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Have you looked at your email marketing setup and thought it looked like a storage unit filled with boxes that are either junk or gold, but you have no way of knowing which is which?
Almost every one of my email marketing clients tells me, with a sheepish look, that their tags are a mess. If that’s you too, this is a zero-judgment zone.
Here’s the thing: an organized list isn’t about tidying up for its own sake. It’s about building an intentional, values-aligned Subscriber Strategy – a system for organizing your subscribers so the right messages reach the right people.
It’s the third step in my Automate with Intention Framework, and is what enables you to send segmented emails and understand your audience.
Why you need a strategy for organizing your subscribers
A clear system for organizing your subscribers pays off in a number of concrete ways:
It prevents irrelevant emails from going out. When each subscriber is identified correctly, you’re not sending people content that doesn’t apply to them. That keeps your list engaged instead of annoyed.
It sharpens personalization. An organized system lets you tailor messaging to different subscribers, which makes what you send more relevant and more valuable.
It reduces confusion on the back end. When your setup is organized, you (or anyone helping you – a VA, a team member) can understand what everything means without playing detective. That means less time decoding tags and more time sending the right emails to the right people.
It saves you time, and it scales with you. It’s a lot easier to set things up right from the start than to clean up a mess later. And a system that’s built with intention from day one grows with your list instead of buckling under it.
It improves deliverability. When people get relevant, targeted emails, they’re more likely to open, click, reply, or forward them. That tells Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo that you’re sending quality mail – which improves the odds your emails land in the inbox instead of spam.
The Subscriber Strategy Framework: How to organize your subscribers inside your email marketing software
There are three steps to the Subscriber Strategy Framework:
- Determine broadly how you need to segment (or bucket) your subscribers
- Identify and break down categories of information you need to know about your subscriber
- Pick a naming convention
- Sort into a tag, field, or segment
Step 1: Determine broadly how you need to segment your subscribers
We’ll dive deeper into segmentation later, but for now, determine what buckets of subscribers you’ll be emailing, which is often informed by what type of newsletter you’re writing and your audience.
Generally speaking, these might be:
- Current and former clients or customers
- Potential clients/customers, and the profile of what they look like
- Referral partners
- Colleagues
- Fellow industry professionals
- Executives
Step 2: Determine the categories of information you need to know
From there, it helps to get clear on what you actually want to know about your subscribers. Not everyone needs every category below – this is meant to help you figure out what applies to you.
Identity, as it relates to your work
For a lactation consultant client, that might be whether someone is currently pregnant or already has a baby. For a pet-industry business, it might be whether someone’s into conventional pet food or homemade pet food. For me, it’s whether someone uses Kit, uses something else, wants to migrate, or hasn’t set anything up yet.
Level or stage
Where is this person in their journey with you? For a career coach, that might be “between jobs,” “employed and looking to switch,” or “looking to level up in their current field.” For me, it’s how far along someone is with their email marketing.
How they found you
Events, talks, launches – giving each entry point its own trackable opt-in helps you see later what’s actually driving both sign-ups and sales.
Current automation status
Whether someone is mid-welcome-sequence, has completed it, or is in some other nurture flow. This one matters more than it might seem, because it feeds directly into the most useful segment most businesses can build: a newsletter segment that excludes anyone currently in an automated sequence, so new subscribers aren’t hit with two emails on the same day.
Products or services purchased
A reliable way to avoid pitching someone something they already bought – and to instead show them content connected to what they signed up for, rather than a redundant sales pitch.
Preferences and consent
Give people a clear way to opt out of sales emails while staying on your list, or to skip a specific sequence while staying subscribed to your newsletter. This especially matters for sensitive or triggering topics – offering an opt-out for specific content is always worth building in.
Interests
If you cover a few distinct topics, let subscribers choose what they actually want to hear about.
A quick compliance note: if you have subscribers in Europe, Switzerland, or the UK, GDPR generally requires that people can receive a freebie without being required to join your general email list. I’m not a lawyer, so check with one on the specifics – but it’s worth building an explicit opt-in step rather than assuming consent.
Step 3: Pick a naming convention
Because Kit sorts tags and custom fields alphabetically, the naming convention you choose determines whether related tags sit next to each other or scatter across your list. Pick an identifier to lead with, so everything in the same category groups together automatically.
It doesn’t matter which format you choose. What matters is picking one and staying consistent.
| Format | Example |
|---|---|
| Category: Value | Relationship: Client |
| Category | Value | Relationship | Client |
| Category – Value | Relationship – Client |
| [Category] Value | [Relationship] Client |
Step 4: Sort each category into a Tag, Field, or Segment
At this stage we’re mostly slotting things into tags, custom fields, and segments. This section is a bit Kit-specific since each platforms organizes subscribers a bit different, but a good rule of thumb is:
| Tags are best for | Custom fields are best for | Segments are best for |
|---|---|---|
| Binary info – purchased or didn’t, enrolled or not | Info that shifts over time or lives on a spectrum – a level, a stage, a status | Combining tags and fields into a group that updates itself automatically |
| Multiple-choice traits, where someone can hold more than one at once (interests, topics) | Info the subscriber generates themselves, usually through a form (name, location, self-identification) | Including or excluding subscribers based on more than one condition at a time |
| Info you or your automations assign to someone | Anything that should only ever hold one current value | Anything you want to stay current without manually re-sorting your list |
If you don’t use Kit, some of this terminology may not map directly onto your platform. Here’s roughly how the concepts translate, but note that it’s not a direct 1:1 match.
| Platform | Subscribers | Static grouping | Dynamic grouping | Open-ended info |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kit | Subscribers | Tags | Segments | Custom fields |
| Mailerlite | Subscribers | Groups | Segments | Custom fields |
| ActiveCampaign | Contacts | Tags | Segments / Lists | Custom contact fields |
| Flodesk | Subscribers | Tags | Segments | Custom data fields |
| Mailchimp | Contacts | Tags | Segments / Groupings | Custom fields |
How to segment your subscribers
How you organize your subscribers in part informs how you segment your subscribers, or which groups of subscribers receive which emails from you.
