The Key to Personalized Emails: How to Segment Your Subscribers

I’m emerging from a 4-month project to set up a fully personalized evergreen email funnel which converts completely new subscribers to more paying customers.

Email marketing expert Brennan Dunn and his agency Slice & Dice guided us every step of the way and took care of the implementation.

In this series of blog posts, I’ll dissect every part of the project so you can implement a personal approach to email in your own business. I’ll also share the first results we achieved (spoiler: they’re positive).

This is part one on how to gather the necessary data by implementing a segmentation survey.

The status quo

First, I want to briefly share where we started: One automated email funnel that connected all our 14 opt-ins to a pitch for our self-paced course Building a Second Brain Foundation. There was no personalization within that funnel and no particular urgency was created for someone to buy.

We segmented our subscribers only by the “default” ways our email marketing platform ConvertKit offers, such as by subscription date, location, and whether they had purchased something from us or not.

Why segment your subscribers?

Before we kicked off, I read This is Personal, Brennan Dunn’s guide to personalized email marketing.

In his book, Brennan emphasizes that “sending highly relevant, personal, and timely messages to your email list is essential for winning new customers and keeping current ones happy.”

Most companies send “one-size-fits-all” emails to everyone because it’s easier and they just don’t know who is on their list. The results are emails left unread and low conversions.

Segmenting your email list means understanding the individual needs and identity of every subscriber who joins. That allows you to make one-to-many emails feel like one-to-one communication that builds relationships at scale and results in more engagement and sales.

Now, how can you automatically segment your new subscribers as soon as they join your email list? Let’s create a survey…

How to create a segmentation survey

Our new subscribers see the segmentation survey as soon as they submit their email address to us (more on how to set this up exactly later).

This is the perfect moment to ask them questions because people are most engaged at the moment of opting in. You always want to give them an immediate next step.

Here’s an example of the segmentation survey on our thank-you page:

The best advice I received for creating surveys in general is to always keep the end goal in mind. You’re not collecting data that’s “nice to have.” You actually want to use it to guide the subscriber towards the right offer for them.

In the segmentation survey, you want to collect data that helps you…

• know how your subscribers self-identify (e.g. entrepreneurs, freelancers)

• pinpoint their main motivation/goals/struggles for seeking you out

• understand what step of the process they’re at (e.g. beginner, intermediate, advanced)

• determine which one of your offers is the best fit for them

• qualify them for something else (e.g., a new B2B offer)

You typically have at least a rough idea of what segments your audience fall into. I’m sharing our final survey below to give you an example of what it can look like (yours can be way shorter).

You’ll notice that we stuck to multiple-choice questions that are quick to answer, reducing any friction in the process. We also kept the answer possibilities few and as short as possible.

• Do you regularly take notes?

  • Yes, on paper

  • Yes, digitally

  • Yes, on paper and digitally

  • No

• IF NO NOTETAKING

  • What’s preventing you from taking notes?

    • Never been able to stick with it

    • Captured notes before, but never do anything with them

    • My memory is good enough

• IF PAPER

  • What’s the top drawback you’re finding with paper-based notetaking?

    • Can’t search my notes easily

    • Can’t relate concepts or ideas easily to others

    • Can’t easily share notes with other people

    • Don’t always have my notebook on hand

    • No issues, I’m happy with paper

• IF DIGITALLY or both DIGITAL and PAPER

  • What’s your MAIN notetaking app?

    • Evernote

    • Notion

    • Obsidian

    • Apple Notes

    • Microsoft One Note

    • Roam

    • Google Keep

    • Craft

    • Logseq

    • Mem

    • Milanote

    • Tana

    • Workflowy

    • DevonThink

    • Other – Open ended

  • How satisfied are you with your current notetaking practice?

    • Very satisfied

    • It’s OK

    • It’s not working for me

  • Would you mind sharing more about what’s working/not working with your current practice?

    • Sure!

    • Not now

• What’s your main motivation for seeking out our content?

  • Reduce stress and anxiety caused by too much information

  • Capture and organize important information

  • Get more done each day

  • Manage multiple projects and roles I play in my life

• Are you mostly motivated to apply what we teach to…

  • Your work/business

  • Your personal projects/studies

• IF BUSINESS

  • Do you work for yourself?

    • Yes

    • No

  • IF YES

    • What describes you best?

      • Entrepreneur

      • Freelancer

      • Creator

      • Coach

      • Consultant

  • Are you interested in applying what you learn…

    • For yourself only

    • For yourself and your team

• IF PERSONAL

  • What describes you best?

    • Student

    • Retiree

    • Employed

    • Self-employed

    • In-between projects

    • Managing a household

• Have you read either of Tiago Forte’s books?

  • Yes

  • No

• IF YES

  • Have you read Building A Second Brain?

    • Yes

    • No

  • Have you read The PARA Method?

    • Yes

    • No

• How do you learn best?

  • Self-study

  • Community and mentorship

  • Other

How to set up your segmentation survey

We picked RightMessage, Brennan Dunn’s segmentation software to host our survey.

RightMessage automatically transfers the answers to custom fields in the subscribers’ profiles in ConvertKit. That way, we can use that data later to personalize our email sequences.

The segmentation survey is seamlessly embedded on our default thank-you pages that anyone who signs up for our newsletter or lead magnet gets redirected to.

RightMessage also adapts the language on the thank-you page to match what someone opted in for so it feels like a natural extension of the experiences.

Here’s another example…

Once the subscriber has filled out the survey, they’ll be redirected to the lead magnet or prompted to check their email for the next step.

How many new subscribers actually fill out the segmentation survey?

Right now, we’re seeing 96% of questions being answered, which is a great result.

However, not every new subscriber comes through an opt-in with a thank-you page, for example, subscribers from Convertkit’s Creator Network.

We send those subscribers an immediate welcome email that links to the segmentation survey. Here’s what this looks like:

With a 55% open rate and a 13% click rate, we’re definitely seeing lower segmentation results compared to the survey on the thank-you page.

How to segment subscribers on your existing list

We made two attempts to segment our existing subscribers, prompting them to complete the segmentation survey.

Here’s what one of those emails looked like, with the subject line, “What’s important to you? (30 sec max)”

These emails had open rates of 53.2% and 48.4% respectively and almost 8.5k people clicked on the survey. However, considering our list of 126k people, that still leaves 109k subscribers not segmented.

The next steps

With the segmentation survey running smoothly, we were now gathering valuable data on autopilot about our new subscribers.

In my next post, I’ll share how we set up the personalized evergreen email funnel. Stay tuned!