that’s me. I’ve got a few of those. So what segmentation allows us to do is personalize our communication the same way you would in a real life experience. So you wouldn’t send the same people the same texts. That doesn’t mean that you’re a different person. It just means you have different communication styles with different people based on how you know each other and how you’ve communicated before or what you have in common. Along those lines, I also have a sweet family member.

Allea Grummert (03:24.632)
who sends me AI cat videos. And I love cats. I have a cat, but I don’t want to see AI cat videos. I want to see real cat videos. And so I actually had to tell her, was like, can you stop sending those to me? And that’s just my way of being able to say, I’m not interested in that type of content. Segmentation in email marketing allows you to do the same thing. It’s allowing you to honor the different relationships that you have with your different subscribers. It’s like manners.

but for your email list. And oftentimes it gets overlooked because email marketing gets overlooked. That’s a whole other thing. That’s my soapbox. I feel like email marketing gets so overlooked, but it shouldn’t. And so if you were to take email marketing more seriously, segmentation would probably come to play in that strategy. Because here’s what I’m seeing. A couple of different problems. One, I six and seven figure bloggers coming to me saying, hey, I’m seeing a lot of unsubscribes.

They’re still growing their list net, you know, thousands of people a month, but they’re losing subscribers as well. And that could also just be a sign of the times that I’m not diagnosing this as their particular problem, but I’ve heard it from a few people. But I would say this is especially huge in the food blogging space where most of my clients are, because if you’re sending too much of the wrong thing or you’re overwhelming people, you will lose subscribers. That’s why you might see revenue drop or traffic drop from email.

Now, that doesn’t mean that all of those subscribers were meant to stay on your list forever. It could also be based on how they’re joining your list. So like I said, this is not a full diagnostic of just that situation. But when you see a lot of unsubscribes, one thing you want to keep in mind is, ooh, am I nurturing people in the right way? And this goes along with the other problem or the other hesitation I hear from people is that you’re not sending as many emails as you could because you’re actually afraid people will unsubscribe.

because you work really, really hard to grow your list, right? And I don’t want you to lose them because of like being a nuisance, I’m putting in quotation marks. Whereas I know that your content is not a nuisance, but what we can do to solve both of these problems is segment your list. This allows you to send more emails and send them more freely and drive more overall traffic back to your site because you’ve allowed people to segment and opt out of emails or the type of, the number of emails they get that don’t apply to them.

Allea Grummert (05:49.869)
If they’re like, nope, I just want one email a week, you can request that information and honor it through segmentation. Same thing could be said for vegetarians on your list, not receiving recipes that wouldn’t apply to them. And when you feel like you’re not pestering people, if you feel like you’ve actually given them an out, and I don’t even want to say an out, I want to say you’ve given them a place to express what they want and you are choosing to honor that with the technical side of how you send out your emails. You are going to see people be happier and stick around longer.

because they feel heard. They’re not just receiving news broadcast after news broadcast after news broadcast. They get to hear from you when they want and what they want. And maybe they do want everything that you send. So segmentation sounds super technical, but segmentation really looks like caring for your audience. They will feel heard, they will feel cared for, and they’ll end up engaging with your content and driving more traffic back to your site. If not, you know.

as much traffic every week if they opt out of some emails, they will hopefully stay on your list longer and have such a high regard for you and your content that they’ll recommend you to friends or they will go to your site to look at your content straight from their browser. That’s what we hope for. Now, if you want some more of like the technical output of this, what you can actually maybe hope to see

is that when you personalize the subscriber’s experience, you are keeping the right messages in the right inboxes and nurturing your list, building community, and avoid sending content to the wrong people, wrong content to the wrong people. And when you do this, you do see higher open and click rates. That just makes sense, right? Whether people have opted in or opted out, you have a more holistic, cleaner look of who’s actually receiving your emails and how engaged they are with that.

So for instance, years ago when I set up a couple of nurture sequences for the Pinch of Young team, what we did is we allowed people in the welcome sequence to say, click here if you’re a beginner, otherwise click here if you’re more experienced. And that new to cooking segment, the people who opted in for that had open rates of over 60 % with a nearly 20 % click rate over the course of those five emails, which is bananas. So for context, a good open rate is like,

Allea Grummert (08:13.022)
27 to 44 % is what my data showed me from last year. And a good click rate is like two to 4%. So here, the Pinch of Yum New to Cooking segment, five emails introducing them to basics of cooking had open rates over 60 % and nearly an average 20 % click rate.

