After completing that integration, I thought it would be useful to offer some background on why it’s so important, and how you can approach list segmentation in your business.

Segmentation defined

My first encounter with segmentation came as I marketed a product to owners of SUVs back in the mid 1990s. I discovered that there are companies whose entire business model is to maintain large lists of individuals, addresses, phone numbers and so on along with a type of meta information, such as where they shop and what car they drive. They even claimed to tell me that I could target owners of a specific model SUV within a zip code region. Wow.

In internet marketing, segmentation takes many forms, including targeted search traffic, strategic joint ventures and, quite importantly, segmenting your own email lists. The most successful marketers manage their email lists in such a way that they can send different messaging to each lead, prospect and customer.

Desired benefits of segmentation

Profit should be the focus behind segmenting your email list. When done properly, segmentation can allow you to craft messages and offers that are most likely to be accepted by a group of people.

Many of the best sales people will tell you that every pitch is individual. While that’s not possible (strictly speaking) in direct marketing where an offer is being presented to thousands or even millions of people, the aim is to get ever closer to a customized pitch for each prospect.

Technology

Technology is becoming more and more sophisticated in its ability to deliver unique, personalized messages to each person on your list, which gets you closer and closer to the individual pitch that sales professionals know closes more sales.

At the same time, you run the risk that you’re messaging becomes unnatural and contrived. Just because technology allows you to insert customized variables, such as name, email address, dates and so on, doesn’t mean that it will enhance your message.

Always run your messaging through your ‘real person’ filter. By that I mean that technology should enable communication, not define it. Don’t do something just because you can, make sure that it ends up looking like something that one real person would actually send to another person.

Two extremes

As we look at the spectrum of uses of technology, there are extreme cases. Some marketers put everyone that ever showed interest in their product on a single list. Whether they buy one offer or another, they stay put on that one single list. Other marketers create labyrinthine frameworks that infer interest based on every click in an email, thereby changing the future messaging for that individual.

Neither extreme strikes me as being effective. In the simplistic single list case there are many missed opportunities where individualized messaging might better resonate with a group. In the second case there is an assumed intimacy that rarely exists between a marketer and a group. In other words, it’s difficult to verify that what you assume an individual is thinking when he clicks one thing and not another is accurate.

Problems with multivariate testing

Which brings me to the vagaries of multivariate testing. In it’s simplest form, testing takes on an A/B question. Two options are presented to large populations and whichever form, A or B, produces the highest response is considered the winner. Typically an A/B test will involve the change of a subject line or an image with all other elements remaining fixed.

On the other hand, if you attempt to test a simple combination of Headline and image, assuming you have two of each, you now have four possible combinations. With four possibilities, the number of people that see each one shrinks. Smaller groups make the results statistically more difficult to distinguish. As a result, the more intricate your triage process the more opportunity for error.

Autoresponders

The good news is that most autoresponder services provide built in mechanisms for sorting through your lists and communicating in both broad and specific ways. When you’re evaluating email services, make sure that the type of segmentation you want is easily accommodated with the solution you choose.

Conclusions

Email list segmentation is an integral part of effective marketing. Finding the proper balance of segmentation and ensuring that your criteria for sorting an individual into one group as opposed to another are effective will require finesse and careful attention. In every case, the outcome is almost certain to be market dependent and so for each new market approached you should expect a settling time to find an effective groove.

Membership websites

As I mentioned, my reason for writing this article is that I just finished extending one of the better membership frameworks available for WordPress to accommodate segmentation. Segmenting visitors, from free members from premium members is a key component to building an effective sales funnel and retention strategy for any membership website.

Onsite vs. Offsite

First it’s important to understand some backup terminology. An onsite backup means that the data for the backup and the data for the production website exist in the same physical location. This might be like making a backup of your computer onto an external hard drive attached to your computer. This would protect you from a hard drive crash, but if your house burns down then both go up in flames.

Offsite means that the data for your backup and the data for your production website are in different physical locations. If one place burns up, the other will still have all the data intact.

There’s a benefit to each type of backup. An onsite backup, such as an external hard drive, can provide a much faster recovery than downloading the data from another site. Offsite backups are more resilient to acts of God (and kids).

Backup in the cloud (Amazon S3)

When it comes to your website, it turns out that the hard drive at your house qualifies as an off site backup. Even better than your hard drive is Amazon S3. There are two reasons why choosing a cloud based service is more appealing than your hard drive.

1. You can automate access to it from your website
2. They manage redundant, fault tolerant data storage for you

What to backup

I think many bloggers (those that create backups at all) use the WordPress export feature and feel confident that they have everything they need to recover their website in case of a crash.

