How to Automate Data Collection - Part 2: Email Marketing Segmentation

List segmentation is one of the pillars of successful email marketing. It gives you the power to send relevant, timely messages to the people who actually want to read them.

But in order to create segmented lists in most email marketing platforms, you need to manually build them by selecting the criteria that you want to filter your lists by.

This can be a very time-consuming process, especially if you have a multitude of lists to build.

In the end, you can’t just send all of your emails to every contact in your database. Spray and pray has never worked.

Like we mentioned before, you need to send the most relevant, timely messages to the people who actually want to read them. So what’s the solution here?

Since Make makes it possible to retrieve submitted form data through no-code forms and custom forms, you can expand the scenarios featured in the first part of this series in order to add your leads to different email lists based on certain criteria.

In the second part of our series about automated data collection, we highlight the Make scenarios that you can use to automate this process.

If you’ve been spending countless hours segmenting your email lists, this post is for you.

How to automate email marketing segmentation

Let’s start with a concrete example: In the Typeform lead form below, an agency asks prospects to select which service they’re interested in.

Once the prospect selects an option and submits the form, Make will add them to a relevant email list in ActiveCampaign.

This automation requires absolutely no manual work from you or anyone working with you.

The list is automatically being built in the background and will be ready for use as soon as you need it.

To build this automation, you’ll have to use the Make filter feature in conjunction with a router.

This will allow Make to execute the path that the prospect selects when answering the form.

And since the “Service” field in the form above has three options, the scenario will contain three different paths, along with three different filters.

So, what are the filters for?

In the screenshot below, you’ll see how the filter in the top path monitors whether the answer in the “Service” field of the form is equal to “Website Development”.

If it indeed is, the condition of this filter is met and the path gets executed.

Now, let’s go over how this scenario works.

In each of these paths, Make grabs the email address that the prospect has entered and creates a contact in ActiveCampaign.

Then, with the generated contact ID, Make adds the prospect to an ActiveCampaign list called “Website Development”.

This allows the agency to email messages that actually cater to the prospect’s needs (the service that they’ve selected).

As a result, they have a much higher chance of nurturing them and turning them into a customer.

Worth telling, all of this happens without any human intervention; the costs of segmenting this way are significantly lower than having an employee manually going through form answers and creating the corresponding email lists.

Building email lists that will generate the best results possible

Like we mentioned before, the spray and pray approach to email marketing has never worked and it never will.

You need to send relevant, timely messages to the people who actually want to read them.

But creating segmented lists requires you to manually build them by selecting the criteria that you want to filter your lists by.

This can be a very time-consuming process, especially if you have a multitude of lists to build.

Fortunately, with Make you can automatically filter your leads into the most relevant lists, start emailing them immediately, and boost the odds that they’ll keep engaging with your brand.