list segmentation

Andrew is the Aussie bloke living in the U.S.; Heather is the American gal living in Australia. Together, they travel the world sharing strategies on how to put your business on autopilot. Doing business online is no longer about having a website. To get more clients and take care of the ones you have, you’ll need a map. They’ve got it. So, sit back and relax, and welcome aboard. This flight is bound to Autopilot Your Business.

Andrew McCauley: On today’s podcast, we are talking about list segmentation.

MC: Have you picked up our online survival guide yet? Get prepped for the future of online marketing by going to www.aybguide.com.

Andrew McCauley: Hey everybody! This is Andrew McCauley! Welcome to Podcast #72! Today, we’re going to dig into list segmentation. What does that mean? Why is it important for your business and how you can do it effectively? Because it is one of those things that, if you get it right, it can be extremely valuable for your business.

Heather Porter is coming in all the way from sunny – or maybe not so sunny – cool Sydney. Hey, H!

Heather Porter: You got the cool part right! Hi!

Andrew McCauley: So, we’ve had a week off because you have been moving your establishment, your house.

Heather Porter: Yes, I have. I’ve gone through one of those tremendous, stressful life moments called moving!

Andrew McCauley: So, that’s why we missed a week last week because you were head-high in boxes, trying to find your microphone and your computer, right?

Heather Porter: That’s exactly right, and the Internet connection. So, here I am in my new place and I am in my cool new, I call it, the industrial office aka “garage.”

Andrew McCauley: Oh, yes, we all love the garage.

Heather Porter: Garage offices are great.

Andrew McCauley: They are good. They are good, depending on certain aspects like, if it’s too hot or too cold, that could not be a good thing.

Heather Porter: Yes, exactly.

Andrew McCauley: So, tell me what’s been going on. What have you learnt this week?

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Heather Porter: Yes. Look, we were just finishing setting up a website for a client of ours and we’ve set up their shopping cart using WooCommerce. We’ve talked about WooCommerce before. It’s a free plug-in and it’s really for WordPress, of course, and it allows you to have a shopping cart which is basically where you have a load of items and you can click Add to Cart, Add to Cart, Checkout.

Now, what we have set up – which I learned as well – is there’s this thing called Groups that you can also set up with WooCommerce and what it allows you to do is set up, say, like a VIP group and then assign that to either all of your products or certain products. So, if somebody buys a product, they’re automatically given access to a VIP area of your site, or VIP access, I suppose. So, what does that mean? It means that you can entice people to buy stuff in your shopping cart in exchange for getting access to a private area of your site. So, you could say, “Spend $10 with us,” so you would basically assign all the $10-products and more, this group, “Spend $10 with us and also get access to our special VIP area where you get cheat sheets and video tutorials and things like that.” Really cool, easy thing to install if you’re a WooCommerce person.

Andrew McCauley: That sort of fits in with our segmentation topic today, too.

Heather Porter: Yes, it does. So, that was one of the many things.

I also did a really cool little mentoring chat for The Entourage which is an incredible organization here in Australia which basically is helping to grow small businesses across Australia. They do these amazing events and I pop in every now and again and give my words of wisdom. So, that was quite good as well.

Andrew McCauley: Splendid!

Heather Porter: What about you?

Andrew McCauley: You know, I have just gone through, over here, they had the WWDC – that’s not the wrestling federation, it’s the Worldwide Developer Conference that Apple puts on and this is where Apple talk about all their latest updates and gizmos and gadgets.

One of the things that they were doing which I thought is going to be pretty cool, you know, we’ve spoken about images and how important they are in our whole world, but they have just revamped the photos app for their iOS8 – their next version of the iOS platform – and they’re basically having some smart editing tools that are going to synch all your edits across all devices.

So, if you’re on your phone and you want to edit – you know, put some filters over the top or create an image, put some cool things on your images – it’s going to synch






it all through the cloud to wherever else you have that image as well. So, if you’ve got the images on your iPad, when you create that new image, it’s going to automatically update it and synch it which is going to be pretty cool.

So, I just think that cloud technology is going to be massive for us. It already is massive, but I think it’s going to be even bigger because devices can only get smaller if they’ve got no memory chips in them. All this memory stuff is going to be stored on the cloud. So, I think we’re going to see some really fascinating ways to be using cloud coming up.

You know, there’s things like Whispersynch technology which is Amazon’s technology that lets you read a book on your Kindle and then pick up exactly where you left off on another device, and that’s all cloud-based sort of stuff. So, there’s going to be some pretty cool stuff coming up and Apple are just jumping into this cloud stuff right now.

So, that’s what I had learned this week.

Heather Porter: Nice. And were you recording something as well? Videos?

Andrew McCauley: Was I recording some videos?

Heather Porter: Are you still doing the TV show thing?

Andrew McCauley: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Heather Porter: Yes, is that kind of a secret you can’t talk about yet?

