Let’s face it, your email marketing platform can get really messy, really quickly if you’re not organised.

With automations, tags, and campaigns flying all over the place, things can go from zero to chaos in no time. That’s why, in this week’s episode of 'The Email Marketing Show', we tackled how to stay organised with your email systems. Ready?

We’re Kennedy and Fifi, and if you’ve ever felt like your email list is a cluttered mess, this one's for you.

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Want more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.

This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.

Want to connect with Fifi?

Fifi is a personal brand and visibility coach who works primarily with introverted coaches and impact makers. She helps quieter people – those who have ideas they want to share with the world but struggle to put them out there. Fifi empowers them to find a way to share in a way that aligns with who they are. You can find Fifi on her website.

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How do you get organized and stay organized with your emails, your tags, your automations, and all the stuff that you've got to do to keep organized with email marketing? We've got three different ways and we're talking about it in today's episode. Oh yeah, it's email marketing Wednesday. You ready heroes? And this is the email marketing show.

It's time for a no bullshit look at how to make more sales from that email list of yours. Let's do it. Hello, welcome to the show.

I am Fifi Mason from FifiMason.com. And I'm Kennedy from emailmarketingheroes.com. Look, until you've hit a consistent, predictable $10,000 revenue every single month, you feel like you're always sort of starting over. You feel like you're constantly trying to figure out what's the next big thing that's going to give me sales. And that's an awful place to be.

And I remember you feel like you're going from feast to famine all the time. And it's especially the case where you're a coach or you've got an online course, you sell your expertise in some way. So we've put together an on-demand webinar where I actually show you exactly how I have got to that consistent $10,000 a month over and over again in lots of different businesses.

Just go to emailmarketingheroes.com slash free class, emailmarketingheroes.com slash free class. You can go, you can register, it's free. And you can just watch it on your own time.

Yeah. So what are you working on at the moment? What's going on in your world, Kennedy? Yeah, what is going on? I'll tell you what, the thing that's going on is you've got this amazing summit coming up. And we recorded my little section for it the other day.

And that was really good fun. I feel like we got into some really interesting stuff and stuff I've never said before. Yeah, I thought it was great.

I thought it was really, really informative, insightful. Lots of gold in there. Lots of stuff that I was just like, this is going to be amazing when people hear it because I'll be blown away.

Some really, really amazing ideas. Yeah, it was really good fun. It was really good fun.

In fact, the summit's not far away now, is it? Do you want to just tell us a little bit about what the summit is for? I know that people who are listening to this show will just get so much value from it because it's a similar sort of vibe to this. If you like this, it's slightly more professional, honestly, your summit than this show is. We dick about a little bit on here.

But just give us a bit of a rundown. Just people can decide, oh yeah, that's for me. Yeah, so this is my fifth summit and I'm celebrating the birthday, I suppose, the fifth birthday.

But it's called the Quietly Impactful Summit and it's for introverted coaches and impact makers who want to get visible and build an authentic personal brand. And we have speakers on all sorts of different things from marketing and email, of course, is in there. We've got productivity, we've got mindset, we've got sales and some interesting workshops as well.

We have a workshop on how to sketch in your business, which is really exciting. I'm really looking forward to it. So if you are interested in finding out more about it and want to come along, you can do that at quietlyimpactfulsummit.com. Cool.

And how much is a ticket for the summit? It's actually free. So completely free. I couldn't remember, you know.

It's free, but if you do want to get the recordings and everything, there is the all access pass. Yes. So if you can't attend live when it's being broadcast, you can get the all access pass.

So that's quietlyimpactfulsummit.com. Yes. Love it. Love it.

Love it. Love it. Yeah.

Honestly, I've seen the lineup, some of the lineup and it's going to be so, so good. I'm really looking forward to it. So that's what you're going to be doing all of next week anyway, isn't it? Yeah, I'm going to be busy.

