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“If you're sending Broadcasts to ‘All Subscribers', then you're definitely not using ConvertKit to its full potential“.
I tell my ConvertKit clients this allll the time.
ConvertKit is an incredibly powerful system. If you're not using the wealth of information you've already got about your subscribers (which form they signed up to, what links they clicked, which tags they have, etc), then you're unnecessarily or confusingly sending them emails they probably don't want.
Aka you're annoying them.
In this blog post I'm going to teach you 5 easy ways to stop annoying your ConvertKit subscribers.
1. Don't send them newsletters until they've finished your welcome/nurture sequence
Let’s say you’ve set up a beautiful new welcome/nurture sequence that’s 5 emails across 10 days. All new subscribers go through this sequence. You send a weekly newsletter on Thursdays. Bob signs up for your epic freebie opt-in. Bob starts to receive your welcome sequence. You don’t want Bob to get your weekly newsletter until after he’s completed the welcome sequence. It’s disjointed for him to get a carefully planned intro email on one day, and then a generic update on your business the next day, and then back to the carefully planned intro emails the day after that!
Want to avoid doing this? Read this blog post here and then this blog post here.
2. Don't email people about something they've already bought
I'm sure you've had this happen to you before. You've signed up (and paid!) for something, only to continue receiving endless emails about how you should totally sign up/join. It's annoying.
There's 2 ways to stop doing this, depending on if we're talking about Sequences or Broadcasts. You do need to make sure that your commerce/booking system is integrated with ConvertKit and you're able to tag anyone when they buy. If you're not sure about how to do this, feel free to shoot me an email or hop on my live chat and I'm sure I can help 🙂
Broadcasts
You just need to add an additional filter to your Broadcast Setup to exclude people who've already bought, like so:
(This is an example for emailing your regular list about Course X).
Sequences
You've got 2 options for excluding certain subscribers from receiving sequence emails.
The first option is to exclude certain tags from the rest of the emails in a sequence (e.g. if the sequence is a pitch sequence and they buy after the 2nd email – you don't want them to receive any of the next 3 emails). You do this in the Sequence Settings
Alternatively, if there's just a couple of emails in a sequence that you don't want certain subscribers to receive (e.g. if you have an evergreen challenge which leads into a pitch for a course, but only the last couple of emails are sales emails), then you can exclude subscribers at an email level:
3. Give people the option to opt out of your launches
Launches make people kinda crazy. You can receive 3+ emails a day, even though you decided at the start you weren't interested. The unsubscribe button looks more and more tempting…
You know how it goes. This neat little trick is going to save you a ton of unsubscribers when you're launching.
You're going to want to set up an automation rule that looks a little like this:
Now, you can just put this link trigger straight into the body of each launch email somewhere, but I would recommend you actually set up a custom email template because when people are getting frustrated with your emails, they're most likely to scroll down to unsubscribe, and then see the alternative option you've helpfully given them:
To stop receiving emails about my Course X launch: click here
To unsubscribe from all my emails including any paid courses you might have: click here.
You can find out more about setting up custom unsubscribe links here, alternatively check out my Template Toolkit training which includes a full video walkthough of setting up your own branded email templates and custom unsubscribe links.
Once you've set this up, you want to exclude the tag from all your launch broadcasts and sequences. It may be easiest to set up a segment, like so:
So you send launch emails to your specially created Segment, and you use your specially created custom email template.
After the launch is over, you can just delete the tag, delete the segment, delete the automation rule and probably delete the custom email template!
4. Set up custom unsubscribe links where appropriate
We already talked about this in #3 above, but seriously, custom unsubscribe links are awesome. They allow people to tell you what sort of content they do and don't want to receive from you (which reduces unsubscribe rates).
Here's some examples of where you might want to set up custom unsubscribe links
- If you've got a free evergreen challenge that runs for 5+ days, give them the option to unsubscribe from that challenge but to stay on your list
- If you have an RSS automation set up to email every time you publish a new blog post or podcast, give them the option to unsubscribe from those emails, but to stay on your main list
- If you email about 2 quite different topics, give them the option to unsubscribe from emails exclusively about one of the topics. (I do this – I give people the option to unsubscribe from emails that are solely about ConvertKit).
- If you're running multiple businesses/projects from the same ConvertKit account, you're definitely going to want to be using custom unsubscribe links.
A word of warning though – make sure your automation rules relating to custom unsubscribes make sense and people who click them don't just fall into the abyss. For example, if someone unsubscribes from your free challenge – make sure you actually add them to your regular list. This is another reason I recommend adding a tag to say they've unsubscribed from that specific thing – it makes it easier to track them down in future!
5. Prioritise one sequence over another
Update March 2018: Okay, so there used to be a video here, but that no longer works (it was based on ‘In Sequence' tags, which I no longer recommend). Where possible, I now strongly recommend having one generic welcome sequence that all different opt-ins and such filter into. An alternative to this is changing the sending time of different sequences (so at the very least they don't all send at the same time each day). Similarly, you may also want to consider which day of the week sequences send and stagger those.
It is possible to set up In Sequence segments and exclude the higher priority sequence's segment from the lower priority sequence. You can learn more about that in my ‘Knowing Who's Currently In a Sequence' Guide:
If you want tons more ConvertKit training + resources, join me in ConvertKit Club! Or you can always work with me 1:1 and we can strategise the most effective way for you to be communicating with your audience (and definitely not annoying them!)