Segment Your Audience

[00:00:00]
>> And then we gotta prepare and send our survey email. Now, in this particular case, we are going to segment our audience, right. So that means we're gonna send different emails to slightly different groups. We're gonna send an email to those we consider influences. We're gonna send a version of the email to those who didn't reply to our first email.

[00:00:28]
And then we're gonna send a version to those who did reply to our first email, right. Does that makes sense? Okay, so in terms of how you do that, it's up to you. You could just do it in Excel, just make a note of who replied and who didn't.

[00:00:44]
Or you could use a tool I use ConvertKit, which is a great tool for managing email lists. And actually longer term, once you've actually got a proper mailing list rather than this cold one. Then that becomes particularly useful, but we'll revisit that later. So let's look at our emails very quickly, so make the subject line to write to influences in this case.

[00:01:07]
Make the subject line clear and reference your previous communication. So I've put next step in the Charity's report we discussed, right. So makes it very obviously tied to previous conversations. You may remember I emailed you in regards to a report we are creating on user experience in the Charity sector.

[00:01:27]
I mentioned I was interested in your feedback as to what she covered. So I'm reminding them about the previous conversation, make it clear why you're contacting them. Then introduce the survey so I've prepared a survey that I would love you to complete. I will use it to inform the final report, it should only take you five minutes to complete.

[00:01:47]
Obviously in return I will send you a copy of the final report when it's completed. So you introduce the survey, make it clear what you want them to do, and what they will get in return. All right, but also emphasize it won't take them long. Also feel free to share this with your network if you think it's of value, the more responses we get, the more accurate the final results.

[00:02:06]
So encourage them because they're influencers to share it with their broader community. And also explain why that's worth their time in doing that it's gonna lead to a better report. If you have any feedback on the survey or maybe you would like to collaborate on it with me.

[00:02:23]
Because these are influences remember, then drop me a reply and I'm happy to set up a call, I'd love to chat. So make it personal and use the opportunity to directly engage, cuz these are the kind of people that actually. If they turned around and said, this sounds like a really good idea, you want, let's get their name on it.

[00:02:42]
Because they've already got an established name and stuff like that. So that's how I deal with influencers, in terms of 'No contact' emails, so the people that didn't reply previously. It's pretty much mainly the same as the other one but it's got some differences. So I've written well, thanks to some great feedback from others in the sector I've now prepared a short survey.

[00:03:07]
That will inform the final report. If you could spare five minutes max to complete the survey, I'll be more than happy to give you a free copy of the final report in return. So I've added a bit where I emphasize how others have got involved. Even though you didn't, it's that old fear of missing out thing.

[00:03:24]
And then I end with if you have any feedback on the survey, we'll be happy or we'd be happy to be interviewed, drop me a reply. So instead of this whole collaboration thing, I've changed out to being interviewed instead. People like being interviewed, because it makes them look like an expert.

[00:03:44]
And if you quote them in the report, then that goes down very well. For those people that had previously contacted, I've changed the subject a little bit, your feedback helped our survey a lot. And then we thank them for their previous involvement, then pretty much everything else is the same.

[00:04:06]
So it's just a lot of kind of thank you for your contributions etc. So yeah and that's the email you're sending out, or you have to write LinkedIn message or whatever else. So it's all there word for word, obviously you need to tailor it to make it sound like you, obviously you need to tailor it for your sector.

[00:04:25]
But hopefully that's a good starting point you can get to from the slide deck that'll save you a bit of work rather than start from scratch. There's nothing worse than that flashing cursor on a blank page when you're supposed to write an important email. So this idea I keep talking about of offering a site audit to encourage responses.

[00:04:47]
It's optional you don't have to do it, but I have found it is quite worthwhile doing, so it provides a number of benefits. When you're auditing websites, if you bother to go to these different websites and audit them and look at them. Then it also actually provides really good quality content for your report, cuz you can now go.

[00:05:10]
For example, on this site, they do dot dot dot, or their performance was better than average. And you can reference things that's going on in the industry, it's a good way, bulking out your report. So it gives you more content in your report, improves the quality of your report.

[00:05:28]
And also, the other great thing is people love to know how they're ranking and how they're doing. Especially compared to their competitors. So this kind of site audit potentially is an interesting strategy for doing that. Now I'll explain how to do it in just a minute, and encourages people to contact you as well.

[00:05:45]
Because they have to write back and say yeah we'd love to be included in that. So, this is the approach that I tend to use, I use a scorecard approach. So this is a scorecard for [LAUGH] bizarrely an Egyptian university. Cuz I did a whole load of work with the Egyptian universities, and so we started exam scoring them against one another.

[00:06:08]
So I had different criteria accessibility, relevance, usability, engagement, and I gave them scores against different criteria in each. So basically, you identify a small number of criteria related to your report, whatever the subject that is. You rank a site against each of your criteria on a simple one to five scale, nothing very complicated.

[00:06:29]
And you even use automated tools where possible. So for example, when I was doing, I think it was usability or one of my factors included performance. So I just use GTmetrix to get a performance figure out there, and then I write a tiny few lines of recommendations for each one.

[00:06:54]
So that it feels a bit more personal, and I spend no more than 30 minutes on each of these things, filling them in. It's really fast and furious, you don't need to review every site on your list. You can even review only the ones that specifically asked you for a review, or you could choose to review a cross section.

[00:07:16]
You can put as much or as little time into this as you want, but this is what people really love, which is league tables, right. Where you publish how different sites performed against one another. Everybody wants to know how they're doing compared to everybody else. So this is why I really think this is although optional, is a really good thing to put in the report.

[00:07:40]
Because if you could say there is a league table where your website is compared to your competitors in the report, they will wanna know. They will wanna download that, so it's a good one for getting downloads.