How to organise contacts in one list
In this article, we’ll walk you through a few simple ways to organise your list and send to smaller groups of your subscribers.
Tags:
Let’s start with tags. Tags are an excellent way for you to target specific groups of contacts.
For example, you can add hidden tags to your subscription forms and landing pages, ensuring that anyone who signs up through a specific form is automatically assigned a tag. This allows you to know the source of your contacts and send them personalised emails or create automations that trigger when a tag is added to a contact.
Example: Imagine you’re working on a new book and want to send a free sample chapter to people signing up via a dedicated landing page. Once they submit the form, a tag is assigned to their contact, which triggers an automation to send them an email with the chapter.
To add a tag to your form or landing page, just click on the email address field visible on your form and on the left-side panel, add a tag.
If you already have a list of contacts that you’d like to import to EmailOctopus, you can import tags directly with your file. You can either have the tags in a dedicated column within your file or automatically apply a tag to all contacts within your imported file on the import page.
Choice fields:
Another feature that might come in handy when organising your contacts is our single and multiple-choice fields.
These fields let you create predefined options that subscribers can choose from to indicate their preferences, like the type or frequency of content they want to receive. You can add these fields directly to your subscription forms and landing pages, and then create dedicated segments based on their selections.
Example: If you offer both a weekly and a monthly newsletter, you could create a multiple-choice field with those two as separate choice options and add the field to your forms. Contacts can select one of those or both at the same time and receive your content at their preferred frequency.
You can learn how to create choice fields in our dedicated guide here. Once your fields are set up, you can add them to your subscription forms and create segments for each field value, like we did for our weekly newsletter:
This allows you to select that segment as the recipients of your campaigns.
You can also use these choice fields to create specific advanced automations for your contacts and send tailored emails based on their selections.
Segments:
Segmentation allows you to create groups of contacts within your list that you can target separately. You can create segments based on tags, field values, your contacts’ engagement data, etc.
Example: If you have multiple forms or landing pages for different topics you want to cover in your emails, you can add a tag to each form. Then, create segments based on those tags to send targeted emails to contacts interested in each topic.
To create a segment based on a tag, click Create a segment under the Segments tab in your list, select the Tags filter and the has tag as operator, and choose the name of your tag. You can create a separate segment for each tag, or create segments that consider multiple different tags. Here, we created a segment based on two tags to send a campaign relevant to both topics.
Make sure to use the Subscribers matching any of the following option. This will ensure that contacts who have any of your selected tags added will be included in the segment.
You can also create these combined segments directly on the campaign creation page under the Advanced tab.