And obviously lots of moving parts. You're a pretty organized person. We're talking about organizing ourselves this week on the show because I remember when we used to do a lot of client work in the business, when we used to like go in and build automations for people, which is not a service we offer anymore.

It hadn't for a while. But I would get into some really experienced marketer, you know, definitely people you've heard of from the marketing scene. And I would go in there and be building stuff for them.

I get into their keep account or their active campaign account or whatever, MailChimp account. And it was just a mess. Like it was just shit everywhere.

It was awful. It was awful. And I'm a pretty organized person.

And I like things to be tidy, right? I like tidiness is something that's important to me. So, but it's hard, like it is hard. And I'm lucky in that.

It's weird. I like things to be tidy, but I'm not actually a tidy person. You're talking about me here too, sometimes.

Oh really? Are you the same? You like things to be tidy, not a tidy person? I honestly, I was thinking about this episode this morning before we sat down, I was having a bath, TMI. And I was thinking about the fact that when I'm done with something, like, I don't know, like the towel, you've dried your back and now you've got to like, hang it up. I wish, like, as soon as I'm done with it, I could let go and it would just fucking evaporate.

You know, like on a video game, like that's gone now. I don't need to think about where it goes. Like, cause in my head, it has, like it's gone now.

And then you come back to the bathroom and you go, oh, I'm a dick. I should have put it away. And now it's untidy.

And my cats are now making a nest out of it. And, but luckily you don't have to be the tidy person in your business. I've got an Aidan in my business who, after I set up any automation or a new opt-in form or a new page or anything, he goes, okay.

He's not even grumpy about it. He's like, I'll go and tidy it up. Cause he'll go and add the right naming conventions and put it into the right folders and in the right places.

Cause otherwise I wouldn't have any folders. Everything would just be the big list, you know? Well, I have to do it for myself. So I don't have an Aidan.

Sorry. But if you wanted to, you could have a VA. You could like, or you could just, you've bitten the bullet and decided that you're going to persevere a bit.

Like when people go to the gym, you're just doing it anyway. You're like, I don't want to do it. I feel like sometimes I'm a bit nerdy with it.

I think it's just dependent on my mindset and the mood I'm in, but I try to be, so I have systems and I have ways of doing things. And like with the towel, I know it has its place. So I know what I'm going to do.

I don't have to think about it. It just goes there because that's the pattern. That's how you do it.

That's where it goes. I think that's a good thing though. Like, so for me too, like the towel is easy cause that goes over the radiator.

That's easy. It's starting next to the radiator. So I not only know where it is, everything's got a place.

And then also you make it so the place is easy to access. So if the place you hang your towel was at the garden shed at the bottom of the garden, even though it has a place, you've added extra friction. Whereas if you make it one that you've decided on the place.

So like when that bill comes through and you want to keep a copy of it cause you've paid the bill and you've written pay on it and the date and all that. If you don't have a place for it, it sits on your desk. Like this one's sitting next to me.

Cause I'm like, I don't know where that lives now. I need to go and buy a box file to put in paid bills. And until I've done that, fucking thing's sitting on my desk next to the other one.

Yeah, well, that's it. That's how I deal. Well, I suppose in business on my computer and in life, everything has a place and you actually have to build it out and you have to create that so that you can put it there without thinking about it.

Yeah. And if you could see my desktop on my computer. Yeah.

I mean, every time I share my screen with Aiden and he's like, what is all of that? And I'm like, I only don't know. It's well, I think I'm pretty good. I use Notion a lot for all sorts and I have it quite organized.

One thing that's not very organized is my chat GPT. So I don't know how you can organize that. I'm sure there is ways.

I'm sure. That's not full of them. Mine's just a load of, yeah, mine's crazy.

I guess my chat GPT is organized rather than creating just prompts. I create my own little private GPT. So I have a list of them and that's easier than just going back through old conversations.

That's what I need to do. Yeah. Well, it's slightly easier for me anyway, in the way that I work, not that I'm Mr. Organized.

