2015-06-23 Smart Simple Email Segmenting with Avram Gonzales

Hey, what's good my friend? My name is Abram Gonzalez and welcome to this Inner Circle Audio. I will be your host today and I'm excited to be here to share with you one of the coolest email marketing strategies I have ever come across and I've actually been using in my business for the last two and a half, almost three months now, maybe it's three months now, but it has just revolutionized the way that me and my partner, Nikki, do business and I believe it will do something incredible for you too. It actually runs pretty counterintuitive to a lot of the things that I grew up learning in the internet marketing industry over the last four to five years since I first got involved and I just want to give you a taste of some of the stuff that it's done for my business and what I'd like to teach you so you can implement in your business. This is what you can expect to learn today.

A couple of things that have happened and transformed in our business since we started applying this is normally our email open rates, we were lucky to get 10% of the people receiving our emails to open stuff up. It used to be anywhere from 5% to 8% which is normal for a lot of people, but if you're like me, it's not enough. You want more people opening your stuff and so I implemented this strategy. Now we're getting easily, easily 20%, 25% of the people on our email list opening up our emails every time we send out a broadcast. This has also dramatically cut down the number of unsubscribes that we have on our email list.

Literally, people were getting burned out on our email list. We would get about 30% unsubscribe rate over the course of 2 months, 3 months, 6 months, whatever the case may be. A lot of people were unsubscribing and now it's closer to 10% or 12% which is a huge improvement. People are sticking around longer. They're enjoying the content which leads to, I think the coolest part about it is the fact that we've been able to establish a better relationship with the people on our email list and that has led to increased number of people buying the different offers and things that we have available to help them grow their lives, grow their businesses and so on and so forth.

What I want to share with you today is I really want to outline the strategy of this email marketing strategy I've been working on so that you can implement it in your business. I want to tell you a little bit more about why it works. Once you get the strategy, we'll dive into why it works so you can duplicate it and shift things the way that you need to make it most applicable for your business. Then I want to give you some applications, some different areas and some different business types that you can use this in. This isn't just for one industry.

This works for a lot of different industries and it's a different sort of approach than I think most people are used to seeing. Just a really quick background about me, 4 or 5 years ago, about 5 years ago now, I got involved in social media, internet marketing and started really looking at what the industry was like and recognizing that I could generate an income on the internet. Truthfully, I struggled for about 2 and a half, almost 3 years trying to get my social media consulting and even my life coaching businesses to a point where I could fully sustain myself. That didn't work for a while. I had to keep a part time job and eventually something just clicked and at the end of 2012, business started exploding.

I earned my first multiple 5 figure month inside my life coaching business at the end of 2012 and since then I've been able to explode our income potential both in the network marketing industry, building our primary business and also in the coaching and consulting industry, building that side of our business as well. Let's jump into the strategy for what I've been doing the last 2 and a half months to get these pretty insane results. Here's basically how it works. Then you'll see why this is very different than what a lot of people do. What I'm doing now is I'm taking my main email list.

By the way, I'm going to give a shout out to one of my colleagues, Rhonda Swan. She said something on a webcast I was listening to a few months ago that inspired this strategy and me and my partner, Nikki, just took it and ran with it. What we've done from what we heard Rhonda say was we took our email list and we took a step back and we looked at what was happening. What was happening was in marketing our primary business inside the network marketing industry, we're getting a lot of list burnout. People that just didn't want the offer for whatever reason and so they were constantly unsubscribing and then not opening up emails anymore.

What we did is we took a step back and we're like, well, why is that happening? It's that reason exactly. People came on to our list for whatever reason, didn't want that one offer that we were hitting them with over and over and over again and so a lot of them unsubscribed and they never got to see some of the other stuff that we had available for them. We took a step back and we decided, okay, let's actually create a main email list that people opt into the email list for whatever lead magnet or free offer that we have. We jump on our email list and then from there, there's actually no selling happening at all.

