Your email service provider can get MESSY if you don’t keep an eye on what’s happening to your subscribers and proceed with caution when you’re creating new tags or setting up automations. The original poster wanted to know how other people use tags and map out email automations – and I shared my thoughts.

I spend a lot of time every single week answering business questions in various Facebook Groups and going forward, I will be sharing my answers here on the blog with additional context and recommendations.

Here is the original question:

“Do you tag your subscribers when they download something they’ve already opted into? (Does it matter to you/have you found it useful to know if they actually access the freebie or purchase?) On a similar note with tagging – I saw someone recently who tags subscribers when they start and finish an email sequence. Do you do that and find it useful? Seems like it’s just cluttering up my list of tags at the moment.”

Here is my reply:

“My recommendation is ALWAYS to take out pen and paper (a nice big one) and draw up exactly how people get on your list, what they get after that and how they get to the sale. And only THEN do you build out any automation in your ESP. During that planning phase you really want to consider some factors. One of them is “what happens if someone subscribes to more than one freebie at the same time” Another popular one that goes wrong: “What happens if someone opt-ins for something they’ve already opted into” Or “what if someone books a call with me while in the sales sequence but hasn’t bought yet” You need to think through the scenarious before you build automations unless you want chaos. And THAT will tell you what tags you need, what automations you need and how people need to flow in YOUR business. What other people do is irrelevant.”

And here is her feedback:

Building Email Automations

Having a clear picture of everything

Whenever you are planning your email automations, the hardest part is to consider all of the possible scenarios.

That’s why it helps a lot to literally draw a flow chart on paper.

Start with listing all of your opt-ins on the left. The draw out what emails these opt-ins connect to, then draw out what the options are (buys/doesn’t buy) then decide what to do with those people next.

And it’s so much easier to work with this if you can see it visually.

Considering odd scenarios

There are always things we don’t consider when we set up email marketing automations.

One of them is that the customer journey isn’t a linear process as much as we pretend that it is. People move forwards, backwards and sideways as they interact with our businesses.

So it’s likely that people are NOT just signing up for one freebie at a time, but potentially all of them.

What happens then?

If each freebie in your setup triggers its own welcome automation, then good luck, because people are now suddenly getting 5 emails PER DAY from you.

But what if they opted in to a freebie 3 months ago. Then they hear about it again on one of your podcast episodes, and they forgot they already signed up for it?

What happens then? Are your settings in your ESP allowing people to receive the freebie more than once? But does that then trigger the welcome automation all over again? Do you want that?

So these are all scenarios that I need to consider with clients all the time.

And I often use automations in a specific way to prevent these issues. And oftentimes clients do not understand why I do things that way and ask me to stop, because they cannot see the map and they think it’s more complicated than it needs to be, when really what it is is a fallback for these mess-ups to be preventable.

So drawing it out on a flow chart can help you to spot these blockages and therefore prevent email mayhem.

Using Tags in your Email Service Provider

Golden Rule: Am I going to be contacting this group of people again (or excluding this group from being contacted)

So the reason why we use tags in our Email Service Provider is to identify segments of your audience that you may need to refer back again in future. Like people who purchased a ticket for one of your workshops (you may want to EXCLUDE these people from all future workshop sales emails, or send them a personalised invite to re-attend at a discounted rate), if so – tag them.

If you couldn’t are less who this group is in 3 months time – don’t tag them.

This is personal to you.

Whether or not you tag people when they complete an automation is again a question of “WHY”.

I, for example, tag people that completed the welcome automation in my account. Why? Because if they sign up for another freebie I DO NOT want them to receive that again.

So I tag.

Again this is something you should work out within your account and specific to how you want your people to receive your emails.