I think one of the big things to help get organized is to have, I know that you're a fan of, I remember you telling me this, is having consistent naming conventions for things, especially like in email marketing specifically. Let's really zoom in. Tags, you know, most systems these days work allowing you to tag different contacts based on things they do, things they don't do, decisions they made, where they are, what things have happened and what things haven't happened or time or something like that.

And having a particular naming convention for tags, and I guess we could share ours, but the most important thing is, yes, you might adopt what we're going to talk about today and use it as is. But the more important thing than that, really, the more important than using the one we're going to share is have one that works for you and use it. I mean, I know it sounds bloody obvious, right? And here's the thing.

The way that I would organize stuff if I was organized is very different to how Aidan in the business organizes things. Like his system makes no sense to me at all. But since he's the person doing the organizing, I have to conform to that.

And I'm okay with that. Yes, I'm pissed off every time I'm trying to find something, but I'm going, well, that's easier than me or better for me having to be organized. So that's the cost to me, right? So let's get into naming conventions.

Yeah, I'm going to share how I do mine, but I love naming conventions. I started doing this, actually, I learned this from the Email Marketing Heroes membership. It was in there.

It's one of the battle plans, potentially. And I break down all of my tags in this kind of structure of, so in square brackets, you have the word of what it is. So it's like event or function or product or resource.

And that, to me, it tells me everything I need to know about what they've actually signed up for. Because in the tag, it tells me what it is. And it just means that everything is easier to figure out and control because you have this convention, this system that you can repeat.

And every time I want to kind of start a new email campaign with that kind of tag, I know what it's going to be because I have this convention. I don't have to go and find out. I don't have to guess.

I know exactly what it's going to be because it follows the same system every time. Yeah. So for example, every time somebody buys something, they're going to get a tag, which starts off with square brackets product, and then the name of the product.

So if you ever want to pull up a list, a segment, or a bunch of people who have bought that product, you're going to just go and find product, name of product. And the reason we have a, we call it a category maybe, called product, is because you might not only want to tag them with, hey, they bought the product called ABC product, but you also might have to have another tag for that product name. So for example, in our members site, in our members area where people get delivered their product, we need to use tags to unlock certain membership levels or unlock certain pages.

So people got access to courses and stuff. So we don't control that through the product, name of product tag, because they're doing slightly different things. What we'll have instead is a functional tag.

So it'll be in square brackets function, then access, because that's what it's doing. It's giving people access to something, then the name of the product. So if we want to pull up or do something with people who've got access to the product, then again, we'll be able to do that.

And I think there's a really important thing here about tags, which is think about how you will need to use these. And that's how you should set things up from the beginning. I've seen people go way crazy on tagging everything.

I remember back in the day, if I made a, I've probably shared this story before, but it still amazes me. If I sent an email out with a link to a video and the video was about subject lines and I sent the email out on a Tuesday morning, if someone clicked to look at that video, I would tag them with video, they're like videos, subject lines, Tuesdays, mornings. And then you look back at that and go, when would I ever only want to pull up a list of people who open on mornings? The answer is never, never.

That is never gonna be useful information, never. So just be careful of not going too tag happy. The other thing to think about is that there are also, in addition to what we've just shared, there are best practices in some platforms.

So for example, there will be some things you can, like functional things in automations and stuff like that in platforms, which you can trigger based on a tag being applied or removed. But in some platforms, you won't be able to do that. And you'll have to do something else.

So it is about making those decisions around what do I want my tags to do? Tags can activate some things, deactivate other things, but also they might act as a way of you pulling up a list of people or a segment of people so you can do something with them. And they might also act as a record of someone's journey. I know this is something you and I had a really nice conversation about the other day, about how different platforms do this.

In some platforms, you can go to a contact and you can see their entire journey. On this day, this tag was applied. Then the next day it was removed.

And then on this day, it was applied again. On this day, it was removed. Some of them don't show you that for tags.

I know in Fusionsoft, keep, don't. You can only see whether the person currently has a tag or doesn't have a tag. So to give a full record of that journey, you will need to have notes applied every time something happens like that so that you can chronologically go through someone's journey.