No selling. Zero, zero selling. Only sending value. So sharing with them stories of struggle to triumph in our lives, in friends' lives, etc. Sharing with them videos and blog posts and things that are loaded with value that they can take and implement in their lives and in their businesses.

So what we did is we took this absolutely no selling approach and what we did next is we segmented people out of that main list and I'm going to share with you how we did that into specific different lists where they're interested specifically in different things. So for example, people that are interested in specifically, let's just take an example, Facebook marketing. We found a way to segment only those people in our email list who are interested in that piece so we could follow up with them and give them the offers that are most relevant to them. We took also people that were interested in sort of our live events and webinars as another example teaching anything from mindset and law of attraction stuff all the way down to just regular internet marketing strategies. That was another group of people interested in our live events and then another group of people interested in our primary network marketing opportunity.

Can you see that those three different groups of people may have some overlap but are also interested in very, very different things? Exactly. Right? Exactly. And that's why we implemented this strategy.

So we started with a main email list and it has a bunch of follow ups in there serving them the latest and greatest stuff that we have to help people grow their mindset and their lives financially. That's really what our business platform is all about. So what we did is we took this idea of no selling and only inviting, right? So we don't sell but we invite people to jump onto other email lists to sort of opt in for the specific information that they're interested in. So what this would look like is, you know, people get on the main list and they're going to get videos from us.

They're going to get blog posts, etc. They're never going to get sold directly on that email list. But what will happen is, let's say we send a blog post out. It's got a video on it or whatever. They read through the blog post.

They get a bunch of value. Inside that blog post, we might put a call to action for them to opt in for one of our upcoming live events. We might put a call to action for them to opt in for more information on Facebook marketing. We might put a call to action for them to opt in for more information about our network marketing opportunity, right? All those different things you can use as calls to action inside of your blog post that you're not selling people right there.

You're just inviting them to opt in and lean forward to get more information on the specific thing that you're offering to them, right? Is that making sense? So you can use blog posts to do that. The other thing that you can also do is you can actually send people to, from your main email list, you can send them to something that I call an internal squeeze page, right? A squeeze page being a capture page.

You might have heard that word before. Same exact thing. It's where somebody puts their email in exchange for further information, like whatever it is you have. Maybe it's a free video or a free report, right? So you can actually take your main email list, write up an email, and send them to another capture page now that they're already on your email list that's specific to X, Y, and Z offer that you want to share with them, okay?

So let me give you an example. The example would be like, okay, let's say I want to take people from the main list and bring them on to a live event or upcoming webinar that we have going on. I'll send out an email, maybe it's the follow-up emails or a specific broadcast that invites them to opt in for that information, okay? And then as that event comes up, I'm only sending people that opted into that list the follow-up information for that webinar, okay? And here's where it gets even juicier.

A lot of times, you know, you're going to do a webinar because you want to sell something on the webinar most of the time, right? So what you can then do is only send email broadcasts to people who opted in for the webinar instead of the entire list, because there's probably this whole portion of your email list that wasn't interested in the webinar, that didn't want to show up for it, and doesn't get this other thing that you're offering that you offered live to people on that webinar. Like they wouldn't get, you know, all these follow-up email broadcasts from you with your special offer the same way that people would get it if they were actually there live or saw the replay. So what this allows you to do is specifically target the people that were most interested and not alienate the rest of your list who may have had no interest at all, okay? And I believe this is what leads to a lot of unsubscribes on your list of people that they like you, but they may not like what that one thing is that you're offering right now, but perhaps they'll like something later, okay?

So those are the two things that we'll do to take people from the main list over to the other list that we had going on, right? We'll send them to blog posts with extra value and a call to action to jump onto, you know, specific email lists regarding, you know, live events or a network marketing opportunity or a specific product or promotion that we have going on. Or we'll just send them directly to a new capture page to get follow-up information on that specific problem that they're having that you can help them solve with whatever offer it is that you have going on. So you have your main list, right, and then you have your other lists, smaller versions of the main list that are specific to your product or promotion, specific to the live events that you have going on, and specific to maybe your opportunity if you have one and that's the line of business that you're in, okay? So why does this strategy work, right?

