Email Marketing Tagging Strategies with Barry Moore
Email marketing using tagging strategies is an art and a science. In this episode, Barry Moore explains how to use tagging to get notified
of exactly when your ideal customer is in her buying window. This means you can make target offers at the right time and improve your conversions.
Links Mentioned:
- www.theactivemarketer.com
- Tagging Guide
- www.GetMeToDone.com
- www.Productiveinsights.com
- www.YouTube.com/ProductiveInsights
- https://productiveinsights.com/the-eisenhower-matrix/
Related Episodes:
- 177. Active Campaign Email Automation Strategies with Barry Moore from The Active Marketer
- 170. Ryan Deiss From Digital Marketer Reveals The 5-Step Conversion Funnel That Turbo-Charges Your Business Growth
Ash Roy and Barry Moore Video Transcript (This transcript has been auto-generated. Artificial Intelligence is still in the process of perfecting itself. There may be some errors in transcription):
Ash Roy (00:00):
You can have 270 events, but because it’s got the prefix event, you know the category of the tag. That’s point one. Point two, by having the prefix, it forces you to think about what you’re doing with this person. Are you tagging them for an event or you’re tagging them for a topic they’re interested in? Are you taking them for a purchase decision they made? What is it?
Barry Moore (00:23):
Yeah, exactly right.
Ash Roy (00:28):
Welcome back to the productive insights podcast. This is Ash Roy, the founder of productiveinsights.com and the host of the productive insights podcast. I’m very excited to have Barry Moore back on the podcast and the last episode, which was the first part of this two-part conversation. We talked about how to create an offer and get cash in your bank within seven days, especially for people who find themselves in a very difficult situation in this corona apocalypse environment as you described it. Today, we are going to talk about how to use a tagging strategy to create a system that allows you to make targeted offers and propositions to people depending on how they interact with your emails. So Barry is going to share with us this phenomenal tagging strategy he’s got. It’s simple, but it’s profound. So Barry, welcome to the show and let’s have it, man.
Barry Moore (01:20):
All right, thanks, Ash. So we were talking a little bit about the last one about, and there’s a famous quote from Bill Gates. I can’t remember it exactly, but it just basically says, you know, automation is just amplification. You know, amplifying, amplifying a good process, it’s great. But if you amplify a terrible process, you know, a chaotic process, so you get us more chaos, right? So automation in and of itself is not the answer to anything. You still need the process, right? So we’ve talked about all that stuff we talked about last time. Basically boils down to the fact that you know, if you’re trying to sell something, you get people, products, and process, right? Those are the three things that you need to talk about. If you want to have a sustainable business, that that is scalable, right? So we talked about finding your audience to sell them.
Barry Moore (02:02):
You know, you can’t sell something if you don’t have an audience. So we talked about the product and the product that people have to produce and the people have to meet and where the product and the people meet is where you put the process if that makes sense. Right? You have, you’re guiding the people to the product. So not everybody that comes to you will be interested in what you have to sell. So we’re trying the automation processes, we’re trying to separate the wheat from the chaff. So who are the most engaged, most interested people away from the people who aren’t necessary? So because those people are going to respond much better to any offer that we put in front of them. Or how do we know what the right time to put an offer in front of them is? Right? So imagine you went to a, you know, I like to use real-world examples cause most people can relate to, uh, let’s say you’ve gone to a networking event, right?
Barry Moore (02:52):
And there are a hundred people there and you walked around and trying to sell your services to those a hundred people, not all a hundred people are going to be interested, right? So you’re going to waste a lot of time talking to a bunch of people who aren’t interested. Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a spotlight in the ceiling that show a really bright light on the five people in the audience that were interested? You had to sell, right? That’s what marketing automation does for you. It tells you who the most recessive people already are offering and when they’re the most receptive, right?
Ash Roy (03:20):
Yes. Now that’s another important point. The buying window. So tells you when they’re most receptive, cause they’re not always going to be receptive to your offer.
