How to Segment Your Audience for Marketing (and Why Most Creatives Get It Backwards)

Hello, hello and welcome back to Business First Creatives podcast. I wanna start by saying something from the get go. Email marketing and client communication are not the same thing. I am really tired of getting people to see the distinction. Y’all. I love a good newsletter. I mean, I have an entire folder dedicated to like read later where I have probably signed up for over a hundred newsletters and I like to just scroll in there and read.

Email marketing is my favorite strategy. Only suck into this podcast, but anytime I start talking about my course email, like you mean it. I get people who are asking me about my newsletter strategy. Open rates, subject lines, and I’m like, that’s not what I’m teaching in this course. Email, like you mean. It is all about the emails that you send to people who are paying you or who are thinking about paying you.

This is client communication, not your monthly newsletter that you send to your wider audience. I really wanna call them CRM emails even if you have not invested in A CRM yet.

Regardless if you’re sending these emails in Dubsado or HoneyBook or just plain Gmail, client communication is important. It is the foundation of your client experience. So it makes it really hard when I spend so much time trying to make a distinction between email marketing and client communication.

And then I wanna hop on here and talk about a topic that relates to both. But I’m feeling bold today. I mean, I’ve been up since 6:00 AM I’ve already had two coffees, and so I’m gonna do it today. I wanna talk about list segmentation. Now that is usually what people talk about for email marketing, but I want to give it a slight twist.

The real problem isn’t how you’re segmenting your list or your lack of segmentation, it’s that you’re probably ignoring the hottest leads on your list, and that is not the people who always open your emails, y’all. That’s the people who have already paid you. Now most of us know how to segment our email marketing list based on interests or behaviors or what freebie they signed up for, or how often they are clicking and opening your email.

But when you segment based on their readiness to buy, you have to take a closer look at what they’re clicking on. So for example, if you share a blog post that’s just, you know, something that you’re sharing versus a link to a sales page, the person who clicks on the sales page is probably more ready to buy than the person who clicked on just a blob link.

Who is even more likely to pay you money is someone who’s actually already paid you before. So here is how I like to stack your audience. Top tier. These are the people that should come front of mind, our clients who have paid you for your signature offer. These are probably people who have already dropped serious cash with you, and even if you don’t have something to offer them next, they are still your best marketing asset.

Think referrals, rave reviews or shouting your name in Facebook groups where you are not a member. The second tier are clients who have bought something smaller. Let’s think of like a warmup offer. Maybe they hired you to design a sales page instead of their full website. Maybe they hired you for a mini session and not your full session.

Maybe they hired you for an engagement session and not their full wedding. These are people who are primed for an upsell conversation down the line. Okay. Third, which is the people that I think everybody ignores are those who inquired with you but did not book with you. I think a lot of us assume that if we give somebody an offer the first time and they say no, or for whatever reason, they just don’t book that.

You kind of cross them off your list and the truth is. People’s buying habits are different. Somebody who inquired about your service in January might not have been ready, but by September, maybe the January of the following year, they’re in a better place to say yes to your offer. These people have already showed you interest.

They took the time to fill out your contact form, and that’s not nothing. So you should continue to engage with them in your marketing. Okay, my kind of tier four are the people who engage with you directly. These are people who are in your Instagram dms. They send you voice memos. They reply to your newsletters, which means they’re listening, but they’re not quite ready to buy yet.

Now you’ve got newsletter subscribers. These are people who were interested enough in you, your business or your offers to start getting weekly or even monthly newsletters, but they haven’t quite gotten into the raising their hand to be ready to work with you yet. Almost last, we’ve got social media engagers.

These are people who are just commenting on your Instagram, commenting on your YouTube video. Then last but not least are just your social media followers. These are people who have followed you on Instagram or subscribed to your YouTube channel, but you really have no idea who they are because they’ve never engaged directly with your content.

Okay, so here’s your like systems professor, homework, if you will, when you sit down to do your marketing even for 20 minutes a day. Are you marketing to the people who have already paid you or are you writing another Instagram caption, creating another carousel, hoping that pure strangers are gonna bite on the offer or just join your audience?

So I wanna take wedding photographer as an example because I feel like everyone will understand this. Wedding photographers don’t get repeat business, at least not as a norm. I mean, wedding photography is not something that you think you’re going to, photograph someone, marrying their partner and then do it again in 10 years.

I mean, yes, I know people do renewals. I, I know all of this, but in general, wedding photographers do not go into business thinking that they will get repeat business. Now if you are a wedding photographer and you offer something other than weddings, you do family sessions, you do newborns, you do real estate, photography, headshots, whatever it is, you actually have something to offer them down the line.

But if you only do weddings. Most of the time, that is a one and done service, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t still increase the lifetime customer value of the people that hire you for wedding photography referrals. You know what happens when someone gets married? They usually have friends and family members that are gonna get married, and so don’t take them off your radar just because the initial job is done.

And this is the other thing. Nurturing isn’t always about selling something new. Sometimes it’s just about staying top of mind so that when someone in their life says, Hey, who did your wedding photos? You’re the first person that comes to mind. They are sharing your website, their experience with you in rooms that you are not even in.

And so here’s what I want you to think about today. Do you have a way. Segmenting your list in order to market and create content for the different segments that I’ve discussed in today’s episode. Do you have a way of checking back in with past paying clients to see if they’re ready to rebook your services again or to share your referral program?

Do you have people who have inquired about your services but didn’t actually hire you? Do you have a way to continue to check in with them to find out when they are in fact ready for your services? So I want you to perhaps create a new priority for your content marketing. Are you gonna prioritize the people who have already paid you or are you gonna prioritize the people who just followed you last week?

Which one do you think is going to give you a higher return on your investment?

And guys, I am not knocking growth marketing. Growth marketing is when you’re trying to increase the number of people in your audience. We all need to do growth marketing. We all need to increase and bring new people into our audience.

I am just trying to get you to rethink how you should prioritize your precious marketing time every week in a different way. Okay, so if this sounds good and you have thought anything about what I’m talking about improving the emails that you actually send to your current clients, paying clients, I would love it if you would join me for the client email Glow Up challenge starting September 16th and y’all, there are prizes, you’ll walk away with a better plan of how to email your clients and perhaps with like a goodie.

So go to Colie james.com/glow up to save your seat. Alright, that’s it for this episode. See you next time.