Andrew McCauley: No, yeah, we did that the other day. Yeah, it’s pretty cool. We’re recording a show. We call the show “Slump Busters” and it’s all about businesses that are going through seasonal changes. You know, there’s businesses where I am in the desert right now, it’s coming into summer and everyone disappears because it’s too hot – except me. But there are businesses that still need to run through the summer and there’s businesses all over the world that suffer seasonal challenges so we do a little TV show for people that are in seasonal communities where we help them sort of get themselves ready for the low season so they can really make sure that they’re not dropping the ball and losing all their cash.

Heather Porter: That’s cool. Is it available yet for anybody to check out?

Andrew McCauley: Not yet. We’ve got a whole bunch of pilots together, but I will share the link with you as soon as I can, actually.

Heather Porter: Good. Yes, please! And I know all of us would like to see that because that’s an interesting topic and, yeah, I like that.






So, list segmentation.

Andrew McCauley: Yeah.

Heather Porter: So, this is really ultimately about having a conversation online. It is about giving the people that come to your business online the information that they want rather than blanket information. It is incredibly powerful, as Andrew said. We love it. We’re working it into our business more and helping others do the same.

So, what is it? I guess, what is list segmentation? So, I guess, the best way to talk about it is this: most of us have an opt-in form on our website and we’ve giving away either a newsletter, an ebook, a cheat sheet, or a video. I mean, we’ve given you guys loads of information. You actually should listen to our Party Starter episode because we’ll give you ideas on what to give away. But you’re giving that away and that’s one item. Most businesses, if they do that, if they’re lucky, they’ll do the auto-responder emails that follow-up and that’s about it. And that’s, again, one topic, one series of emails, and that’s it.

So, what everybody’s missing when you’re not going further than that is the actual deeper level conversations of specific topics within what your business does because, if you can get that specific, imagine how powerful it would be. You’d really almost be inside the head of the person reading your email, wouldn’t you?

Andrew McCauley: Yeah, definitely, and I think it’s getting more and more intelligent, too. You know, websites are becoming more and more intelligent. I think that, if you can start to segment your lists from now, you’re going to start finding some pretty amazing results.

Heather Porter: Absolutely. So, let’s start with what you need – what sort of systems or tools you need to do something like this.

Now, we work in two systems. Bigger level system that we use is Office Autopilot – currently being rebranded to Ontraport – that’s what we use. But there’s another big system out there called Infusionsoft that a lot of people use that’s a very similar system. That’s the top-level system that allows you to do segmentation very easily because it comes with rules.

So, essentially, if you send out an email, you can set up a rule that says, “If somebody clicks on the link in this email, then add them into this group over here.” So, if you, for example, have an email that’s talking about – let’s use personal training as our example, I guess, for this show because it’s easy – so you have an email that’s going out and it’s saying, “Hey, guys! You know, this is an amazing article I just wrote on how to build muscle.” Now, some people would love that topic and they’re going to click on that link. So then, what you would do is set up a rule






that says, “If they click on that link, add them to a new group called the Muscle Builders,” you know? And so, suddenly, you have this new group formulating that’s on the side from your main list.

So, Office Autopilot and Infusionsoft have these rules that are beautiful to allow you to do that. So, as you grow as a business and you look at doing segmentation, I highly recommend that you go to a rule-based sort of program.

Andrew McCauley: So, when you say rules, just so people understand, it’s essentially like an “if this happens, then do this” basically, right?

Heather Porter: Correct. Yeah.

Andrew McCauley: If one thing occurs, then you need to do something. And, if nothing occurs, then do something else.

Heather Porter: Exactly.

Andrew McCauley: So, if you can think about the rules being, “If something happens, then something else needs to happen.” So, if somebody clicks on my link, then do this. If somebody opens my email, then do this. So, you can really segment according to the topics that you’re creating.

Heather Porter: Exactly. And so, suddenly, on Autopilot, when you send out an email, things happening behind the scenes, and then the next time you go into your email platform, you can see, “Okay, cool! So, I have a Muscle Builder group of 100 people. I have people that are interested in food – I have 50 of those. And I only have 10 that are interested in weight-loss. How interesting! You know, my list really, I should be talking more about food and muscle building.”

So, that’s the bigger picture. Now, there are other platforms.

The other one we use that’s a lower level is MailChimp. There’s AWeber, there’s Constant Contact, there’s loads of them as well. But, MailChimp, I’ll just use that as an example.

So, it’s build where you have lists. So, essentially, you can set up an unlimited amount of lists and you can have people go into those lists from either manually entering them or from what’s called web forms. So, you can stick these little sign-up forms anywhere you want online – on your website – and direct people to them.

But what it doesn’t have is that whole rule thing. So, you still can segment – absolutely. You can do that through forms in different pages of your site which we’ll talk about in a second. But the only thing you can’t really do is actually have people,






when they click on a link, go from this email list to another email list. You have to do it more creatively.

Andrew McCauley: Now, the difference between MailChimp and Office Autopilot or Ontraport is about $350, right?

Heather Porter: Yeah.

