Segments and automations
Lesson 16 of 31 in the course “Million Dollar Sales Course”. Free, with animations and a quiz.
Find your hottest fans
Last lesson you wrote to strangers; now back to your own list. In lesson 8 you saw that a live list beats a big one and a buyer is worth more than a subscriber. Now let’s learn to manage that. Start with something Jeff Walker found. In his experience, almost every list has a small share of “hyper-responsives”: they open every email, reply first, share your posts and happily buy. How do you find them? Watch what people do. Replied to an email, clicked in the last three, already bought: tag them “hot”. Why? These are the people Misha asks first when he’s dreaming up a new product. He opens sales to them first. Their feedback is the fastest and most honest. In lesson 23 you’ll see how Walker launches a product almost from scratch with exactly these people.
Tag, segment, rule
For a list to run itself, you need three simple things. A tag is a sticker on a person: “shorts”, “buyer”, “hot”. It’s added when the person does something or answers a question. A segment is everyone who fits a condition, like “bought and hasn’t opened in 30 days”. You can send them something just for them. A rule: “if X happens, do Y”. A rule triggered by an event is called an automation. Misha’s example: “if someone buys the course, remove the ‘not bought’ tag, stop the sales emails and send three ‘getting started’ emails.” Without a rule like that, you get the most painful mistake: Anya bought the course yesterday and today gets “Last chance to buy!”. She feels unseen. Almost any email service handles rules like these, and you set them up once.
Autoresponder vs broadcast
Remember lesson 13: the five-email soap opera series. Brunson sets it up as an autoresponder. That’s a chain that sends itself: sign up Monday, get email one Monday and email two Tuesday. Sign up Friday, same thing starting Friday. Everyone goes through the series from their own day, and Misha doesn’t press anything. The story emails from lesson 14 work differently. That’s a broadcast: one email to everyone at once on the day it goes out, about what’s happening now. Brunson explains that once someone finishes the series, they move to the broadcast list and from then on get only those emails. You can write them ahead and schedule them, but they’re not lined up in a chain. That way newcomers never miss the introduction, and longtime subscribers never get it twice.
One question splits your list
Where do tags come from? Brunson shows how to build segments almost for free: ask a question at sign-up. His example: “Do you have a dog or a cat?”. Dog owners get a follow-up: “How old is your dog?”. A puppy needs one food, an old dog another, and now you can offer each person exactly what fits. Even the picture on the next page changes: dog people see a dog. Misha asks one thing: “What do you edit: Shorts, vlogs or gaming?”. The answer sets a tag. The email ends up the same, but the example inside comes from the reader’s world: a gamer gets a highlight breakdown, a vlogger a pacing breakdown. People click more when they see themselves in the email.
Emails based on actions
The second way to group people: by what they did. Brunson does this after a webinar, a live online class, covered in detail in lesson 21. His team tracks who left when and sends four different sequences. Signed up but didn’t show: “Here’s the replay, it’s up until Sunday.” Showed up and left halfway: “The key part was at the end.” Watched to the end: answers to questions and a link to buy. And the moment someone buys, all sales emails stop automatically. Why does it work? Everyone gets an email about their own situation instead of a generic “Buy!”. Misha starts simpler: click the link about color grading and you get a “color” tag, so next time you’re the first to hear about his mini course on color.
Case: one email, 30 minutes
Why bother with automation? Sabri Suby, author of Sell Like Crazy, tells the story of one email he wrote in 30 minutes and put into an automated sequence. He says 117,391 people read it over two years and it made $467,163. And all that time, in his words, he didn’t lift a finger. Suby calls emails like this sales soldiers: write it once and it works every day while you sleep, study or shoot. So your best emails shouldn’t be sent once and forgotten, they should go into an autoresponder so every new subscriber gets them. But remember lesson 13: automation must be honest. No “last chance” if everyone has their own chance and it never actually ends.
Cleaning your list: ask, then let go
Remember lesson 12? Suby writes that mail services decide whether to deliver your emails partly by whether people open them. Everyone who stays silent for months drags the whole list down. So every few months Misha cleans his list. People who haven’t opened anything in, say, 90 days get a short email: “Still with me? If yes, click here and I’ll keep writing. If not, no worries, I’ll remove you myself.” Click, and you stay. Silence, and you’re removed. Feels like a waste? Remember Walker: a live list of 100 beats a dead one of 1,000. And the gains are real: fewer complaints and dead addresses, a higher open rate, emails landing in the inbox more often, and usually a cheaper email service, since many charge by number of contacts.
Do it yourself: three tags and three automations
Don’t build a complex system right away, start with the minimum. Come up with one sign-up question with 2–4 answers, each answer is a tag. Add a “buyer” tag. Set up three automations. One: signed up, so they get the series from lesson 13, then move to the broadcast list. Two: bought, so sales emails stop and 2–3 “how to start and not quit” emails go out instead. Three: 90 days without opens, so a “Still with me?” email, and the silent ones get removed. Almost any email service does tags and automated sequences; for starters Suby names MailChimp and ActiveCampaign, for example. Everything else is regular story emails to everyone. Next lesson starts level 4: the launch.
Check yourself
- Who should he email first?
Correct answer: People tagged “hot”. Hot fans open everything and reply first, so they’ll give fast, honest feedback. That’s Walker’s advice, and how he prepares a launch from scratch (lesson 23). - What should he fix?
Correct answer: A purchase should switch sales emails off at once. A buyer moves to the other list: getting started, support and the next step. Brunson does this, and Walker teaches it. - How can he raise clicks?
Correct answer: Ask at sign-up what they edit and match the examples. That’s Brunson-style segmentation: one question sets a tag, and everyone gets an example from their world. People click when they recognize themselves. - What should he do with them?
Correct answer: Ask “Still with me?”, remove the silent ones. A short email gives a chance to those who just missed things, and the silent ones go. The list gets livelier, complaints drop, delivery improves (lesson 12).