So that's just an example of how you have to be very mindful of how a platform does something. For example, again, if your platform doesn't require tags to give people access to stuff, you don't need to have tags for access and then the name of the product. Yeah, I don't have any access tags.

I just have things for products or resources, my events. So it's like a summit, a masterclass. A webinar.

And then I also have just, well, I do have one access tag, but I just call it membership. Because there's just one. So I don't really need to have this whole tagging system for it.

So it's a membership and then what for. But there's not many that actually trigger anything for me. So I tend to, yeah, just stick to the basic ones and try not to have too many.

And also the length is something to be conscious of, which I found out the other day because I was trying to get this system set up for the summit and have a tag go through from Thrivecart. And a really great way to do that was with the label because it does that in Thrivecart, but there's a limit on how long it can be. So that's another thing to consider.

But yeah, you're right. When you have tags, it shows the bigger picture of where they've been, what they've done, where they've been. And I love the way that you described it as passport stamps.

Yes. I forgot about that. Yes.

Yeah. They're almost like little passport stamps of, oh, you've been to Argentina. Oh, then you went to Portugal.

And then you went to like, oh yeah, I've collected all these stamps and you can see someone's passport stamps inside of there. Yeah, I'd forgotten I said that the other day. It's cool.

The point we really want to drive home here is not really the use of tags, but it's the naming convention to be organized. That's what it is. So the ones you really need are product, resource, which is like any free resources, free gifts, lead magnets, that kind of thing.

Event, so summits, master classes, webinars. Function, which is like disengaged, so by email preferences or access to stuff. And then if we do events, it would be that kind of thing.

So that's a really good thing. But there's a thing that's a really fast way of messing up the organization of your email marketing. And this is the thing that really I found out was the cause of when I was going into some of these big marketer systems.

The big problem was that a lot of different people had their fingers in it. I mean, just a lot of different people had been in there and each of them bringing their method or no method and just being very like, let's just get it done, I'll call it any old thing without having one singular legend or one singular glossary or database. So we have a spreadsheet, apparently, I've never bloody seen it, right? We have a spreadsheet which tracks our tags, which is how the team are able to use the same conventions over and over again.

Obviously, I completely ignore those things the same way I ignore my tasks in Asana and all the other things I'm supposed to be doing. But that's how you bring it all together. So the solution here is have one person who quote unquote, owns the platform.

In a corporation, they'd be called a CRM manager. You don't need to give the person a title or anything like that, obviously. But somebody needs to be the person who owns and oversees the platform.

Yeah, I think that's key. That's something that when I created this system in a membership that I created a few years ago, I was the one that was pushing the tagging system. We had a spreadsheet and every time a tag was added, I kind of had to check and make sure that it complied and be the one that took the ownership.

And I think that's key because it just stops it being messy. And yeah, it makes it easier. One of the ways I think of it is, think of these tag names as folders.

Think about websites. Think about the breadcrumbs of which folder you're within. Are you inside of, you know, it's a product and it's a coaching program.

And therefore, you'd have product, coaching and then the name of the coaching program if you have two or three coaching programs. Just think of it that way. Therefore, you can search for all products or you could search for all coaching programs.

So you could easily see that thing. And one of the things that does drive me bonkers is this thing I do myself and I have to go back and correct it is if I sometimes get them the wrong way around or I use an interchangeable word. So if I put a tag, it's called lead generation and another one that's called list building.

I'd be like, I need to pick one of those words because I can't be looking at both of them. So keeping that consistency and using name conventions and thinking of them like folders, like a route that you can see, that you can use a little chevron or you can use a forward slash or a dash or a little pipe, however you want to do it. Just keep it consistent so you can at a glance easily see what it is that that thing is.

Yeah, it kind of looks a bit like a breadcrumb. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

People are familiar with that. And I just thought of something actually and I'm not sure it works consistently and it's only something that I started trying to do and it made sense at the time. But I actually started using the naming convention for campaigns and doing that in this membership.

