The new subscriber

It’d be weird if you went to a cocktail party and then proceeded to have the exact same conversation with everyone, whether you had met them before or not. 

But that’s what you’re doing with your email when you send everyone the same thing. You’re assuming that the new subscriber with no idea who you are is similar enough to the past buyer who’s been reading your emails for the past year that it’d be okay for you to send them the same thing. 

You may have heard that email marketing has the highest ROI of any digital marketing activity. Time and again studies by Experian, Econsultancy, MarketingSherpa, Forrester demonstrate that users like communicating with brands through email, use email to make purchasing decisions, and buy things that are relevant and of interest to them. 

In summary, email is good, but personalized email is better.

So how can we personalize for new subscribers? 

You might already be doing it. Depending on where your subscribers join, they likely get dropped into an on-boarding sequence. Maybe its a 5 or 10 email autoresponder, a PDF download they signed up for, or even just a double opt in confirmation email.

If you think about it, most every new subscriber gets welcomed. And the open rates on those welcome emails are insane. This is great…

But then they get dumped into your broadcast emails. 

What if instead of that one welcome email or that 5 day sequence, you extended the on-boarding process to 30 days, and you used that 30 days to automate some of your segmentation work?

Then it’d be one and done.

How to determine a new subscriber’s “mindset” and tag them accordingly

There are a lot of ways to do this:

• You could use a quiz or survey where you just ask them what they’re interested in or why they signed up.
• You could create a list of resources by interest and tag them based on which interest they clicked.
• You could look at what page they signed up from and tag them based on the category of that post.

If you can’t come up with a good starting point, you could just ask open ended questions and start segmenting based on patterns in the responses.

In the next post, we discuss why the first 30 days a new subscriber is on your list is the most paramount to your business’ continued success.