Andrew McCauley: Per month.

Heather Porter: If you have sort of a list of 1,000 or so in MailChimp, you’re paying about $20 a month. And then, Ontrareport is around $300 a month. So, it is a big difference so that’s why you want to get a bigger list and actually be monetizing and making money from that list online before you consider going from Point A to Point B and getting bigger systems.

Andrew McCauley: So, give us a quick rundown of what are some of the things. We spoke about the fitness – you know, the diet and the muscles and that sort of stuff. What other things could you segment? What sort of criteria could you segment, do you think?

Heather Porter: The way I look at it is that you first want to start at the end and work backwards. So, you’re thinking about what is the signature product or service that your business is offering and you want to then break that apart into different topics that you will teach or the person will get from you if they sign up for that product or service.

So, for example, if you’re a personal trainer, maybe your signature program is a six-week weight-loss program or a six-week training program and you basically, as part of that, you know, you get an ebook, you get one-on-one sessions, that sort of stuff. And you might be teaching how to lose weight, how to eat better, how to build muscle, posture techniques – like, that could even be something you’d teach – how to breathe properly, how to meditate – all the different topics that you would include in what you do with the client, those are different topics that you could then segment your list into.

Andrew McCauley: I’ll tell you one of my biggest pet hates is, if I’m on somebody’s list and I’ve purchased their product. I’ve bought their product, okay? It doesn’t matter what price it is, but I’ve bought their product and then they send me an email, a day or two or a week later, trying to get me to buy the product. And I’m like, “Why are you telling me this? I’ve already bought your product.”

Heather Porter: Yes.

Andrew McCauley: You know, this is a perfect example of segmentation, right?






Heather Porter: It’s great.

Andrew McCauley: It’s like, “Get me out of your prospect list and put me into your customer list because I’ve already purchased it. Don’t try and sell it to me again. I’m going to get annoyed.”

Heather Porter: That’s such a good point. So, when people are actually starting to monetize their lists online just like that, that is so important to move into bigger systems where what happens is it says, “If somebody buys this particular program, remove them from my prospect list and put them into my buyers list.” So then, you no longer promote to them.

Andrew McCauley: Yeah, and then one other one I want to bring up is that we’re going through this process right now is our inactive subscribers. You know, we’ve had people on our list for a number of years – some of them, they might lose their email address or they may just be busy and they don’t read stuff. So, you know, we’re putting a process together to find out – we don’t want to write them off completely but we want to have an inactive list. So, it’s like, “Okay, we’ve got a list of X amount of people. Maybe it would be beneficial for us to have a smaller list that have a better open rate rather than a massive list with a small open rate,” and I’m talking a small open rate of five to ten percent. I’d rather have a smaller list with an open rate of 30 to 40 to 50 percent which means at least half of my list is getting to see what’s going on. And then, I’m keeping those up-to-date and I’m getting rid of – not getting rid of completely but segmenting the right people into my list. So, everything about how you can get rid of inactive subscribers as well.

Heather Porter: And that’s exactly what we’ve been doing, and you’re right. Like, suddenly, we had a lower open rate for our entire list, but as we’re starting to segment for specific topics and then we’re sending out content – you know, valuable content just covering those specific topics to the people that want them – we are getting sort of what? 40 percent I think it was open rates.

Andrew McCauley: Yeah, that’s amazing. Yeah, we’re blown away.

Heather Porter: We were amazed. This stuff really, really does work, and why wouldn’t it if you think about? You’re giving people the exact thing microchunked down to the exact topic that they want to learn instead of a bigger picture.

Like, for us, online marketing would be the big, big picture, but chunking way down. We could even go as low as how to set up a WordPress website.







Heather Porter: And then, just give content around there. So, I guess those are some ideas.

So, we’ve talked about specifically rules, but that’s not going to apply to a lot of you. You probably have lower-end or smaller email platforms. What you can do is use forms – like I said before, web forms.

So, the best way to think of this is you think about, again, the topics that are in your signature product or service. And then, you start to create content based on each of those topics. If, say, you’re writing a blog post on what to eat, for example, you would then have an opt-in form at the bottom of that blog post that says, “Do you like what you see? We would love to give you our free recipe book. Go ahead and enter your details here.” So, now, suddenly you have just that form that appears on your website just to any of the categories around food. So, now, when people are reading about food, they’re going straight into your food list from there, if they sign in.

And you can even, like, if you guys want to get really fancy, you can hire a web developer and you can say to the web developer, “Look, I have ten different lists, ten different forms, can you please assign or make that form for this specific topic pop up automatically underneath my blog post that I tag to this category on food?”

So, it can be automated for you. If you literally get smart enough to go, “These are my ten topics, this is what I’m always going to write on. Here’s my ten opt-in forms or my ten lists,” then you can actually kind of put that more automated.

Andrew McCauley: That’s a pretty fancy thing to do.

Heather Porter: It’s fancy and it is worth it.

Andrew McCauley: Yeah, really. Love it, love it.