Barry Moore (03:27):
Exactly. Right? So every customer has a customer journey and there’s a lot of people that talk about this, but whatever you’re trying to sell them, it’s usually not the product that they’re buying.
Barry Moore (03:36):
It’s the outcome of having that product or the potential outcome of having that product that you’re actually selling. Right? People don’t buy a car typically because it has good gas mileage and it’s, you know, they buy it because it’s going to make them feel a certain way. It’s going to make it feel sexy or it’s gonna make them feel tough or it’s going to make them feel, you know, outdoorsy or whatever. Like how many people buy four-wheel drives and never take them off the concrete. Right? But it makes them feel a certain way. Right? I own a Jeep Jeeps, I’m cool and I’m talking, even though it’s never had any dirt on it. Right? So that customer journey is taking them from one state to another, right? And you use the automation and the tags, which we’ll talk about in a second, to track that state, right?
Barry Moore (04:17):
So are they aware of your product? If they are aware of your product, are they responding to your marketing? If they’re responding to your marketing, what are they interested in? Which time? Which particular topic or which particular product are you interested in and how interested in have they have? They looked at your sales page once in the last 60 days or five times in the last 60 days. Right? Those two people are not created equal. Right? The one that’s looked at that five times is much warmer, much more receptive. Much more likely to buy, right? But clearly, they’re displaying behavior and the behavior is that they’re interested in your product, but they have, they haven’t bought it yet. So there’s some objection that they have there yet. So for example, if they’ve looked at my landing page five times, but they don’t have a purchase tag, which needs to say buy it, they haven’t bought it, but they’ve looked at it for five times, they must have some.
Barry Moore (05:05):
So let’s fire off automation that starts identifying common objections and in talking to common objections that people have and then sending them some testimonials about what great results other people got from that particular product and addressing any objections they might have. And maybe at the very end game, it sends me bad automation also sends me a personal email that says, Hey, Ash has looked at this thing five times, but he hasn’t bought it. How about you pick up the phone and call? Or how about you send them a personal email? Right. But I’ve identified that one person out of a hundred that’s super interested in, in that particular product. Right. And I might have three or four product products that sell five or 10 products I sell. But I know you are all of a sudden interested in like I used to like to use travel agent examples cause I used to work for a large travel agency company and their econ running in their eCommerce.
Barry Moore (05:54):
But, that’s probably not a great example at the moment. But you know, I know that you’re super interested in Fiji. Yeah. But you haven’t bought the Fiji package yet. Why not? Well, maybe you’re concerned about how to get their visas or, or you know, what the, what it’s really like is it good enough for kids or what are you, so once I know you’re interested in that, I can start addressing those objections and try and close that. So even if it takes a personal, which is automated, right? The automation allows me to know when’s the, when’s the right time to reach out to you instead of just like, you know, you’ve signed up for my PDF and all of a sudden I pick up the phone and call you. You’d be like, Whoa, Hey, Whoa. Stop, you know? But if I’m, if I’m getting my credit card out and I’m just not sure if I want to buy that product, then all of a sudden I get an email from me and I’m like, Oh yeah, okay. Yeah. I’m receptive to you, to your message now.
Ash Roy (06:40):
Yeah. As Ryan Deiss said in episode 170 he said, you don’t go up to a girl in a bar and say, Hey, do you want to come back home the first time you see her? There may be a time when you have that conversation, but it’s not the first time you see her. He used the dating analogy a lot of marketers do. That’s a very important point. So we need to know where in the process we are in terms of the business courting process we are, and we need to follow those protocols. They’re there for a reason.
Barry Moore (07:10):
Exactly. Right. So you know, that might work if you just went up to everyone said, Hey, do you want to, you want to go home, you want to go home, you want to go home, you want to go home? But you got to hit a lot of people before Wednesday.
Ash Roy (07:19):
He got to probably get hit by a lot of people as well.