Why does this strategy work? Well, here's the thing. From my point of view, it's very simple and easy to execute, okay? It's very easy to keep track of. You don't have a million different lists for a million different things, okay?

And you're not having to get expensive email marketing software to help you segment different people based on what they're clicking on or what they're opening or what they're not opening. It's just very easy and apparent what people want based on what they opt in for, okay? Second reason I think that this works really well is because your list isn't getting pitched on a whole bunch of stuff that they don't actually want, right? I'll talk about this more in just a second, but your new email lead, your prospect, somebody on your list who's reading your emails, they may not want what you have to offer right now, right? But they may want something else later.

So rather than pounding them over the head with the same offer over and over and over and over again, why not only serve them the things that they want most, that they desire the solutions to the most? Makes sense, right? So your list doesn't get burned out, right? And they don't leave before they get the chance to see something that they might really, really like, which leads me to the third reason why I think this works incredibly, incredibly well. See, you get the chance with this email marketing strategy to nurture your leads and incoming prospects for a much longer period of time before they see the different offers that you have going on.

Let me give you an example, right? You might have somebody that sticks around on your email list and needs to hear from you for a year before deciding to buy anything from you, and if you're constantly slamming them in their email inbox with the same offer over and over and over again like a lot of people do, they might leave before they see the amazing thing down the road that you have to offer, or they may leave before they actually get warmed up to you and trust you and get to know you enough before they actually buy from you, okay? I think the old way of doing email marketing where you just bash people over the head day in and day out with your same exact offer from a different angle every single day is a little overdone, right? People are sick of it. If they're going to read your emails and buy from you in the future, you have to create a relationship with them where they want to open your emails, where they're excited to open your emails, and it's more difficult to do that if you're constantly hitting them over the head with the same offer every day, especially if it's an offer that they don't love or they're not ready for or they have absolutely zero interest in, but they like you.

They like you, right? Give them the chance to stick around, to find a reason to buy from you, and I believe this email marketing strategy is the key to doing that. So I'm going to give you a couple different applications that you can use this strategy on. Okay, I'm going to give you, you know, being somebody that came from the life coaching and consulting industry initially, here's a great application for this, right? As a coach or as a consultant or as anybody who's in the information industry, you know, you're giving people the how-to or you're giving them the inspiration or you're giving them the mindset training or whatever it is, you know, you have to, what was I going to say here?

You have to address the different needs that your potential clients have. Some of them may be interested in, let's say, one-on-one type consulting or coaching with you, right? Others may be more interested in a sort of like group coaching structure with you, while others may be only interested in the different applications and sort of, you know, courses and e-books and things that you could provide for them where they don't feel like they need to talk to somebody to get help moving forward, but they just want to consume something on their own time, right? You can split your, you can use this exact strategy where you have your main email list, you're constantly serving them value, and you might have a friend or a partner in the industry that has some cool, you know, class coming up or some product they just launched. You might send out emails, not blasting your list about the actual product itself, right?

But you might send them to a blog post that teaches them something from that course and encourages them to opt in and find out more about whatever it is that you're talking about in your video, okay? And that way, when they cross that bridge, now you can serve them more follow-up emails and messaging that's specifically applicable to the thing that they opted in for versus, again, and I'm repeating myself so that you get it, right? Versus sending it to your entire list where the majority of people may not be interested in what it is that you have to offer, okay? That's like the first application. I think that's one that's going to help a lot of people, okay, in the sort of services, coaching, consulting, information industry.