Heather Porter: So, oftentimes, we see underneath a blog post, it says, ‘Do you like what you see? Get more of this,” and then it just puts people into a newsletter. In this case, it’s putting people into segmented lists instead.

Andrew McCauley: Awesome, awesome.

Heather Porter: So, that’s what you do with social media as well – same thing. You might have a series of landing pages, ten different landing pages using a tool like lead pages which we love where you can easily build little mini web pages that get people to opt into these ten particular topics that you have.

So, if you’re tweeting, you might say, “Hey, I just released my cool recipe book. You want to check out? Come on over here,” and then people go to that same landing






page, same list, same recipe book that you already have on your blogs into that same food list. So, you can use it in that way as well.

Andrew McCauley: You can do that with LeadBoxes as well, actually.

Heather Porter: That’s right, yeah!

Andrew McCauley: You don’t even need to have landing pages. LeadBoxes is the same company as LeadPages. Basically, you put a link there and, when they click on the link, a little box pops open. They enter their details. You’re done!


Andrew McCauley: So, have a look at LeadBoxes. That could be an option for you, too.

Heather Porter: Yeah, absolutely. If you want to know more about LeadPages, LeadBoxes, where to go, you can just go to our show notes which are on autopilotyourbusiness.com/podcast and then you just pop on over to this episode. What are we on? 72?

Andrew McCauley: 72.

Heather Porter: 72 and in there you’ll have the links so you can just go to the website and click from there straight into these amazing resources that we love and use in our business as well.

Andrew McCauley: Absolutely, yes. I was just muting my microphone because I had some noisy backgrounds.

Heather Porter: Yes, Andrew is a father and Andrew has a couple of little boys where, you know, those of you with children, when you tend to do something important such as the phone or a podcast and your video-making, that is the moment when they tend to appear.

Andrew McCauley: You know what? I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you a funny side-note. So, my youngest one, he’s two-and-a-half. For some reason, he gets freaked out when the sprinklers come on and, I know, I can see out the window, they’ve just come on and he was trapped between the fence and the sprinklers.

Heather Porter: That’s funny.

Andrew McCauley: So, he was having a freak-out, so my apologies for the screaming in the background. Nobody died in our creation of this podcast.







So, I guess for me, I’d like to just leave you guys with this to think about. Work backwards. Go with main product or service that you are selling in your business. Break it into chunks or topics. And then, think about those as lists – email lists. And then, start to develop out content for each of those lists that you can actually create different lead funnels for. So, you’re actually doing auto-responders once somebody comes into that particular list that’s separate to that.

And the best way to look at this so you cut the overwhelm is one by one. I mean, you could be working on this over the next year, two years, but just start on it. You know, take your main list and think, “Okay. What could be the first topic that I could actually start to work on over the next month?”

Andrew McCauley: Love it! Love the short podcast – punchy, short, to the point, beautiful.

Now, where can people find out more about our resources?

Heather Porter: Yeah. You know, actually, aybpodcast.com – if you pop over there, we have a really cool resource guide. This is basically all the tools that we use in our business for automation. How many pages? It’s good. It’s a good guide, guys. It has a lot of good stuff in it.

Andrew McCauley: I put a lot of work in that one.

Heather Porter: So, aybpodcast.com is where you find that. As always, you can pop on over to autopilotyourbusiness.com/podcast and that’s where you’re going to get our show notes, transcriptions so you can basically download PDFs of our shows and have them with you to read more about what we’re talking about if you prefer to read, and all sorts of other cool little things. So, pop on over there as well.

Andrew McCauley: If you are listening to us on iTunes, please leave us a review! Leave us some stars – five – and leave us a review. If you’re listening to us on Stitcher or PodOmatic or Spreaker or iHeartRadio, any of those, we’d love to hear from you as well.

So, that was good, H! I love it.

Heather Porter: Yeah!

Andrew McCauley: Short, sharp, and to the point.

Heather Porter: Oftentimes, the most powerful things in your business are simple.






Andrew McCauley: Yes. Oh, well, good to catch up with you. I’m glad you’ve moved into your house.

Heather Porter: Thank you.

Andrew McCauley: And I look forward to seeing you next week, speaking to you next week.

Heather Porter: Yeah, absolutely, and thanks guys for tuning in once again. Talk soon.

Andrew McCauley: Okay. Bye!

MC: Make sure to grab our free business automation guide now and get access to other special bonuses. Head on over to aybpodcast.com.

All passengers and cabin crew should now be seated with their seatbelt securely fastened. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the first officer speaking. On behalf of your captains, Andrew McCauley and Heather Porter, we would like to thank you for taking the journey with us to Autopilot Your Business. You are now closer to putting your own business on autopilot using the Internet.

Of course, if you would like to rack up some frequent flyer points, visit our website www.AutopilotYourBusiness.com or check us out on Facebook at Facebook.com/AutopilotYourBusiness. These frequent flyer points are totally useless but the information is gold.

