Building your email lists is important.  Lists are your owned asset and give you access to your fans and followers.  Social media is just rented ground and if a platform goes down then you have lost all access to your followers.  For more on growing your email list, read this blog.

Organising subscribers on your email management platform is essential because not all contacts will be the same.  This is where email lists and tags come into play.

How many lists should you have?

Some platforms allow you to have only one list whereas others allow as many as you like.  The aim is to keep your email platform tidy and easy to manage, plus give your subscribers a positive experience.

Think of lists as the top organisational level of your contacts.  If all your contacts will be receiving a similar message, for example they are all interested in the same product, then one list works and you can use tags to differentiate them.  If, however, you send very different messages out to groups within your contacts, then it does make sense to have more than one list. 

For example, a car showroom may send emails to business customers, private customers and prospects.  The messages they send out will be very different.  Private customers will not want details about business transport whilst business customers will not want emails aimed at prospective private customers.  

Do, however, aim to have as few lists as possible.  Creating a list for every event you hold, every lead magnet you offer, every location in which you operate etc is not best practice and ultimately lead to your lists being marked as spam, thus hurting deliverability.  Suppose one person is on all those lists, if they unsubscribe from one list, they will still hear from you due to being on the other lists.  They keep unsubsribing but eventually get bored and mark your emails as spam.  This is where tags come into play.

Using Tags

Tags are labels you can use to categorise your subscribers.  Tags represent subscribers’ interests, activity, and engagement.  They allow you to classify your subscribers to a deep level without them being on lots of lists.

There is no limit to the amount of tags you can use or, indeed, how you name them.  Just make sure you use a good naming convention so you remember what all your tags mean.

You could tag people to identify the lead magnet they requested, helping you identify their interests and enabling you to follow up with targeted content.  

Tagging with regards to product bought would help you target them with similar products.

You could tag with location of an event attended so that you can email them with details of the next event in that location.

You can tag depending on engagement in an email.  For example, when someone clicks on a link in your email, you can tag them as “opened blog link” and then, once again, follow up with further related content.

The tagging possibilities are endless!

Have a look at your email lists and tags and see if you can categorise in a more efficient manner.

Need some help with managing your email platform? Book a free discovery call with me to chat about working together.