Barry Moore (07:21):
Exactly right. So to loop that back to tagging, right? Every customer has a journey through your business. Some don’t make it from end to end, some will drop off. But we want to identify that journey first of all. So first of all, you want to identify the people. So I would say, who are the people that you think that your product is for? Right? So you would sit down and create a couple of customer avatars, says the right person who’s really going to respond the best of this product or has done so in the past is this kind of person, right? And then now that you’ve got their customer avatar set up, you know who you’re talking to, it makes it a lot easier for you to come up with a messaging for those people that emails for those people in the white pages for those people, et cetera.
Barry Moore (08:00):
And then we want to map out the process. So what is the process of taking them from A to B, that customer journey in my mind, where are they now and what’s the end result like trying to get, I mean I start with the enema and then we map, we look at the critical juncture points along that process. And that should be pretty easy. Like I just do this on a piece of paper. Like I don’t have any fancy tools. I just have a moleskin notebook or a big butcher paper. I could show you on the wall. You probably won’t like this one cause it looks a little bit decompress, but literally, Oh wow. Okay. Right. That is me mapping out a couple of funnels, right? So first, you know, their first place they’re going to go is here and then, you know, point a, there’s a junction point and that junction point usually is a customer decision of some sort, right.
Barry Moore (08:45):
And people are going to fall into three camps. They’re going to fall into the yes camp. Yes. I want it. I want to continue down this path. You know, think of it as one of those, uh, one of those adventure books. You know where it says to turn to page 98, right? Yeah. Build your own adventure. So people are gonna fall into three camps and we have to have to message for all those three camps. Right. So they’re either going to fall into the yes camp. Yes. You want to take the next step, you’re going to fall into the no camp. No, this is not for me. Yep. Or they’re going to fall into the not right now camp. Right. I’m not saying, I’m not saying no to your offer, but it’s probably not the right time. Gotcha. Yep. So, for example, just before the current apocalypse hit, I was about to buy a car.
Barry Moore (09:25):
And so I was well down that road and I was well into the yes camp.
Ash Roy (09:30):
But you bought a plane instead?
Barry Moore (09:31):
No, no, not yet. But the guy comes back to me and he’s like, so where are we? I’m like, you know, we might just press pause on this whole car thing to figure out what’s going on in this current apocalypse. So you know, I kind of manually put myself into the nut now camp. But it’s not a no, it’s not a hard no. Like it’s just not, it’s just not the right time. Right. So you need to have, basically the automation needs to branch off into three different directions. The yes branch, the no branch, and the not right now branch. Right. So, and, and you have those at every single juncture in the kind of the decision-making process. So to loop that back to tags, tags are the way we keep track of what’s going on in that system.
Barry Moore (10:07):
So are you familiar with Pachinko? It’s like a Japanese kind of pinball game where you put it like a steel ball bearing in the top and there’s a bunch of pegs and it just kind of bounce it up. And then it ends up down at the bottom and one of these things, well that’s kind of what the automation is, right? It’s, it’s bouncing people around and they end up in certain buckets down at the bottom line. But the way we keep track of that journey is with tags, right? So tags, tell me where you are in the journey, what you’ve done so far, what you’re likely to be receptive to in the future. And then I can use those texts to segment my audience, right? Here are all the people that looked at Fiji. So if I have a special for Fiji, they’re going to be the most receptive Emily and send it to them.
Barry Moore (10:47):
I’m not going to send it to the people that were looking at Europe because they’re probably not really receptive to going to Fiji. Right. And then it will also tell me when, like we already talked about, so had this person’s persons looked at the package deal for Fiji five times, but let’s send them some more messaging about Fiji or let’s pick up the phone and call them over. Let’s do something. It’s those tags that tell me that. So I broke the tags down into a number of different things. Basically event-based tags. So event-based tags might be the fact that someone has done a certain thing on my website. They’ve downloaded a certain PDF, right? They’ve looked at a certain web page, they filled out a certain form, they’ve unsubscribed or they’ve, or they’ve clicked on a particular link, right? So the cool thing about active campaign is that it tracks everything from the user behaviors perspective. The bad thing is it’s a little bit creepy, right?
