A reader sent me an email over the weekend asking why he needed to submit his email address for my Twitter WordPress Integration Guide when he was already a member of my mailing list after downloading How to Become a Freelance Blogger.

I responded to him explaining how and why I use multiple lists on this blog to segment my subscribers into more focussed groups.

Why Use Multiple Lists?

I use Aweber as my email service provider.  They let you have as many different lists as you like under the one account.  You only pay for the number of total subscribers you have.

If you run several different blogs or websites the benefits of this are obvious.  You can have one single Aweber account and manage all of your different lists within that account, each having its own subscribers, autoresponders, reporting stats, and so on.

Taking it a step further, you can use multiple lists for the one blog or website too.  This might seem confusing to some people, as it did to the reader who emailed me.

The reason I do this is so that each list can have:

• Its own signup incentives
• Its own focussed topic
• Its own series of follow up messages

Here is a diagram to illustrate this point.

In this example, List #1 is the general mailing list, and List #2 and #3 have their own special free content design to attract signups.

So how do we build a single mailing list for a blog when we’re splitting signups into three separate lists?  The answer is in the Aweber feature called “automation”.

Using Aweber Automation

Aweber’s automation feature lets you configure special rules so that when people signup to a list they are automatically added to or removed from another list.  This is the feature you can use to transfer subscribers from a “leads” list to a “buyers” list, so that they stop receiving your pre-sales marketing materials and start receiving your after-sales content instead (ie, you don’t want to keep promoting a product to someone once they’ve bought it).

I use automation rules to add new subscribers from either of my lists into my main blog mailing list.  So for example when someone signs up to List #2 for the free ebook, they are also added to the general mailing list.

In the spirit of “permission marketing” it is important that you always make it clear during signup that the person is also signing up to your general mailing list when they signup to receive your free content.

Delivering Content to Multiple Lists

Once you have multiple lists running with automation rules in place you can set up different autoresponder series and other content for each list accordingly.

For blogs with a very tight, focussed niche this might not be necessary.  But for blogs that have a broader set of topics this is a very effective way of segmenting your subscribers so that you can deliver people content that interests them.

Using my own blog as an example, I have a general mailing list that I send my latest blog posts to, a second list for people who downloaded my Twitter guide, and a third list for people who downloaded my freelance blogging guide.  People who downloaded my Twitter guide might have no interest at all in freelance blogging, so I don’t send them any of the follow up content for that topic.

Here is how the content delivery might look over time for multiple lists.

In the example above, a person who signs up for the free ecourse will receive each of the lessons via email at the pre-configured intervals, followed by a final upsell message to a paid course.  Meanwhile they will also be automatically added to the general mailing list to receive the latest blog posts, newsletters, and any other special broadcasts that are sent to that list.

Downsides to this Technique

There are a few downsides to this mailing list technique depending on how you look at each one.

Firstly, a subscriber who is signed up to two of your lists counts as two “subscribers” from a billing perspective.  You might choose to ignore this cost as it is quite small in comparison to the revenue you can potentially generate from that subscriber, as well as the long term benefit of having them on your general mailing list.

Another way of dealing with this cost issue is by purging your list of older subscribers.  If a subscriber has a finite usefulness on a given list, eg they have reached the end of a series and received all of your follow up marketing messages, you could choose to remove them from your lists through the Aweber account tools.  Or you might look at your open and click rates, and filter out those who have never opened one of your messages and remove them from your lists.

A second possible downside is that subscribers who signup using multiple email addresses may receive some duplicate emails.  This might annoy them and lead to complaints and unsubcribes.  This problem will definitely come up from time to time, because people have a habit of appending special identifiers to the email addresses they submit to list signups as a means of identifying spam sources.  Be prepared for this potential backlash, though I would expect it to be fairly minor.

Summary

Whether this method is right for you depends on your blog’s topic and your plans for list building and email marketing.  If you have a broad topic and want to offer multiple signup incentives to visitors then the techniques I described above could be the way to go.

Image Credit: Flickr

Tagged as: Aweber, Email Marketing, Mailing Lists