And it made sense at the time because some of them would start with the tag. So it made sense that it would be to do the same tag. It would be the same name for the campaign.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And it's like, if you have to have multiple automations or workflows or whatever the heck your platform calls them, if you have multiple automations for one campaign, which sometimes you have to do because they need to make decisions and stuff, then again, having that convention, like if you're using our daisy chain campaign, for example, you're probably going to have a couple of automations to make that happen. So you might have multiple daisy chain campaigns because the good thing about that campaign is you can have multiples of them.

That's kind of the point of it. So what you'll probably have is the convention there would be, so again, it's not a tag. This is the name of a campaign.

It would be DC, daisy chain, Chevron, and then what the daisy chain's about. So let's say it's about flowers, okay? DC, then Chevron, then flowers. And then the first automation in that is called the content campaign.

So it would be the word content. So the whole campaign would read DC flowers content. And then the conversion sequence of that would read DC flowers conversion.

So now I can see at a glance, those two things are related. Rather than one of those called daisy chain, the other one's called daisy. And then that one's called flowers.

And this one's called roses. You can't tell they're related at all. Whereas if you have that, and we do the same exact thing with the naming of our pages, the URL of our pages.

People are like, how do you always know what the URL is of one of your sales pages? It's a formula. It is a formula. It's usually the website slash the campaign, the campaign name, whatever it's about.

Similar sort of thing. It allows you to be super hyper organized that way. Yeah, and this is reminding me, I do this too.

It's funny, isn't it? Just finding your own formula and sticking to it and make it, it just makes it so much easier. So much easier. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Untangling a mess is always harder than making the mess, isn't it? Like that's the thing. That's the thing. So hopefully this has acted as some inspiration.

Hopefully a kick up the ass to get your shit together, get things organized, and also give you a way of actually doing that. Shall we get into this week's subject line of the week? This one works very, very, very, very well. It's just the words changed my mind.

That's it. Yeah. How do you like that? I'm very curious.

Okay. And that's the point. Like it's the whole point of it is about what? Is it about me? Have you changed your mind about how you feel about me or about the whole business? Screw this.

I'm not going to teach this stuff anymore. There are so many questions. What did you change your mind from? What did you change it to? Who about, who does it affect? Like there's so many questions.

So again, you can use it for anything. I mean, this was about the fact that I was going to do a live class and then I decided actually I'm going to just pre-record it and let people just jump in straight away. Or it could be how I changed my mind about what it is that I do.

So if you help people with back pain, then it could be at the time when you changed how you think about back pain. I used to think it was all a physical thing, but actually I realized there's a mental element to it. And again, you can find ways of using that.

But just those stark three words of changed my mind, just really stand out. This is reminding me of one that I saw a while ago and it was, I'm retiring. And I was like, what? This person, surely they're not retiring.

They're so successful. What's going on? So I clicked on the email and it was that they're retiring some of their products, not retiring altogether. So it's kind of a similar thing and it just grips you and you're curious to find out the answer to it.

Yeah, I love it. Yes, that's it. Changed my mind.

If you're thinking, hey, I'd like to hear more about this sort of stuff, we have a free on-demand web class. If you go to emailmarketingheroes.com slash free class, it's all one word, free class, emailmarketingheroes.com slash free class. I'll share with you exactly what we do to create consistent, predictable $10,000 months in our businesses using email, using something I call hybrid email marketing.

I think you'll get a lot out of it. Just over at emailmarketingheroes.com slash free class. I have really loved this episode.

It's been awesome. Even though I'm a bit of a nerd, I am a bit messy as well. So I like talking about this.

Messy nerd unite. So thank you so much for listening. We will be back with a new episode next week.

So if you're new to the show, be sure to subscribe so you don't miss out. See you then. Make this show every week for you for free.

So make sure you hit subscribe on your podcast player so you don't miss the next episode. And we will speak to you next email marketing Wednesday.