Until we fly again, happy travels!





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Andrew is the Aussie bloke living in the U.S.; Heather is the American gal living in Australia. Together, they travel the world sharing strategies on how to put your business on autopilot. Doing business online is no longer about having a website. To get more clients and take care of the ones you have, you’ll need a map. They’ve got it. So, sit back and relax, and welcome aboard. This flight is bound to Autopilot Your Business.

Andrew McCauley: On today’s podcast, we are talking about list segmentation.

MC: Have you picked up our online survival guide yet? Get prepped for the future of online marketing by going to www.aybguide.com.

Andrew McCauley: Hey everybody! This is Andrew McCauley! Welcome to Podcast #72! Today, we’re going to dig into list segmentation. What does that mean? Why is it important for your business and how you can do it effectively? Because it is one of those things that, if you get it right, it can be extremely valuable for your business.

Heather Porter is coming in all the way from sunny – or maybe not so sunny – cool Sydney. Hey, H!

Heather Porter: You got the cool part right! Hi!

Andrew McCauley: So, we’ve had a week off because you have been moving your establishment, your house.

Heather Porter: Yes, I have. I’ve gone through one of those tremendous, stressful life moments called moving!

Andrew McCauley: So, that’s why we missed a week last week because you were head-high in boxes, trying to find your microphone and your computer, right?

Heather Porter: That’s exactly right, and the Internet connection. So, here I am in my new place and I am in my cool new, I call it, the industrial office aka “garage.”

Andrew McCauley: Oh, yes, we all love the garage.

Heather Porter: Garage offices are great.

Andrew McCauley: They are good. They are good, depending on certain aspects like, if it’s too hot or too cold, that could not be a good thing.

Heather Porter: Yes, exactly.

Andrew McCauley: So, tell me what’s been going on. What have you learnt this week?



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Heather Porter: Yes. Look, we were just finishing setting up a website for a client of ours and we’ve set up their shopping cart using WooCommerce. We’ve talked about WooCommerce before. It’s a free plug-in and it’s really for WordPress, of course, and it allows you to have a shopping cart which is basically where you have a load of items and you can click Add to Cart, Add to Cart, Checkout.

Now, what we have set up – which I learned as well – is there’s this thing called Groups that you can also set up with WooCommerce and what it allows you to do is set up, say, like a VIP group and then assign that to either all of your products or certain products. So, if somebody buys a product, they’re automatically given access to a VIP area of your site, or VIP access, I suppose. So, what does that mean? It means that you can entice people to buy stuff in your shopping cart in exchange for getting access to a private area of your site. So, you could say, “Spend $10 with us,” so you would basically assign all the $10-products and more, this group, “Spend $10 with us and also get access to our special VIP area where you get cheat sheets and video tutorials and things like that.” Really cool, easy thing to install if you’re a WooCommerce person.

Andrew McCauley: That sort of fits in with our segmentation topic today, too.

Heather Porter: Yes, it does. So, that was one of the many things.

I also did a really cool little mentoring chat for The Entourage which is an incredible organization here in Australia which basically is helping to grow small businesses across Australia. They do these amazing events and I pop in every now and again and give my words of wisdom. So, that was quite good as well.

Andrew McCauley: Splendid!

Heather Porter: What about you?

Andrew McCauley: You know, I have just gone through, over here, they had the WWDC – that’s not the wrestling federation, it’s the Worldwide Developer Conference that Apple puts on and this is where Apple talk about all their latest updates and gizmos and gadgets.

One of the things that they were doing which I thought is going to be pretty cool, you know, we’ve spoken about images and how important they are in our whole world, but they have just revamped the photos app for their iOS8 – their next version of the iOS platform – and they’re basically having some smart editing tools that are going to synch all your edits across all devices.

So, if you’re on your phone and you want to edit – you know, put some filters over the top or create an image, put some cool things on your images – it’s going to synch






it all through the cloud to wherever else you have that image as well. So, if you’ve got the images on your iPad, when you create that new image, it’s going to automatically update it and synch it which is going to be pretty cool.

So, I just think that cloud technology is going to be massive for us. It already is massive, but I think it’s going to be even bigger because devices can only get smaller if they’ve got no memory chips in them. All this memory stuff is going to be stored on the cloud. So, I think we’re going to see some really fascinating ways to be using cloud coming up.

You know, there’s things like Whispersynch technology which is Amazon’s technology that lets you read a book on your Kindle and then pick up exactly where you left off on another device, and that’s all cloud-based sort of stuff. So, there’s going to be some pretty cool stuff coming up and Apple are just jumping into this cloud stuff right now.

So, that’s what I had learned this week.

Heather Porter: Nice. And were you recording something as well? Videos?

Andrew McCauley: Was I recording some videos?

Heather Porter: Are you still doing the TV show thing?

Andrew McCauley: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Heather Porter: Yes, is that kind of a secret you can’t talk about yet?