And we see this kind of reaction because the beginners knew that this content was for them. They’re more eager to engage. They stick around. They click through. It’s exactly what they need when they’re joining their list. And it’s going to build that brand loyalty. And then from a brand perspective, when we had done research and kind of evaluated what the Pinch of Young team wanted for their email list, they wanted to be able to provide something for beginners because not everybody knows how to use a knife or how to cut up an onion.

And in their generosity saying, how can we provide this to people who are new home cooks so that in the long run, they will be able to make more of our recipes because they know how to cut an onion or how to make tofu. So there’s a strong connection between strategy, like the segmentation and customization to actually seeing higher data and engagement. While the overall clicks might be lower because we’re asking people to opt in in this case.

It also means that the people who didn’t need beginner content aren’t getting beginner content and feeling like you’re talking down to them. There’s so many wins to this. So, like I mentioned, I actually have a segmentation workshop on how to do this. And the way that I explain it is that, I mean, I’m going through and talking about tags and segments. Particularly, I’m actually talking about how to use it within Kit, MailerLite, and Flowdesk. If you use any of those email service platforms, this workshop is for you.

And what we’re actually talking about is how to set up the frequency. So allowing people to say, I just want one email a week versus getting all of your emails. And we’re keeping it simple that way, knowing that you can always expand to do other strategies. Like I mentioned, sending people into a beginner sequence or allowing people to opt out of, you know, your old content, which is what I do.

Allea Grummert (10:22.703)
My, quote unquote, old, it’s evergreen. My best of duet sequence goes out on Tuesdays. I still get replies from it and it’s awesome. And people are like, I love that case study you sent. I was like, my gosh, I wrote that three years ago. So it’s still serving me. But anybody who clicks at the bottom saying, I just want your new content, Ali, stops getting the Tuesday emails. So I talked through different ways and strategies, but.

briefly in the segmentation workshop, because primarily I want you to be in your platform. I want you to have your kit open, your mailer light open, your flow desk open, and I’m gonna show you how to set this all up correctly so that you have the tools and the skills to be able to make it operate. So the replay is only $30 and it’s a 50 minute workshop. So there are actually breaks in there for you to actually go do the work for five minutes, go do the work for 10 minutes.

And you can follow along as the live attendees had asked questions. I’m sure that it’ll answer some of yours as well. So if you know the segmentation matters, but you haven’t really done it yet, or it feels too complicated or too time consuming, like this 50 minute workshop will be all it takes to get you started. And I’m so grateful that I get to be the person to guide you through that. So if you want to check out that workshop replay, it’s at duet.co slash trainings. And would love to be able to see you go through that.

Let me know, reply back to an email once you’ve set it up. Tell me, tell me, tell me how you’ve got it set up and tell me that so I can celebrate with you. Now, I hope that you know that segmentation isn’t just about organizing your list. I’m all about being organized. But it’s about organizing relationships because when you know who is on your email list, you’re able to organize your email subscriber relationships more effectively and nurture your list with the relevant content that they want.

and it

Allea Grummert (12:37.679)
Thanks so much for listening to happy subscribers and our conversation about email marketing today. I hope you feel inspired to take action, even if it’s a small change, so you can more confidently share your valuable message with your community through email. Special thanks goes to my team who makes it possible to produce and share these episodes with you. Seriously, thank you guys. If you want to hear more email marketing tips, strategies, and success stories to help you develop deeper,

or meaningful relationships with your email subscribers, be sure to subscribe to Happy Subscribers so you don’t miss an episode. If you have a few seconds, I invite you to share this episode link with a friend or post it on social media so your peers and community can benefit from it as well. And if you have a few minutes, I’d appreciate if you’d leave a written review of the podcast since that helps more people hear about it. And I believe we need more creators sending more valuable emails to their audience with more confidence. If you want to reach out to me directly, the best way to do that is to join my email list.

through one of my top freebies listed in the show notes. You’ll get regular emails from me that are packed with value. And if you hit reply to any of those emails, it’ll land in my inbox and I can’t wait to chat with you there. Until next time, let’s do it.