Rob Walling

Rob Walling is the Co-founder at Drip – one of the fastest growing email marketing & automation tools on the market. Serial entrepreneur, podcaster, blogger & author with 10 years of experience teaching entrepreneurs how to build, launch & grow startups.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Rob’s success

Blueprints for behavioral emails that convert

Result if you follow the steps in Rob’s session

You will have a deeper understanding customers’ behaviors to ultimately determine what actually converts for your business

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

You’ve made the beginner step of like, let’s build a list, right? And you’re just trying to figure it out. You build your maybe email mini course, or your PDF giveaway.

And you’re at about 100 people, 200 people and suddenly realize, I have some people who are prospects, I have some people who are in my trial, maybe download a sample, and I have people who’ve already bought for me, I can’t send the same thing to all of them.

And you have this sudden realization of like, wow, I really need to start thinking about this as three separate groups.

And so that’s really what segmentation is. And it’s something you should do very early on, probably earlier than you think. As I said before, I think of it in three stages. There’s actually four stages.

So you have your prospects, these are people who have never bought from you, you have your trials, or sample downloaders, you have customers and then you have your best customers or your repeat customers. And the first three are kind of the most common.

So I want to run through those quickly. In essence, your prospects are folks that you’re going to capture with the you know, the email mini course.

And if you’re cool, has the ability to do lead scoring or engagement lead engagement to figure out who’s opening the most, you know, most emails and who’s interacting with your website, then with those folks, you can kind of segment them off into a, we call it a ready to buy sequence, but it’s basically actually a different campaign.

It’s a different sequence of emails than just normal prospects get because if they’re really engaging with your stuff, they’re more likely to buy and we start getting more salesy when the copy of like, I never get to sales leaks.

I don’t like that language, but it’s like encouraging them to buy and actually giving them stuff about your product and the differences between you and competitors and that type of stuff rather than continuing to educate them. So I like to segment that way, even within my prospects.

And then another kind of cool thing is when you’re talking to prospects and you can do things like you can pitch demos, or you can pitch educational webinars that offer a lot of educational value, but they’re higher up in the funnel.

And these are things that you would never pitch to your trial users or to your customer, because their trial users and customers, you want to teach them more about how to use your product to accomplish what, what they want to do, right, because they’re at a different spot in the purchase flow. They’ve already at least a trial users and committed to trying out your product.

And so with that, with that first list, you’re really, it’s a lot of education. And you want to give people something they can use, even if they’re not going to buy your software or not going to buy your book or not going to buy your consulting services, you’re just trying to hand out value after value after value.

Then moving into trial users, you’re now trying to educate them the whole goal of trial users or sample downloaders is your trial. Convince them to use your product. So if you’re selling an E book, you download a sample chapter, you’re trying to help them get value from that and encourage them to read it.

If they’re using your SaaS app as a trial, try to find out how do they get value out of this? You know, at what point did they get that endorphin rush from using your product that you’re trying to push them towards that.

So it’s totally separate and it’s totally separate campaign. It’s a totally separate mental model, a totally separate thought process.

And then with customers typically, if they’ve bought something from you as a one time thing, you’re typically either trying to upsell them to a higher priced, you know, maybe a video course or something. Or if they’re, let’s say a SaaS subscription, you might be encouraging them to either refer other people or to upgrade for an annual plan.

So those are the three, that’s the kind of a three minute look at how to think about segmentation. And why it’s important.

Because if you think about just posting to your blog, and then you know you have some marketing education stuff that you’re doing, hey, here’s how to use email to do whatever, and you’re sending that email to all three of these segments, that’s terrible. Like that’s 20 years ago email marketing, you know.

Today, you have to be sending different messages to these three groups in order to get the maximum value from the entire length of your funnel.