Andrew McCauley: No, yeah, we did that the other day. Yeah, it’s pretty cool. We’re recording a show. We call the show “Slump Busters” and it’s all about businesses that are going through seasonal changes. You know, there’s businesses where I am in the desert right now, it’s coming into summer and everyone disappears because it’s too hot – except me. But there are businesses that still need to run through the summer and there’s businesses all over the world that suffer seasonal challenges so we do a little TV show for people that are in seasonal communities where we help them sort of get themselves ready for the low season so they can really make sure that they’re not dropping the ball and losing all their cash.

Heather Porter: That’s cool. Is it available yet for anybody to check out?

Andrew McCauley: Not yet. We’ve got a whole bunch of pilots together, but I will share the link with you as soon as I can, actually.

Heather Porter: Good. Yes, please! And I know all of us would like to see that because that’s an interesting topic and, yeah, I like that.






So, list segmentation.


Heather Porter: So, this is really ultimately about having a conversation online. It is about giving the people that come to your business online the information that they want rather than blanket information. It is incredibly powerful, as Andrew said. We love it. We’re working it into our business more and helping others do the same.

So, what is it? I guess, what is list segmentation? So, I guess, the best way to talk about it is this: most of us have an opt-in form on our website and we’ve giving away either a newsletter, an ebook, a cheat sheet, or a video. I mean, we’ve given you guys loads of information. You actually should listen to our Party Starter episode because we’ll give you ideas on what to give away. But you’re giving that away and that’s one item. Most businesses, if they do that, if they’re lucky, they’ll do the auto-responder emails that follow-up and that’s about it. And that’s, again, one topic, one series of emails, and that’s it.

So, what everybody’s missing when you’re not going further than that is the actual deeper level conversations of specific topics within what your business does because, if you can get that specific, imagine how powerful it would be. You’d really almost be inside the head of the person reading your email, wouldn’t you?

Andrew McCauley: Yeah, definitely, and I think it’s getting more and more intelligent, too. You know, websites are becoming more and more intelligent. I think that, if you can start to segment your lists from now, you’re going to start finding some pretty amazing results.

Heather Porter: Absolutely. So, let’s start with what you need – what sort of systems or tools you need to do something like this.

Now, we work in two systems. Bigger level system that we use is Office Autopilot – currently being rebranded to Ontraport – that’s what we use. But there’s another big system out there called Infusionsoft that a lot of people use that’s a very similar system. That’s the top-level system that allows you to do segmentation very easily because it comes with rules.

So, essentially, if you send out an email, you can set up a rule that says, “If somebody clicks on the link in this email, then add them into this group over here.” So, if you, for example, have an email that’s talking about – let’s use personal training as our example, I guess, for this show because it’s easy – so you have an email that’s going out and it’s saying, “Hey, guys! You know, this is an amazing article I just wrote on how to build muscle.” Now, some people would love that topic and they’re going to click on that link. So then, what you would do is set up a rule






that says, “If they click on that link, add them to a new group called the Muscle Builders,” you know? And so, suddenly, you have this new group formulating that’s on the side from your main list.

So, Office Autopilot and Infusionsoft have these rules that are beautiful to allow you to do that. So, as you grow as a business and you look at doing segmentation, I highly recommend that you go to a rule-based sort of program.

Andrew McCauley: So, when you say rules, just so people understand, it’s essentially like an “if this happens, then do this” basically, right?

Heather Porter: Correct. Yeah.

Andrew McCauley: If one thing occurs, then you need to do something. And, if nothing occurs, then do something else.

Heather Porter: Exactly.

Andrew McCauley: So, if you can think about the rules being, “If something happens, then something else needs to happen.” So, if somebody clicks on my link, then do this. If somebody opens my email, then do this. So, you can really segment according to the topics that you’re creating.

Heather Porter: Exactly. And so, suddenly, on Autopilot, when you send out an email, things happening behind the scenes, and then the next time you go into your email platform, you can see, “Okay, cool! So, I have a Muscle Builder group of 100 people. I have people that are interested in food – I have 50 of those. And I only have 10 that are interested in weight-loss. How interesting! You know, my list really, I should be talking more about food and muscle building.”

So, that’s the bigger picture. Now, there are other platforms.

The other one we use that’s a lower level is MailChimp. There’s AWeber, there’s Constant Contact, there’s loads of them as well. But, MailChimp, I’ll just use that as an example.

So, it’s build where you have lists. So, essentially, you can set up an unlimited amount of lists and you can have people go into those lists from either manually entering them or from what’s called web forms. So, you can stick these little sign-up forms anywhere you want online – on your website – and direct people to them.

But what it doesn’t have is that whole rule thing. So, you still can segment – absolutely. You can do that through forms in different pages of your site which we’ll talk about in a second. But the only thing you can’t really do is actually have people,






when they click on a link, go from this email list to another email list. You have to do it more creatively.

Andrew McCauley: Now, the difference between MailChimp and Office Autopilot or Ontraport is about $350, right?


Andrew McCauley: Per month.