The second application that I want to share with you is one that's going to help a lot of people who are in the network marketing industry. So if that's you, listen up. Like I mentioned earlier, a lot of people are going to opt into your email list because they like you or something that you put on the internet piqued their interest and they opted in, okay? And they may not know what your primary business is yet, and if they don't and they find out and they don't like it or they don't resonate with it for whatever reason and they've just decided that they don't want to do it, then all of your marketing efforts are going to be futile, right, in trying to get them to purchase your primary marketing opportunity, your primary network marketing opportunity because here's what a lot of network marketers do. They find the six ways to Sunday to try to find out how to get you to join their business.

So every other promotional email is just a different angle of the same problem that they're trying to solve for you to get them to join, to get you to join their business, okay? That's what most people are doing. The problem is that 1% or 3% or even, you know, if you're doing really good, 10% of your list is interested in your opportunity and they'll join it. What about the other 90%? What about the other 90%?

These are people that have joined your list through either free marketing strategies or paid marketing strategies. You've paid money to get these people onto your email list and they're not interested. So there's this whole other group of people that they're staying on your list, they don't want your primary business opportunity, so they either opt out or they stick around and stop opening your emails and even worse, they just, they just don't buy anything, right? You're in business to sell stuff, I imagine. So this whole extra 90, 95, 97% of your email list is not being monetized.

So what do you do about it? What do you do about it? You use this exact strategy that I'm talking about where you have a main marketing list. It's just built to develop a relationship with the people that are on your list. It's just built to develop a relationship with the people on your list.

And when they're ready, when they're ready, you give them the opportunity to opt in for more information about your business. This will set you apart from everybody else in this industry because nobody is really doing this, right? The people that inspired me the most when I first got into this industry were the people that I had no idea what business they were in inside the network marketing industry. Some of them were so good that I didn't even know that they were in the network marketing industry that when I got on their email list, they treated me the exact same way, right? Where I got to know them, like them and trust them over the course of months before actually finding out what they really did.

And by that time, it didn't even matter what they did. I was, I was in, I was hook, line and sinker, you know, ready to gobble up any sort of training on products, eBooks, like whatever they had to offer. I was there. I was ready to buy it, but I wasn't ready to buy their opportunity. Okay.

So what this allows you to do is to be able to segment that list out and be able to offer things to those people who, who love you. They appreciate you. They love your emails and stuff, but they don't want your opportunity. Use this strategy to segment them out and invite people based on what they really, really want from you and serve up other offers to them that might be more appealing. Okay.

That might be more appealing. So the quick recap of all of this is really simple. Create a main email marketing list. where everybody's coming into your funnel. Okay, from all over the internet, whether it's YouTube videos, you know, Facebook paid marketing, Instagram, like whatever it is, people are coming into your email marketing list and you're not selling them, okay?

You're not selling them on that list. The only thing that you do is you invite them to look at blog posts, okay? You invite them to come on to different live events with you and opt into separate marketing lists based off of the different offers, products, promotions, or live events that you have going on. You know, for me, it's like I have one list that's for all of the live events that I do because if somebody opts in for one live event that I do, they're likely to love the other live events that I have going on as well, right? So you have your main list, you have smaller, more segmented lists that you can be very specific with your targeting and not burn out the rest of your marketing list at the same time like a lot of people accidentally do.

So that's my super secret. Now it's not so secret. Email marketing strategy that I've been using for the last two, two and a half, almost three months. I don't really know, have a sense of time anymore, so I don't know how long it's been, but it's working great. And it's felt really good to do it too because I feel like it gives me more freedom in my business to give people a better sense of who I am without the feeling or the pressure of selling my whole list when I know that some of them are not ready for certain things.

So I appreciate you for listening to this audio. Go out there. Take this information out into the world. Apply it yourself and reap the benefits and the rewards of having more people opening your emails, more people being excited about what you have to offer and sticking around long enough to where they actually want to buy from you in a way that maybe you've struggled to get them to do up until now. So again, my name's Abram Gonzalez.

I appreciate you for listening to this Inner Circle audio. Make it a great day. Go out there and crush it and use these strategies to grow your business, grow your life, and ultimately just have an amazing time doing it. Cheers.