Ash Roy (11:43):
By the way, what I particularly love about your tags is, I don’t know if I’m using the right term here, but it’s nomenclature. It’s the prefixes, simple but profound. So can you just talk to us a little bit about that?
Barry Moore (11:55):
So you want these tags to identify somebody. So, for example, if you’re interested in Fiji that you looked at the Fiji landing page three times, I’ll put a tag on you that says you’re interested in Fiji. Or if I’m a personal trainer and you’ve been looking at running, running articles on my blog, I might tag you with, let me know you’re interested in running, right? So if I have a seminar or workshop or this race coming up, I know you’re the one I need to talk to you, right? So if you just make up the tags as you go along, I guarantee it will look like a dumpster fire in no time, right? Right. And you want, you’re not going to be able to six months later figuring out what they were and if you have other team members, the other team members are going to figure it out. So I break them into categories, right? So nomenclature is exactly what he said, right? So all the event tags will have an event prefix it’ll say event landing page visited the event, PDF download event attended seminar or event attended webinar June 2015
Ash Roy (12:48):
Barry, what I love about this though is because you prefix it with the word event, you can have 270 events, but because it’s got the prefix event, you know the category of the tag. That’s point one, point two by having the prefix, it forces you to think about what you’re doing with this person. Are you tagging them for an event or you’re tagging them for a topic they’re interested in? Are you taking them for a purchase decision they made? What is it?
Barry Moore (13:16):
Yeah, exactly. Right, and so to your point, we have topic tags, right? Or use topic tags. It might say topic running or topic Fiji or topic Europe or topic, you know, Island getaways or something like that. So I know that I know what you’re in style, I know what topics you’re interested in, right? And then that allows you, if, if you want to put together an office for an offer for everyone who’s interested in iron getaways, all I need you to do is go into my system and filter all my contacts by who has the topic on the getaway tag. Here are a hundred people, right? So if I need a little extra cash, I put together an offer for people who are interested in Island holidays. I go and send that out to the hundred straight away, see what kind of response I get from that.
Barry Moore (13:55):
And then I can decide whether I want to continue with that offer and give it to other people who might not be as interested, but it’s still might convert or you know, tweak the offer or whatever. So there’s event text is, there’s lead magnet tech. So I can see every lead magnet that everyone’s downloaded. So if you have an online business where you’re giving away PDFs or free courses or whatever it is, I want to know every lead magnet you’ve downloaded because that’s telling you, telling me your behavior and what you were interested in. So you know, know lead magnet, downloaded our running guide or lead magnet downloaded the top 10 things to do in Fiji or took an online course on how to drive trucks, right? So I have lead magnet tags, I have event tags, have topic tags, have status tags. It tells me a status, like your status, you’re a customer or you’re not a customer or status, you are a leader for a particular product.
Barry Moore (14:42):
Status lead for Fiji or status customer, or if you’re a repeat buyer or do you have a customer lifetime value that’s above a certain threshold status VIP. Status VIP tags it tells me who my most engaged customer, who is my brand champions, who are the people that buy from me all the time, right, so they’re going to status VIP tag. I might put together special offers for them, or when someone goes above the threshold that makes them a VIP, let’s say a hundred lead points or whatever you want to say. Once they tick over and they get that status, VIP tag sends me an email system, sends me to me, and says, yey, Ash has just tipped over the BIP threshold. Let’s send him something special. Send him a special gift or call them up or give them an extra hour of consulting or whatever because those people are going to be your brand champions. They go around telling everybody else how awesome you are, right? So you might want to treat them a little bit special,
Ash Roy (15:31):
In active campaign, you can do lead scoring to achieve this as well.
Barry Moore (15:34):
You can, you can, they have a lead scoring feature in some of their, their higher plans. But you know, they probably don’t want me to tell you this, but you can kind of roll your own solution inside of active campaign yourself, even on the lower plans as well. But wouldn’t it be great, right? If you had a list of 5,000, 10,000 people if you knew the top 100 were right, and that’s kinda, that’s what tags can do for you. It set the spotlight in the ceiling that shows you who the most receptive people are. So it’s really important that you think about the customer journey first. And once you’ve got the customer journey kind of mapped out that you go through these tags and create these tags before you start, right? What are my event tags going to be? What events am I trying to drive these people to?