Heather Porter: If you have sort of a list of 1,000 or so in MailChimp, you’re paying about $20 a month. And then, Ontrareport is around $300 a month. So, it is a big difference so that’s why you want to get a bigger list and actually be monetizing and making money from that list online before you consider going from Point A to Point B and getting bigger systems.

Andrew McCauley: So, give us a quick rundown of what are some of the things. We spoke about the fitness – you know, the diet and the muscles and that sort of stuff. What other things could you segment? What sort of criteria could you segment, do you think?

Heather Porter: The way I look at it is that you first want to start at the end and work backwards. So, you’re thinking about what is the signature product or service that your business is offering and you want to then break that apart into different topics that you will teach or the person will get from you if they sign up for that product or service.

So, for example, if you’re a personal trainer, maybe your signature program is a six-week weight-loss program or a six-week training program and you basically, as part of that, you know, you get an ebook, you get one-on-one sessions, that sort of stuff. And you might be teaching how to lose weight, how to eat better, how to build muscle, posture techniques – like, that could even be something you’d teach – how to breathe properly, how to meditate – all the different topics that you would include in what you do with the client, those are different topics that you could then segment your list into.

Andrew McCauley: I’ll tell you one of my biggest pet hates is, if I’m on somebody’s list and I’ve purchased their product. I’ve bought their product, okay? It doesn’t matter what price it is, but I’ve bought their product and then they send me an email, a day or two or a week later, trying to get me to buy the product. And I’m like, “Why are you telling me this? I’ve already bought your product.”

Heather Porter: Yes.

Andrew McCauley: You know, this is a perfect example of segmentation, right?







Andrew McCauley: It’s like, “Get me out of your prospect list and put me into your customer list because I’ve already purchased it. Don’t try and sell it to me again. I’m going to get annoyed.”

Heather Porter: That’s such a good point. So, when people are actually starting to monetize their lists online just like that, that is so important to move into bigger systems where what happens is it says, “If somebody buys this particular program, remove them from my prospect list and put them into my buyers list.” So then, you no longer promote to them.

Andrew McCauley: Yeah, and then one other one I want to bring up is that we’re going through this process right now is our inactive subscribers. You know, we’ve had people on our list for a number of years – some of them, they might lose their email address or they may just be busy and they don’t read stuff. So, you know, we’re putting a process together to find out – we don’t want to write them off completely but we want to have an inactive list. So, it’s like, “Okay, we’ve got a list of X amount of people. Maybe it would be beneficial for us to have a smaller list that have a better open rate rather than a massive list with a small open rate,” and I’m talking a small open rate of five to ten percent. I’d rather have a smaller list with an open rate of 30 to 40 to 50 percent which means at least half of my list is getting to see what’s going on. And then, I’m keeping those up-to-date and I’m getting rid of – not getting rid of completely but segmenting the right people into my list. So, everything about how you can get rid of inactive subscribers as well.

Heather Porter: And that’s exactly what we’ve been doing, and you’re right. Like, suddenly, we had a lower open rate for our entire list, but as we’re starting to segment for specific topics and then we’re sending out content – you know, valuable content just covering those specific topics to the people that want them – we are getting sort of what? 40 percent I think it was open rates.

Andrew McCauley: Yeah, that’s amazing. Yeah, we’re blown away.

Heather Porter: We were amazed. This stuff really, really does work, and why wouldn’t it if you think about? You’re giving people the exact thing microchunked down to the exact topic that they want to learn instead of a bigger picture.

Like, for us, online marketing would be the big, big picture, but chunking way down. We could even go as low as how to set up a WordPress website.







Heather Porter: And then, just give content around there. So, I guess those are some ideas.

So, we’ve talked about specifically rules, but that’s not going to apply to a lot of you. You probably have lower-end or smaller email platforms. What you can do is use forms – like I said before, web forms.

So, the best way to think of this is you think about, again, the topics that are in your signature product or service. And then, you start to create content based on each of those topics. If, say, you’re writing a blog post on what to eat, for example, you would then have an opt-in form at the bottom of that blog post that says, “Do you like what you see? We would love to give you our free recipe book. Go ahead and enter your details here.” So, now, suddenly you have just that form that appears on your website just to any of the categories around food. So, now, when people are reading about food, they’re going straight into your food list from there, if they sign in.

And you can even, like, if you guys want to get really fancy, you can hire a web developer and you can say to the web developer, “Look, I have ten different lists, ten different forms, can you please assign or make that form for this specific topic pop up automatically underneath my blog post that I tag to this category on food?”

So, it can be automated for you. If you literally get smart enough to go, “These are my ten topics, this is what I’m always going to write on. Here’s my ten opt-in forms or my ten lists,” then you can actually kind of put that more automated.

Andrew McCauley: That’s a pretty fancy thing to do.

Heather Porter: It’s fancy and it is worth it.

Andrew McCauley: Yeah, really. Love it, love it.