What exactly is email segmentation?
Email segmentation starts from a simple premise: your subscribers don’t all have the same needs, interests, or place in their journey with you. When you tailor who receives which email, you’re respecting their inbox, building trust, and staying relevant.
I find it helpful to separate two ideas that get blurred together constantly:
- Segmentation is the “who.” It’s the group of people receiving a given email, and the logic behind how you built that group.
- Personalization is the “what.” It’s how the message itself shifts based on what you know about the person reading it.
Here’s a concrete example. Say I send an email to everyone on my list except people who told me they don’t want to hear about an upcoming training. That’s the segment – the who. Within that same email, someone who hasn’t set up their email marketing software yet might see slightly different messaging than someone who already has. That’s personalization – the what.
How detailed you get with segmentation depends on your business model, your list size, what you sell (a low-cost digital product versus a high-touch 1:1 program calls for very different approaches), what you already know about your subscribers, what they’ve consented to receive, and – importantly – your own capacity to manage it all.
Segment ideas for your business
People ask me constantly: “Bev, what segments should I set up?” And the honest answer is always: it depends. Anyone who hands you a universal list of “the 3 segments every business needs” is oversimplifying. But a few patterns show up often enough to be worth sharing.
A newsletter segment
If you have a welcome sequence or any other nurture sequence, build a segment that excludes anyone currently enrolled in it. That way your regular broadcast newsletter only reaches people who’ve completed onboarding – so a subscriber who joined yesterday and started your welcome sequence today doesn’t also get hit with your Friday newsletter on top of it.
Client or customer segments
If each product or service has its own tag, it’s worth having a segment made up of just your current clients or students, in case you ever want to send them something separate from your general list.
Segments by interest or level
Ask a question at signup so you can route people to the content that’s actually relevant to them. My client Steve, who coaches K-12 teachers, ran into exactly this problem – his list was getting fatigued from receiving every lesson plan regardless of grade level. Once he started asking subscribers what grade they taught at signup, he could send tailored lesson plans instead of a one-size-fits-all blast. Engagement recovered, and Steve stopped hearing complaints about irrelevant content.
Time-bound launch segment
Give people the option to opt out of launch emails, and automatically exclude anyone who’s already purchased. My client Margaux, who runs multiple summits a year, used to send every summit promotion to her entire list regardless of purchase status – with no opt-out. The result was declining opens as each promotion wore on, and rising unsubscribes. After we built a proper launch segment, purchasers stopped receiving promotional follow-ups, and subscribers could opt out of promotions for summits they weren’t interested in. You can get even more specific by excluding subscribers who wouldn’t benefit from the offer at all – my own launch segment for a Kit-specific program excludes anyone who doesn’t use Kit or hasn’t set up email marketing software yet.
Subscriber Strategy in practice
Here’s an example of a subscriber strategy for an imaginary client is a financial advisory.
| Tag Category | Tag Options | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Identity | Retired Retired by Temporary Work Not Retired | Identifies people’s current working stage, this information is collected when they sign up for the newsletter. |
| Relationship | Client Past Client Referral Partner | Identifies people’s relationships to the business owner. Most subscribers have none of these tags. |
| Initial Signup | Webinar Website Footer Lead Magnet | Track where subscribers came from, so that the business owner can track which sources are leading to people hiring them. |
| Service | Strategy Call Financial Advising Services | Identifies what types of services their clients have purchased. |
| Currently Enrolled | Welcome Sequence | Know who’s mid-sequence to avoid double-sending. |
| Newsletter Consent | Yes | Identifies who has consented to receiving the newsletter (some of their clients receive updates here, but don’t also want to receive the twice-monthly newsletter). |
This person has a newsletter segment that excludes anyone who is currently in the welcome sequence and has not consented to receiving the newsletter, which is what they use for sending out their twice-monthly newsletter.
Best practices for creating your Subscriber Strategy
If you take one thing from all of this, let it be this: segmentation isn’t about building the most elaborate system possible. It’s about matching your setup to your actual capacity and your actual audience.
Keep it simple. You could slice your list a dozen different ways, but most solo businesses and small teams don’t need to super nitty gritty.
Know your limits. If you don’t have a dedicated marketing team, you probably don’t have the bandwidth to manage a dozen different subscriber segments getting a dozen different emails. Build what you can actually maintain.
Remember there’s a human on the other side. Give people room to step back from promotions when they need to. Send relevant offers to the right people instead of everything to everyone. Show a little extra care to your existing clients and customers.
That’s what a real Subscriber Strategy looks like in practice – not a rigid rulebook, but a system that treats your list like the complex, individual people they actually are.
In the meantime, if untangling your current setup feels like more than you want to take on alone, that’s exactly what I help with. Download my services guide to learn more.
The Subscriber Strategy was was developed in 2022 by Bev Feldman, an email marketing strategist and Kit Certified Expert at Your Personal Tech Fairy, where she offers done-for-you email marketing services for credentialed professionals who built their business out of their expertise and didn’t become masters in their craft to become marketers. The Subscriber Strategy is step 3 of the Automate with Intention Framework.