How to Tag & Segment Your Email Subscribers

There are so many different email marketing tips and tricks that can help grow your email list, improve open rates and retain subscribers—but there’s one important tip I recommend above them all:

Properly tagging & segmenting your email subscribers.

No matter which email marketing software you use (Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Flodesk, etc.), it most likely includes the ability to organize your email subscribers based on factors like how they opted in (where they came from!), what material they’re most interested in and engaged with, and how engaged they are in general.

Why you need to tag & segment your email list

I’ve mentioned before that, in general, it’s best to retain just one email list for your business, and segment that one list as needed. Here’s why:

Most email marketing tools are structured around subscribers, and you’re charged per subscriber, so you don’t want to have duplicates across multiple different lists.
If you have duplicate email subscribers across multiple lists, it’s possible you could send duplicate content to them… which is not ideal for their user experience, and increases the chances they’ll choose to unsubscribe or report your content as spam (uh oh!).
Unless you do actually need distinctly different lists for your business (which I’ll explain more below), you’re ultimately aiming to grow a list for one specific purpose—to grow an audience for your business and brand—and it’s easiest to focus on just one audience rather than a bunch of audiences that overlap.

There is a scenario in which it would make sense to maintain multiple “lists” for your email marketing: If you communicate with distinctly different groups that do not overlap.

For example, if you’re a nonprofit that needs to communicate both with donors and recipients of your services—those are two distinct groups of people to maintain different lists for, because there’s no overlap.

Now, the reason you want to incorporate “tagging” and “segmenting” in your email list is that, despite being on the same email list, not all of your subscribers are necessarily interested in the same content—and perhaps not all content is even relevant to them.

So, it’s helpful to have a way to organize and categorize your email subscribers so you can target certain groups—and not the others.

Tagging means adding a specific label to an email subscriber’s profile in your email marketing tool. (We’ll get into the different options for tagging below!)

Segmenting means working with your tags and/or other user data from your email marketing tool to send email campaigns to specific segments of your audience.

Ways of tagging & segmenting your email list

Here are some examples of why you’d want to be able to tag and segment (aka separate) your email subscribers into distinct groups:

Purchases or enrollment

It’s useful to know if (and what!) your email subscribers have already purchased from you.

For example, if you’ve designed an online course and you’re sending an email promoting it to your subscribers, you don’t want to try to sell it to people who have already purchased it—you want to exclude them from those marketing emails, which it doesn’t make sense for them to receive.

Sign-up source

There are likely several (if not many!) different ways subscribers join your email list. Maybe they signed up to receive your newsletter, or maybe they opted in to receive a certain freebie download.

It’s useful to know how specifically each subscriber opted in, as that can inform (or at least hint at) why they opted in, and what they’re interested in receiving from you.

For example, I have a variety of email opt-in offers. Some of my email subscribers are here because they’re interested in Squarespace web design, some are interested in building an online membership program, and some are interested in improving their website’s SEO.

Each of these people has a different interest area, different “pain point” (the problem they came to us looking to solve), and different types of content that would be useful and relevant to them.

Understanding where and how your subscribers opted in to your list is helpful for understanding how to continue engaging with them and offering content of interest and value (as well as understanding which of your paid programs or services would be relevant to offer them down the road).

Action completed

Sometimes it’s also useful to track if a specific action has been completed by a subscriber—for example, if they’ve finished a certain email sequence, or they’ve clicked a certain link. These actions can also generally be tagged in your email marketing platform.

How to tag your email subscribers in Mailchimp

We’ll walk through the specific steps for tagging subscribers in Mailchimp, though the same principles can generally be applied in other email marketing tools as well, like ConvertKit, Flodesk, and others.

Email addresses can be collected from your Squarespace website via either:

the Squarespace newsletter block (which has a built-in integration with Mailchimp, if you’re on the Business plan or higher)
or embedded opt-in forms from your email marketing platform

Mailchimp has their own helpful documentation on tagging subscribers, with step-by-step instructions if needed, so I’ll just give an overview of the options available, and when each would be a good fit.

Create a tag in Mailchimp

Each of method of tagging subscribers will start with first creating a tag in your Mailchimp account: In your Audience dashboard, click on the Tags tab and Create Tag, naming it as you’d like.

Then, there are a few different methods of applying this tag to your subscribers:

Tag subscribers upon import

If you’re importing a list of subscribers to Mailchimp, you can apply a specific tag to those subscribers, which will come with them in your import. This is great for external lists you’re adding in to Mailchimp, like email subscribers from a conference, trade show, etc.

Manually tag subscribers

You can manually tag subscribers either in bulk (via your audience contact list) or individually (via their contact profile).

Tag subscribers after an automation is sent

You can add a specific tag to subscribers as a Post-send action after a subscriber receives a specific email in an automation. This is useful if your subscribers receive an email automation upon opt-in.

