If you have been working with a list-based email marketing tool, we would like to introduce you to the difference between this and a tag-based tool, as well as the advantages.
List-based email marketing
With list-based marketing, you always need a list for certain actions. A new prospect comes to your website and signs up for a form. When creating the form, you select in advance in which list the contact will later be automatically assigned. Usually, the first form is for the newsletter. This means that the contact has confirmed the Double-Opt-In procedure and is now in the newsletter list.
Now you send an offer for an e-book to all newsletter subscribers and later an offer for an online course or a registration for a webinar.
As soon as the contact buys a product, he gets into the different buyer lists for the respective products or for the registration for the webinar.
Now we already have four different lists:
- Newsletter list
- Buyer list product A (Ebook)
- Buyer List Product B (Online Course)
- Webinar registration list
Problems:
- A person can appear in several lists, depending on which action the person has taken. This means that it is not possible to prevent a contact from receiving a duplicate email, as segmentation is not possible here.
- Another problem is the payment plan of the respective provider. Most of the time, this is staggered to a certain number of contacts. If a contact is on 5 lists, he counts as 5 contacts, even though he only has one e-mail address. That is why you never know exactly how many different contacts you have already collected.
It also gets difficult with segmentation: if you want to send a discount code to everyone who has bought product A but not product B, for example, there are two possibilities:
- Send the code to everyone. The problem here is that contacts who have bought product A but possibly also product B will also receive the code. That is what you want to prevent. Irrelevant mails are the result.
- You compare both lists and remove from list A all those who have bought both products. This may be relatively easy with 10 people, but with more than 100 it is a big effort. If you then possibly have further segmentations, it will become impossible.
List-based email marketing is not designed for customised segmentation and is no longer up to date.
Overview of the disadvantages of a list-based marketing system:
- Contact in several lists (no overview anymore with many products).
- Price/month depends on the number of contacts (limit of contacts)
- If a contact was in 5 lists, it also counts 5 times
- Specific segmentation is not possible or very difficult
The tag-based email marketing
A tag is a virtual notepad. With the help of tags, you can provide your customers with keywords and/or key points to better select them. Where did he come from, what was he interested in? You can answer these and many other questions automatically with the help of tags.
The biggest advantage over list-based email marketing is certainly the extremely precise segmentation of your contacts.
For example, you can segment exactly to whom you want to send this mail for your campaigns: To buyers of a certain product? To readers who clicked on a certain link in an email and thus signalled interest? To contacts who have watched a video? The possibilities here are many.
Now you can go one step further with automation and determine that an email campaign can be triggered as soon as someone has received a certain tag. So as soon as someone has bought your product, for example, they immediately enter the upsell process.
Even at a later stage, you can use tags to segment each individual contact and also create analyses and reports from them, which can then be used to optimise your automation.
The advantages of tag-based email marketing:
- Contact has multiple tags for a specific action:
- Mail dispatch can be selected via tags
- Segmentation of your customers by target group or interest is easily possible