AP 0424: How Do I Keep My Subscribers from Getting Duplicate Emails?

AskPat 424 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here. Welcome to Episode four-two-four, 424 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today.

We have a great question from Rachel, but before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is ZipRecruiter.com. Now, I know a lot of you are bootstrapping, and hiring can be a pain, especially if you're trying to grow, and you know that you need more people to help you. It can just be very difficult to find the right people, and ZipRecruiter.com streamlines the entire process. You put up a job ad on one location, on ZipRecruiter.com, and it gets sent to over 100 job boards automatically, and candidates get sent back to ZipRecruiter. You can review all of them in one place, conveniently. There's built-in interview questions to screen candidates before they even get to you, and then you can find the people you need to help grow your business. So you don't have to stress about it, they're doing all the hard work. You've got to check it out. If you go to ZipRecruiter.com/pat, you're gonna love it. ZipRecruiter.com/pat.

All right, here's today's question from Rachel.

Rachel: Hey, Pat. I'm Rachel Coley from CanDoKiddo.com. My question is related to creating autoresponders for multiple email lists. I have multiple lists that people opt into from different sources and for different lead magnets. For example, I offer one lead magnet on my site, but I also offer free bonus materials in my book, and I'd like to start offering free printable tools at the end of my blog posts. So the initial welcome emails obviously need to be different for those lists in order to deliver the different lead magnets, but I'd like to keep the rest of my autoresponder series the same. So how can I prevent people from getting duplicate emails if they've opted into multiple lists? I know you're a Leadpages guy, and SPI Session 78 with Clay Collins has my mind racing, but until my budget expands, I'm a MailChimp gal, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this challenge. Thanks, Pat.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Rachel. Thank you so much for the question. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to give you some solutions for your problem. I have used AWeber in the past and MailChimp as well, and I know kind of how it works with these multiple lists and if you have multiple lead magnets I completely understand. So I'll give you a solution that you could use, that could potentially work. I understand about Leadpages as well; it definitely is a high-end product, but it can work wonders once you eventually get there. And then I have another solution that's completely different than all these different email service providers, that I'm using right now that I'll share with you, that is working and would solve all these problems as well.

So the first thing, whether you are with MailChimp or AWeber, I know the struggles because they work on a list-based system, meaning your subscribers subscribe to a particular list, and they can be subscribed to multiple lists, depending on the purpose of those different lists. Maybe it's a webinar registration page, or list. Maybe it's a list of people who have purchased a particular product, or people who have downloaded something that you can then feed emails to, that then leads to a pitch to get that particular product. Or there might be multiple products. Or maybe there's a list for people who went to a live event that you put on. Again, these are all different lists that you have, each that serve a different set of autoresponders, each that have different welcome emails, different forms, different experiences for people as well.

Unfortunately, both with AWeber and MailChimp, they treat those people, even if it's the same person, but they're on five lists for example … they're encountered five times in that database. So if you're calculating, for example, if you have 10,000 subscribers, if you're paying for 10,000 subscribers, that might actually be one counting as five, and you might not have as many as you think. There's just that many entries in different lists. That's one thing that has always bothered me with AWeber and MailChimp. But again, it's great in terms of delivering autoresponder emails. They're absolutely fantastic; they've helped people make million of dollars. So hopefully they're helping you as well.

Now, the issue is you have multiple lists, and the reason that there's multiple lists is because you have different incentives for people to subscribe. Instead of bringing them onto one specific list, you have them going on different lists, but after the first welcome email that delivers that product, you want them to eventually get the same stuff and be on the same list, even though they're on five different ones. Now that's a huge headache, for several reasons. One, you have to have all these different lists that you have to manage, and you're overpaying for the subscribers that you have that are on multiple lists. Not only that, if you change one email, you have to change all five of them, if there's five, for example, and it just becomes this massive headache.

Now, there is a solution here. Now, I'm not sure how this is going to change what you already have, in the lists that you've already built. But in the future, you might be able to do it this way. Where you have everybody going to one list, if you really want these people to just have one … have all the same autoresponder series, all the same emails that you've prewritten over time. If you want them all to get the exact same ones, you can still deliver a unique lead magnet by redirecting them, based on the form that they subscribed on, to a specific landing page, a specific thank-you page, that is, because at least with AWeber, I know, because I'm not as familiar with MailChimp, but I'm pretty sure that the specific form that you create, that you embed on your website, you can have that go to a specific landing page. So, when people, for example, subscribe, and they click subscribe after they put their name and email, they go to a thank-you page. Traditionally, this thank-you page would say something like, “Oh, you're almost there, thank you so much. Just check your email for…” whatever it is. That thank-you page could be where you put that unique thing that people get. That way they get it much sooner, and then they all get onto the same list.