Use Zapier to add tags

Though a bit more involved, one of the most effective ways to use Mailchimp tags with your Squarespace opt-in forms is via Zapier, an online tool that allows you to connect different apps to automate workflows.

Though the Squarespace integration with Mailchimp allows you to send email addresses (and names, if you’re requesting them) directly from your website opt-in form to your Mailchimp list, it does not offer the ability to tag your subscribers in that process.

So, this Zapier method is useful, and perhaps even necessary, if you have multiple opt-in channels you’d like to distinguish between.

Each unique opt-in form (aka Squarespace newsletter block) is connected to Zapier, which collects information from Squarespace (email address and name, if included on your form) and then sends that information over to Mailchimp along with a tag that you’ve designated for that specific opt-in form.

Here’s an example:

When we used Mailchimp for our email marketing (we’ve now switched over to Flodesk, which has a different set up process), we used Zapier so that any sign-ups from the Website Checklist opt-in would be sent to the Mailchimp list with the tag “Website Checklist” and any sign-ups from the Blog Post Checklist opt-in would be sent with the tag “Blog Post Checklist,” etc.

Zapier can be set up to either update or overwrite subscribers in Mailchimp. If it’s set up to “update,” you can add multiple tags to subscribers, based on all of the opt-ins they’ve requested. (So, if a subscriber had already requested the Website Checklist and then later requested the Blog Post Checklist too, their contact profile would be updated to include both tags, rather than removing the first one.)

How to segment your email subscribers in Mailchimp

Once your email subscribers are properly tagged, you can work with those tags (as well as other data!) to segment your list for various purposes.

Any Mailchimp email campaign can be sent to a custom “segment” of your audience, which can be defined by factors such as:

tags
sign-up source (i.e. Admin Add, Import, Squarespace, Zapier, MemberSpace)
automation activity (specific email workflows subscribers have started or completed)
campaign activity (whether a subscriber has been sent, or not sent, or opened or clicked, etc. a specific campaign)
contact rating (how much the contact has engaged with your previous emails)
date added
location

Here are some examples of when you’d perhaps want to segment your list for a given email:

Email newsletters

Not all of your email subscribers may be engaged or interested enough to receive your weekly newsletter… and sending it to them repeatedly would simply lead them to unsubscribe. (Bye-bye, friend!)

For these people, it’s best to keep them subscribed for the here-and-there updates or content they’re really interested in, without overwhelming them with the regular generalized emails if they’re not interested in receiving those.

So, you can segment your list to send email newsletters specifically to people who have opted in to receive your newsletter (rather than opting in to a specific freebie download), and/or subscribers who have a high contact rating, meaning they’re quite engaged—which Mailchimp measure by how often they open and click links in the emails you send.

Marketing emails

Promotional emails are a key area you might wish to segment your email list. First, because you’ll want to remove any subscribers to whom the product/service you’re promoting does not apply (for example, anyone who already purchased it!).

This is also one of the reasons it’s helpful to tag subscribers in ways that help describe to you what their interests may be. For example, someone who arrives to your list via a Blog Post Checklist opt-in is reasonably interested in blogging, and perhaps other topics related to blogging.

Tags can also let you know that someone who purchased your expensive premium coaching service might not be the best audience to try to sell a more affordable DIY option.

So your tags can be used to segment your audience and only send marketing emails to those subscribers who would be most interested in the product or service you’re offering.

Product, service or program updates

It’s also helpful to know which of your subscribers purchased certain products or services from you, or are members of a specific program you’re running, so you can communicate with them regarding their purchase or membership, as needed.

For example, members of the Membership Lab are tagged “Membership Lab” in my email list, and members of SEO Basics for Business Owners are tagged “SEO Basics,” so I can communicate with members of each program—sharing program updates, tech updates that apply to them, etc.

It’s important that we not only know which subscribers on our list are customers, but that we know which specific program(s) they’re members of, so we can send the right information to the right people. The SEO course members don’t need to receive updates about new content being added to the Membership Lab, or vice versa.

GDPR compliance

GDPR (the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation) prohibits us from sending emails that a subscriber did not opt-in for. That means, if a subscriber is not aware they’ve signed up to receive your email newsletters or your marketing emails, they should not be sent those.

GDPR applies only to subscribers from the EU, though it does apply to them regardless of where your business is located.

Note that Mailchimp does not offer a simple way to segment your list based on EU or non-EU locations, so in general it’s best to apply GDPR guidelines to all subscribers. (And, that’s best practice for keeping your list happy, too!)

So, properly tagging and segmenting your list can help you keep track of who should be receiving which types of emails from you.

This ensures everybody’s receiving the information that applies to them, yet they’re not getting overwhelmed with emails that aren’t relevant, or that they didn’t ask to receive.

Strategically tagging and segmenting your email list can help improve deliverability and open rates and reduce unsubscribes, leading to a “healthier” email list overall.