Heather Porter: So, oftentimes, we see underneath a blog post, it says, ‘Do you like what you see? Get more of this,” and then it just puts people into a newsletter. In this case, it’s putting people into segmented lists instead.

Andrew McCauley: Awesome, awesome.

Heather Porter: So, that’s what you do with social media as well – same thing. You might have a series of landing pages, ten different landing pages using a tool like lead pages which we love where you can easily build little mini web pages that get people to opt into these ten particular topics that you have.

So, if you’re tweeting, you might say, “Hey, I just released my cool recipe book. You want to check out? Come on over here,” and then people go to that same landing






page, same list, same recipe book that you already have on your blogs into that same food list. So, you can use it in that way as well.

Andrew McCauley: You can do that with LeadBoxes as well, actually.

Heather Porter: That’s right, yeah!

Andrew McCauley: You don’t even need to have landing pages. LeadBoxes is the same company as LeadPages. Basically, you put a link there and, when they click on the link, a little box pops open. They enter their details. You’re done!


Andrew McCauley: So, have a look at LeadBoxes. That could be an option for you, too.

Heather Porter: Yeah, absolutely. If you want to know more about LeadPages, LeadBoxes, where to go, you can just go to our show notes which are on autopilotyourbusiness.com/podcast and then you just pop on over to this episode. What are we on? 72?

Andrew McCauley: 72.

Heather Porter: 72 and in there you’ll have the links so you can just go to the website and click from there straight into these amazing resources that we love and use in our business as well.

Andrew McCauley: Absolutely, yes. I was just muting my microphone because I had some noisy backgrounds.

Heather Porter: Yes, Andrew is a father and Andrew has a couple of little boys where, you know, those of you with children, when you tend to do something important such as the phone or a podcast and your video-making, that is the moment when they tend to appear.

Andrew McCauley: You know what? I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you a funny side-note. So, my youngest one, he’s two-and-a-half. For some reason, he gets freaked out when the sprinklers come on and, I know, I can see out the window, they’ve just come on and he was trapped between the fence and the sprinklers.

Heather Porter: That’s funny.

Andrew McCauley: So, he was having a freak-out, so my apologies for the screaming in the background. Nobody died in our creation of this podcast.







So, I guess for me, I’d like to just leave you guys with this to think about. Work backwards. Go with main product or service that you are selling in your business. Break it into chunks or topics. And then, think about those as lists – email lists. And then, start to develop out content for each of those lists that you can actually create different lead funnels for. So, you’re actually doing auto-responders once somebody comes into that particular list that’s separate to that.

And the best way to look at this so you cut the overwhelm is one by one. I mean, you could be working on this over the next year, two years, but just start on it. You know, take your main list and think, “Okay. What could be the first topic that I could actually start to work on over the next month?”

Andrew McCauley: Love it! Love the short podcast – punchy, short, to the point, beautiful.

Now, where can people find out more about our resources?

Heather Porter: Yeah. You know, actually, aybpodcast.com – if you pop over there, we have a really cool resource guide. This is basically all the tools that we use in our business for automation. How many pages? It’s good. It’s a good guide, guys. It has a lot of good stuff in it.

Andrew McCauley: I put a lot of work in that one.

Heather Porter: So, aybpodcast.com is where you find that. As always, you can pop on over to autopilotyourbusiness.com/podcast and that’s where you’re going to get our show notes, transcriptions so you can basically download PDFs of our shows and have them with you to read more about what we’re talking about if you prefer to read, and all sorts of other cool little things. So, pop on over there as well.

Andrew McCauley: If you are listening to us on iTunes, please leave us a review! Leave us some stars – five – and leave us a review. If you’re listening to us on Stitcher or PodOmatic or Spreaker or iHeartRadio, any of those, we’d love to hear from you as well.

So, that was good, H! I love it.

Heather Porter: Yeah!

Andrew McCauley: Short, sharp, and to the point.

Heather Porter: Oftentimes, the most powerful things in your business are simple.






Andrew McCauley: Yes. Oh, well, good to catch up with you. I’m glad you’ve moved into your house.

Heather Porter: Thank you.

Andrew McCauley: And I look forward to seeing you next week, speaking to you next week.

Heather Porter: Yeah, absolutely, and thanks guys for tuning in once again. Talk soon.

Andrew McCauley: Okay. Bye!

MC: Make sure to grab our free business automation guide now and get access to other special bonuses. Head on over to aybpodcast.com.

All passengers and cabin crew should now be seated with their seatbelt securely fastened. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the first officer speaking. On behalf of your captains, Andrew McCauley and Heather Porter, we would like to thank you for taking the journey with us to Autopilot Your Business. You are now closer to putting your own business on autopilot using the Internet.

Of course, if you would like to rack up some frequent flyer points, visit our website www.AutopilotYourBusiness.com or check us out on Facebook at Facebook.com/AutopilotYourBusiness. These frequent flyer points are totally useless but the information is gold.

Until we fly again, happy travels!





http://www.AutopilotYourBusiness.com/


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