It turns out that several things are missing. First is that even the most disciplined person can find it difficult to login regularly and take frequent backups. Since a blog is an evolving opus, constantly changing, it’s important to take frequent backups. Another problem has to do with the ‘rest’ of the information on your website.

What about all the pictures, audios and videos that you upload, along with theme and plugin files? This data needs to be included with your backups in order to restore your website. Without it, you would be able to restore little more than the text content from your site.

So, if you insist on taking manual backups then make sure you use FTP and grab the wp-content folder of your WordPress website in addition to the XML file that you export.

There’s a better way

If you don’t want to worry about all these details and risk messing them up then you’re in luck. I found a great plugin which I’ve been using on all my sites for about a half a year now. It’s called Automatic WordPress Backups. To get it up and running all I had to do was provide it with my Amazon S3 account information and it took care of the rest. It manages creating backups on a regular schedule and maintaining historical backups too.

The cost for S3 storage works out to be pennies a month, and for the peace of mind that it brings, that’s CHEAP!

How to restore

In the event that you need to restore your data, you can most likely find someone on elance.com. In fact, if you’re restoring after a hosting company crash, you could probably even give them the backup file from your S3 account and let them work through the details. It turns out to be pretty easy. Here’s the process I would follow:

1. Ensure that you have the domain configured and pointed to a directory on your host
2. Upload WordPress (you can probably use cPanel if you want to)
3. Delete the wp-content folder and upload the folder from your backup
4. Create a database and import the database file from your backup
5. Update the wp-config.php file with the connection information to your new database

Hopefully you never need to go through these steps. but if you do, you’ll be glad that you took the time to setup Automatic Wordperss Backups. Post a comment if you have any questions or need additional help.

One thing you’ll notice is that I don’t spend a lot of time talking about the actual coding, because there isn’t really very much at all.  Using my approach (I show you in the video) nearly all the heavy lifting can be done using the “easy buttons” that are available with most modern hosting companies.

Here’s what I cover in this video:

• What alternatives there are to WordPress and why I still use WordPress
• Why Google loves WordPress blogs
• Email list segmentation and membership websites
• A little trick that will save you money finding premium solutions online (that’s all I can say in this teaser, but you’ll thank me once you see it)
• Prevent spam on your blog
• Protect your digital content
• When and how to upgrade your site (this is so easy it hurts)
• Best places to host your membership web site
• The top reasons to buy premium themes for WordPress

This is the full 1:15 video.  After you press play you might have to wait a minute for it to start loading (be patient).

In fact, I’ll be talking about alternative uses for membership websites, including education and online course delivery.  I’ll also cover payment integration methods and advanced autoresponder techniques to promote consumption of content while creating a passive interactive dialog which enables you to engage the most interested members of your community.

While I know this will be a very remote location for most of you, anyone is welcome.  I’ll be presenting at 3:00 pm in the Farnsworth building in room 65.  I’ll also record the session and post it here afterward.  If you have any topics you think I should cover, send me a message.

Use this link to learn more about the Boise Code Camp.

To answer the question of structure, offer and content I’ve put together the video and a PDF below showing one of my favorite models. I’ve seen components of this model used tons of times by loads of people, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a single diagram that outlines the entire process and helps you plan your content, email lists and so on. I hope this is useful. Here’s the video:

Click the full-screen button on the video so you can follow along better…

In this video and PDF I can’t possibly tell you everything you need to do, but here are some of the most important concepts to keep in mind.

• List segmentation is crucial (separate lists for prospects and buyers (thanks Jeff Walker))
• Free content should be an extract of the most valuable gems you offer in your paid content (thanks Eben Pagan and John Reese)
• your autoresponder sequence should focus on consumption of your content, whether paid or free
• Use downsell and retention (before you go) sales letters to increase margin

Download the PDF here:

My current favorite platform for membership websites is WordPress using MemberWing and Aweber. It’s a no brainer for me since I can have a new membership website up and running in an hour, with all the bells and whistles.

There are other models that I can put together if there’s enough interest. This one is super easy and can work very well since it uses reciprocity by giving them access up front to your best material and reducing their risk since they get to see some of the content before buying. One other model that I really like is the 30-day free trail, or $1 trail. Frank Kern is a master of that model and I recommend you follow one of his launches to get an idea. Mike Filsaime is also fantastic at the upsell/downsell on offers like this.

After you’ve watched the video and read through the PDF, let me know what you think and if you have any questions by posting a comment below.