Barry Moore (16:14):
He doesn’t have to, it’s a terrible analogy to use. But you think about Cowboys driving cattle right? You’re trying to get everybody into the corral of buying your product or being part of your membership or showing up at your event, right? You’re trying to drive everybody to that point. Now, some strays are gonna go up this way in that way, but what events are we trying to drive them to that are going to turn them into customers? How far along the journey are there? I’m there. Step one, are they in step 10 of the journey? Right? So tax will tell you that. So you have all these tags ready to go before you even opened an active campaign before you even look at the tool. I do it in the spreadsheet, I do it in an Excel spreadsheet and I go, right, this is the tag, this is what it means. This is what I’m going to use it. And I give that spreadsheet away for free for people. Anybody who wants to know
Ash Roy (16:55):
you have an excellent tagging Ninja guide. How do our listeners get hold of that?
Barry Moore (16:59):
You can just go to theactivemarketer.com/taggingguide and it breaks down everything we just talked about. It gives you access to that free spreadsheet and there’s also a free tagging mini-course on the site as well. You can take a video of course if you’re not a reader, there’s a free video
Ash Roy (17:15):
I linked to that in the show notes of this episode. And if you want to find the episode, just go to productiveinsights.com and type in Barry Moore in the search bar. That’s M O O R E. Speaking of driving people towards an offer, I’m going to make a shameless plug here and say this episode is brought to you by the productive insights membership program. So I’m trying to drive you right now to go to getmetodone.com where you can find out more about that. So we drive them towards the offer and we get the people to put their hand up, get the people to self select the ones that are interested and that are in the buying window. And then we make those people targeted office.
Barry Moore (17:53):
Correct. And then so once they, and then once they have taken that off for up or yes, no, or not now, right? If they’ve taken that off for up, then the tags are going to tell me that and we’re going to put them into an onboarding sequence. Right? And that I have a free onboarding sequence people can get as well over at the book. But that onboarding sequence will do a number of things for you, right? It’ll set the expectations for what the customer is about to go through, what they’re about to get, what they’re about to do, what they’re, what they’ve just paid for, which is gonna. It’s going to help them. It’d be in the right mindset, as we talked about earlier. It’s going to head off any kind of chargebacks and refunds, uh, because people have different expectations of what’s happening next.
Barry Moore (18:32):
So we want to set expectations, then we want to give them some quick wins. So the best thing you can do is somebody who’s just bought a product from you is get them a win straight away, right? That starts the magic of momentum that we talked about before, right? Once you get your first one, you’re hungry for your second one and your third one and your fourth one and your fifth one line. How many times I’ve done it, I’m going to say I’ve done it. How many times have you bought a product and then never opened the thing? Yeah. Yeah, that’s great for whoever sold it to you. They’ve got, they’ve got your money and they didn’t have to deliver anything. But you know what, you probably won’t buy anything else from them either. That’s fine because you haven’t, they haven’t shown you what they can do for you, right?
Barry Moore (19:08):
You haven’t had the opportunity to actually get the result that you wanted. So you can be looking for any other results. So getting somebody’s results is really good for you because they’ll come back and be a repeat customer, right? So you want to get them started and getting results straight away. Then you want to tell them common pitfalls, right? It’s common pitfalls. Ahead off, stop them from making mistakes, which is the altruistic thing. But the slightly less altruistic thing is it reduces calls and tickets to your help desk system, right? If I could tell you what the common mistakes are upfront, you won’t make them, right. Then part of that automation will also be checking in with them, right? So you bought this thing from me a week or two weeks ago. I’m going to get an alert and I’m going to reach out to your person and say, Hey, Ash bought my membership program.