Now, if you set it up, you test it out, obviously, and people would be redirected there, and that would solve that problem. However, the only issue would be, and again, I'm just kind of thinking out loud here as we're talking, 'cause I haven't really explored these options, I'm using another service right now, is if people wanted to get those things in the future, they wouldn't necessarily have the link to where they were redirected to. So you want to make sure on that page that they're redirected to, that unique thank-you page that's just for that specific item, it goes to the same list. It's just a different thank-you page, again, the thank-you page after they click subscribe, not the thank-you page when they click to confirm. When they click to confirm, that might say, “Hey, thank you for joining the list,” and it can be the same for everybody.

Now, here's another idea that I've had in the past. It depends on how you want it to work in your business, but that final thank-you page, the one that they go on after they click on that confirmation link in that confirm email. That one, you might be able to list all of your lead magnets. That can be considered a bonus for people. They might subscribe because there's one lead magnet or something they're interested in, but then they go to this landing page at the end of this process, after they clicked confirm, and say, “Oh, here's your thing that you were looking for, plus other bonuses and free incentives that I've created over time. This is how much information that's coming out for free for you, so continue to stay on the email list 'cause I'm going to be giving away more things for free in the future. Here's all a list of free things that I've given away in the past.” That way, again, people are on the same email list, same autoresponder series, and no matter where they come in from, they're landing on the same page, but they're able to download that and everything else. As you create new lead magnets over time and new forms, they just go and end up on that page, and you just add those to the list. Again, that can be your sort of tool box or tool kit, for example.

Now, that's a lot of workarounds, and of course you shouldn't have to do that, but if you are happy with MailChimp, which I'm sure you are, and I know a lot of people are, they are obsessed with it, and it's great, then great, then that works. But if you didn't want to do that, I want you to explore this other tool called ConvertKit that I've been using, and it's amazing. I have a couple YouTube videos that I've explored and shared the ins-and-outs of ConvertKit. Now, coming in October I have some more detailed videos, so I'm not going to go over in detail now. I don't want this to be a pitch for ConvertKit, although if you do want to check it out, and you do want to check out my affiliate link, that's AskPat.com/ConvertKit. They have a way for you, in a very Infusionsoft-like way, without all the confusion, they have a way for you to tag people, to deliver unique lead magnets to people, and they don't get on a list essentially, they get put into a specific, what they call, courses. So, depending on where they come from, or depending on what form they go into, they can go into a different course, if you will. They can get tagged as such, or tagged with anything else you'd like. Then in the future, when you want to send emails, you can pick out, okay, I want to send an email to all the people in this specific course. Or I want to send an email to all the people who have been tagged as this.

Now, it might sound confusing, because it's very new. It's very new to me, when I started exploring Infusionsoft, but it has become an amazing tool, and that one subscriber counts as just one subscriber, as they should be, and then I send autoresponder emails out based on where people have subscribed from. They can all be the same, or they can all be different. I can send broadcast emails out to people who have been tagged a specific thing. Tagging is based off of, again, where they come from, what links they click on and so many other things too. Again, I'm not going to go into the ins and outs of ConvertKit right now, but it is something to explore. This person who created this tool, Nathan Barry, who was featured on the SPI podcast a long time ago, before he created this tool, he was just so frustrated with email service providers. I believe he used … he might have used MailChimp, actually, or AWeber, one or the other, but he was just not happy. He needed something better, so he ended up creating it on his own. Again, AskPat.com/ConvertKit.

So, Rachel, I hope those workarounds work for you for now. You can also check out ConvertKit, and wishing you all the best of luck. Thank you so much for calling in. Your question, because it was featured here in the show, earns you an AskPat t-shirt, free of charge. You're going to hear from my assistant in the next couple of weeks, and we'll send that to you. I'd love to see a picture of it; that'd be awesome.

For those of you who have a question, you'd like to be potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat and you can ask right there on that page. I also want to thank today's sponsor, which is ZipRecruiter.com. Again, they make it incredibly easy for you to find and hire people full-time, part-time for your business. You know you can always use more help, but it is very difficult to find the right candidates, plus it's just so stressful to post your job ads in all those different places. But ZipRecruiter makes it super easy in just one location, with one click of a button you can send out your job ad to over 100 different sites. You can even send them out to different social media sites as well. You can search existing resume databases, and you can seek out job candidates at the very same time. Again, they highlight the best candidates for you. I mean it's like your own HR department here. So go ahead and check it out, ZipRecruiter.com/pat. ZipRecruiter.com/pat. It's free to use for a little bit, so check it out.

All right, thanks for listening to the show. I appreciate you and as always we finish with a quote. Today's quote is from Ramsay Leimenstoll: “A small list that wants exactly what you're offering is better than a bigger list that isn't committed.” Gotta love that. Cheers. Take care, guys, and I'll see you next week in the next episode of AskPat. Until then, keep rockin' it. And if you have a sec, please head on over to iTunes and do me a quick favor. Leave a review for the show. It's much appreciated, I read them all, and they help with the rankings and help more people find AskPat as well.

Thanks so much, I appreciate you, and see you next week. Bye.