Link Segmentation: How to allow your audience to segment themselves

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If you have an email address, chances are you got something like this at least ONCE:

This is an amazinggg way to get you know your audience better.

So what is this about?

Basically, we are letting our audience segment themselves. Meaning that with just one click, we can add them to a particular “bucket”. [New to email segmenting? Read this post first].

In this article, I will be showing you how to create something like this for yourself using my favorite email marketing tool, Active Campaign.

If you use a different tool, you can scroll down to the bottom where I linked the help articles on how to do this for some other tools.

Spoiler alert: Is easier than you think.

Step 1: Get clear on your segments

Before we get started with the technical aspect of segmenting, we need to have a couple of things in place.

First, define our buckets. By buckets I mean the categories we want to group our audience.

As an example, I’ll use my own email from before. In my case, I want to know in which of the following 4 categories my audience falls into:

New service providers
Experienced service providers
New content creators
Experienced content creators

Step 2: Create the landing pages

Depending on your email marketing tool, you might have to create one page per option (more on that later). But as a general rule, if they click on a link, that link needs to land somewhere right?

So, whatever your page builder is (or honestly, it can even be a google doc saying thank you!), just create a suuuper simple page where they can land after they click on an option. As an example, here is mine.

Step 3: Set it up!

Okay, this part is completely different depending on your email marketing tool. I’m going to give you examples on how to do this on my 3 favorite tools: ActiveCampaign, Convertkit, and Mailerlite.

If your tool is not listed here, just search within your tool’s manuals! You can usually find it under “Link triggers” in their documentation section.

So let’s dive in:

Before we get started, note that ActiveCampaign has one small downside: For click segmentation, you will need to have a different URL for each option. Meaning that if you will give your readers 4 different options to choose from, then you will need to have 3 different pages to send them to, since AC will only apply one tag to one URL (if you use the same link more than once, the same tag will be applied each time, instead of different ones like we wanted)

Go to Campaigns ➝ Create a campaign
Once inside the campaign, you will add your text, and select the sentence you’d like your audience to click to segment themselves. And select the “link” icon in the formatting bar

Then you’re going to add the link to your “Thank you” page
Click on “Add Action”. Then “Add Tag”, and select the tag you want to be applied to people who click on that particular link