Barry Moore (19:50):
GetMeToDone. How are you doing? Is there anything I can help out with your stumbling box? Have you been, have you gotten started? If you haven’t gotten started, why not? How can I help you get the result you want? Right? And then, you know, maybe three or four weeks later I asked her or whatever, whenever we get the result, that sequence is going to automatically ask you for a referral or a testimonial or something like that, right? Because the testimonials become powerful things to sell the seller the product in the first place, right? If you go to my go look at my active campaign courts, there’s like a gazillion testimonials one from you I believe as well. Gazillion testimonials there. If someone’s not convinced by 55 started testimonials going past that, not what you can do, but you know, I had to ask for those. It’s not like I had to get them right, so don’t forget about that as well. So that’s what happens on the yes branch. What happens on the no branch is, you know, I’ll put them into a longterm nurture sequence. We always said no, but you’d have an unsubscribe. So maybe just not putting the right thing
Barry Moore (20:48):
in front of them. So I’m going to go back and look through their tags and try and figure out what the right thing is. And then the not now thing of the not now branch, which is, Hey, they were interested in this product. Not now is the right time. So I might keep them in a nurture program that tells them more about that or offers them a similar programs. Or maybe I have a program instead of a slightly reduced price or something like that. Or a different payment plan or something that’s going to get them past common objections. Right. And so the tags are going to help me do that brand to those people into the appropriate things.
Ash Roy (21:15):
Cool. Okay, so let’s wrap this one up. Key insights and action steps. So for me, I’ve been taking notes as I always do. You talked about people’s products and process and you explained how process connects the people to the products.
Ash Roy (21:28):
I really like that you want to get clear on who’s interested in your product. You effectively get them to put their hand up by tagging them. And what you may or may not have mentioned is within the active campaign and probably a lot of these bits of software, when someone clicks on a certain link on one of your emails, you can automatically tag them in the background. This was a slightly creepy part, but as long as you don’t use it for the evil it is, in my opinion, a good thing. So if someone’s clicked on certain links or they’ve gone to certain pages, which you can do by sidetracking, you can tag them within active campaign automatically. And then based on what behaviors they’ve shown, you can send them targeted offers at the right time in their buying window. Start with the end in mind and you said you want to try and divide people into three camps and I believe he uses in most parts of your automation you got the yes camp.
Ash Roy (22:21):
The not right now camp and the no camp and you have messaging for each one of those three. We also talked about tags and prefixes, so you might have event Colin feed your creed, you might event Colin, I was going to say raw concept but they don’t have it anymore. These days you get the idea or someone purchases something. Purchase Colin membership program and then you talked about creating onboarding sequences where you set certain expectations. Great episode with the co-founder of digital marketer episode 171 Richard Lindner. He talked really well about onboarding sequences and I recommend you check that out. Productiveinsights.com/171 and then you talked about the importance of getting people to understand the quick wins, help them to get some results. That’s what the quick wins are about so that you build a stronger brand and you get them an actual result. And the term common pitfalls is obviously don’t want them to step in the potholes, but you also don’t want too many calls coming into your call center and burdening your infrastructure. Any other thoughts or ideas?
Barry Moore (23:22):
No, just make sure you, you’re pretty clear on what that customer journey is that you’re trying to take people on and that’ll help you design that process that you’ve tried to, you know, for lack of a better term, heard people through or guide people through it. Yeah. Yeah.
Ash Roy (23:34):
And episode one 70 is really a master class on building a good customer value journey. Ryan dice revealed all that digital marketer does in terms of building customer journeys. I recommend that out. Productiveinsights.com/170. If you’re listening to this on the iTunes channel, please check out the YouTube version. The YouTube channel is youtube.com/productiveinsights. There’ll be links to the various things that we talked about in the show notes. And Barry, how do people find out more about you if they want it?
Barry Moore (24:06):
The easiest way is to head to the activemarketer.com. It’s all there.
Ash Roy (24:10):
Thanks for being on bro and I look forward to having you on again sometime soon.
Barry Moore (24:14):
Cheers. Always a pleasure, Ash. Thanks.
