How to correctly tag your subscribers in ConvertKit
Friends, exciting news, I finally nailed down a strategy I actually like for tagging my ConvertKit subscribers!
Superrrr thrilling topic I know.
I mean, does it get sexier than email marketing organization? I don’t think so!
I am a v happy ConvertKit (that’s an affiliate link!) user and have been for a few years now.
Related: Why I chose ConvertKit for my email marketing over MailChimp, Squarespace Campaigns, etc.
One of the reasons I really love ConvertKit is it’s ability to tag and organize subscribers based on their interests.
“… Why is this important?” you ask.
Know when you get an email that’s completely irrelevant to you? Someone’s trying to sell you on house insurance, meanwhile you’re renting and don’t even own a home? *Unsubscribe!*
When you can get to know each of your thousands of subscribers individually, you can send your people emails which are relevant to each person individually.
The more relevant emails you send, the better chance people will stay on your list, and you’ll have less unsubscribes over time!
This is especially important if you run a business which offers multiple services, provides info on more than one topic or has more than one target market.
You offer web design and copywriting? You’ll want to tag your subscribers based on interest.
You talk about Facebook Ads strategy and YouTube ads strategy? You’ll want to tag your subscribers based on interest.
You sell to both first time home buyers and people looking for an investment property? You’ll want to tag your subscribers based on interest.
You offer both high and low priced services? You’ll want to tag your subscribers based on interest.
You blog both about beauty and fitness? You’ll want to tag your subscribers based on interest.
You get the point!
Truly knowing your customers, knowing as much about them as possible greatly helps you provide them the content they actually need (and stops you from annoying them and them unsubscribing.)
And the way you do this in ConvertKit is to tag your people!
But just tagging them can even be a bit confusing if you don’t use some consistent tags throughout.
So I’m going to share with you the tag naming strategy I’ve come up with.
These are the 6 tags I use to organize my subscribers:
IN SEQUENCE:
I use this if the subscriber is currently being sent a sequence of emails.
Why? Because if they’re being sent a sequence of emails, say my Welcome Sequence which is 5 emails sent every other day, then I don’t want to send them even more emails on top of that!
So if I tag someone who is ‘In Sequence: Welcome series,’ then I can exclude everyone who is tagged with that from say broadcast emails which I also send out once a week.
INterested:
I use this to tell me what the subscriber is likely interested in, based on what they opted in for. For example, if someone opts in for my Online Business Matchmaker then they’re likely interested to build an online business, so they’d be tagged with ‘Interested: Building an online business’.
Alternatively, if someone opts in to my Start Your Squarespace Website Workbook, they’re likely interested in building a Squarespace site, so they get tagged with ‘Interested: Squarespace’.
I recently invited a guest on my podcast who is an expert in digital nomad taxes. I figured the people on my email list who would most likely be interested in his expertise would be those who were tagged as ‘Interested: Building an online business’ so I emailed just people with that tag inviting them to send me any questions they’d like me to ask the guest on the show.
Opted Out:
When we’re launching a course, we give people the option to opt-out of launch emails in case they’re not interested in that course or launch for whatever reason. In order to ensure future launch emails don’t go to them, we tag people who click the ‘opt out’ link in our emails with ‘Opted out: Month and year of launch and name of course’. For example, for a recent launch that tag looked like ‘Opted out: May 2019 SSB launch’.
Self-segmented:
In a couple of my emails, I ask subscribers questions, and have them click the link which most applies to them. For example, back when I was doing 1:1 services and offering DIY courses on web design, I’d ask new subscribers in my welcome series if they were interested to hire a pro to build their site or DIY it themselves.
I then would know with certainty (because they chose and clicked the link - this is a bit more guaranteed to be correct than my ‘interested’ tag) that they wanted to either hire a designer or do their site themselves.
From there, I’d send them the relevant emails about upcoming dates in my 1:1 custom site design queue or on my course Square Secrets.
I was basically telling them more about the thing they’re interested in, and that fit within their budget!
Student:
I have a student tag as well. If you sell something other than courses, this could be ‘customer’ or ‘client’ maybe. I use this mostly for when we make updates to the courses to notify past students of updates they can go enjoy, or of upcoming live Q+A calls to remind them of the link to the call and where to pre-submit questions.
I tag them with the following strategy ‘Student: Course Month Year’ so for our past class of students in my Square Secrets Business course (we shortform that to SSB) the tag looks like so: ‘Student: SSB May 2019’
Webinar registrant:
We use this tag to let us know who is registered for which upcoming webinar. Our webinar software Crowdcast automatically sends a reminder email to those registered just before the webinar, but often we have a workbook to send registrants or also want to give them a reminder the morning of the webinar so they don’t forget, so we use this tag to help us determine who is registered and send emails just to those people, as opposed to our full email list.
We tag webinar registrants with the following strategy ‘Webinar registrant: Day, Month, Year’ of webinar.
There we go, our super thrilling tagging strategy! I hope that helps you also organize your people inside ConvertKit too!
