Please stop marketing to me if I’ve already purchased

By Tina | October 28, 2011

Can I share a pet peeve of mine? (One of many, hehe…)

I get annoyed when I purchase something and then continue to receive emails saying “hey, buy this thing!”

This happened to me over the past couple of weeks. I purchased a program on October 13th which started on October 27th… and I’ve received an email every 2 or 3 days since then continuing to promote that same program.

I already bought it – so why do you keep asking me to buy it again? Seems like a little thing in some ways, but it is really frustrating to me. And I know this is frustrating to other people, too.

Now I get why people do this – they aren’t being strategic with segmenting their list. Segmenting a list means that you send emails only to a specific group of people. For example, you might “promote Product A to people who have bought Product C”. Or you might segment a list into “everyone on the ezine list LESS those who have already made a purchase” <– which is exactly what I’m talking about here.

Part of what comes into play here is the technology you are using to send your emails – in some systems it is easy to segment, and in others it may not even be doable.

Here are step-by-step instructions on how to do this with the two most popular systems that people use.

[Beware – this part is a bit techie. if you aren’t the techie one in your biz, pass this along to your VA/OBM.]

• If you are using Infusionsoft this is super easy to do (gotta love Infusionsoft!).
  1. Do a search of people who are tagged on your main list (ezine).
  2. Then in the second drop-down box, pick the option “Doesn’t have any of these tags” and pick the tag/s for those you don’t want to send it to (the people who have already purchased).
• If you are using 1ShoppingCart (or some reseller version of that system), it gets a bit more tricky, but it is doable with a little bit of autoresponder “magic.”
  1. Set up a new autoresponder specific to your promotion, i.e.: it could be called October 2011 Promotion.
  2. Do a search for all contacts on your main list (i.e.: ezine), scroll to the drop-down box at the bottom of the search results, choose “Subscribe to Autoresponder,” and add them to the new one you just created.
  3. Wait a few minutes for that to process… then bring up all the people in that new autoresponder, go to the drop-down again, and this time choose to “Unsubscribe from Autoresponder.” Choose the autoresponders of people who have purchased – this will remove all the people who already bought the program.
  4. Every time you send out a promo, run step 3 again to remove new buyers.

Now I’m not sure how/if this works in other systems – if you know, go ahead and post here in the comments.