Is Email Marketing Dead?

Is Email Marketing Dead?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Email marketing has been around forever, which leads a lot of people to wonder and question whether email marketing is actually the best tactic to use in 2021. Well, have no fear. We have a special guest with us today and we're going to dig into this and really find the answer once and for all whether email marketing is actually dead. Hi, I'm Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult. All you need is the right plan. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am super excited to have Matt Rouse from Hook SEO with me today. Matt, thanks. And I really appreciate you taking the time to be here with me.

Matt Rouse
Thanks, Tim. Thanks for having me on the show today. I'm excited.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yes, me as well. Yes, email, email, email. That's what we're jumping into. And people are going to find out really quickly how both you and I feel about email marketing here. Shortly before we do that, I want to jump into just some rapid-fire questions. Help us get to know you a little bit better and then we'll learn more about what you're doing it at Hook SEO. So you ready to rock and roll?

Matt Rouse
I'm ready. Let's do it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
OK, when you're not working, how do you like to spend your time?

Matt Rouse
Well, I'm pretty much always working, but there is a very small amount of time that actually I'm kind of a big tabletop gamer. So I like board games, card games and role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons and a little bit of video games. Not as much right now. But, you know, I love those kind of games.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it. What's your hidden talent?

Matt Rouse
My hidden talent? I'm probably my superpower, as one of my co-hosts on the Business Builder Throwdowns says, it's my superpowers to build the car while I'm driving it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
OK, that's a great talent to have. What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

Matt Rouse
That there isn't any gatekeepers anymore, so nobody can tell you what you can or can't do.

Tim Fitzpatrick
What's one thing about you that surprises people?

Matt Rouse
Probably the amount of content, I call it content that I produce. I've written three books, each one has more than three editions. I also have three podcasts, a live show, blog, article writing, off-site, as well as still managing to run an agency.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So and I told you before we jumped on air here that I'm impressed because anybody that creates content knows how much work it is. So having even more than one podcast is a testament to how prolific a content producer you are, what success mean to you?

Matt Rouse
Well, at the end of the day, it's how many other people you help that really measures your success, right? So and, you know, you hear people say things like, you know, do what you love and don't work a day in your life and that kind of stuff. And, you know, I love doing marketing. I like helping business people. It's not, you know, like, yeah, I would rather sometimes be like playing a game with my family or something like, you know, but at the end of the day, you've got to do something that's going to pay the bills and you might as well do something that helps people.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yep. Where's your happy place?

Matt Rouse
I just moved to my happy place, actually. I moved from the Pacific Coast in the United States out to Nova Scotia in Canada. I live in the Annapolis Valley on a beautiful property. I can see the water and my wife is building a flower farm on our property. So every window out of our house, you can see flowers.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Damn, that's cool. Now, what kind of flowers? All kinds?

Matt Rouse
Dahlias mostly, but we have a whole bunch other kinds, too. But she has about five hundred dahlias in the ground right now and probably another two or three thousand over the next couple of years going in.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Wow. And you're now remind me, because I knew we chatted about this last time we spoke. How far is your nearest neighbor?

Matt Rouse
Well, they're not technically that far, but I mean, my old house outside of Portland, Oregon, you could reach a hand out and touch a house, right? And, you know, now I can't even see their houses, so.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So it feels like you're alone.

Matt Rouse
It is. You know, technically, I can see one of their houses, but they live about probably a quarter mile down the road.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, OK, quarter mile. What qualities do you value in the people that you spend time with?

Matt Rouse
You know, everybody's got to have that kind of giving spirit, right? Everybody has to come from a generous place and, you know, nobody wants to hang out with a bunch of, you know, people who are all about themselves and greedy and selfish and I'd rather hang out with a bunch of people who want to give.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Awesome. Before we jump into email marketing, tell us a little bit more about what you're doing at Hook SEO, types of companies that you're helping.

Matt Rouse
At Hook SEO, me and my business partner, Scott Person, we run Hook SEO and Hook Digital Marketing in the United States, we run Hook Digital Marketing Canada. We have customers in Canada, New Zealand, the UK, the United States and Costa Rica. We don't have a specific niche of clients, mostly because our business was two previous businesses that merged. So we kind of have clients all over the map. Right. And both geographically and in what they do. But our specialty is helping companies grow their business. And we would work sort of like having your own marketing department, except without having to pay for an entire marketing department. And we also we produce a lot of content, like you had said earlier. So we do the Digital Marketing Masters podcast, which comes out twice a week. I think we're on episode 189 right now. And you were on our show too.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yes.

Matt Rouse
You know. And then also we did The Motivational Success podcast, which we have episodes for, but it's not released yet, as well as the Business Builder Throwdown, which is a live show with myself, Dee Scott Smith and Coach Holly Jean Jackson, where we pick two sides of a business growth tactic, we battle it out to see which tactic is going to win. So it's like a competition show, kind of like those cooking competition shows, except this one teaches you how to make money. And so we're finishing up season one of that. And then it kind of has like a boxing wrestling kind of combat throwdown theme to it. Right? And so the podcast that's coming out of a shortened version of those episodes is called Seven Minute Jabs. And that's based on the old joke from that movie, something about Mary where the guy says that he's going to make the video 7-minute abs. That's faster than the workout tape, 8-minute abs. It's kind of a little marketing joke from long in the past movie. I mean, obviously, I came out quite a while ago, but don't update ourselves too much.

Tim Fitzpatrick
And it's all good, man. I remember that movie and it was that's a classic so.

Matt Rouse
Right? And the only thing that we do is we have two courses, one on making podcasts and one about email marketing.

Is Email Marketing Dead?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Awesome. So which is why we're talking about email marketing today. Right? So let's jump into email marketing. It is something near and dear to my heart as well as yours. You know, a lot of people are talking about hey email marketing dead. What are your thoughts?

Matt Rouse
I think if somebody thinks email marketing is dead, they should stop sending emails and leave some more room in the inbox for the rest of us. Man. So you know what happened? Coronavirus came along, businesses, workplaces got locked down. What's the first thing every business did to try and get customers? Number one, they posted on Facebook, realized that, no, you don't get any reach on Facebook anymore. And then they got to email. And the people who had made an email list in the past did well. And the people who didn't have one panicked because they didn't have any way to talk to their customers anymore. So, if you want to talk to your customers, email is still the best way. It's still the second highest converting sales channel there is. The first being in-person conversation. So in-person conversation, email, everything else. So if you want to have the second highest converting sales channel, you better be doing email marketing.

Tim Fitzpatrick
The way I look at it too is email is it is something that you own and you're not renting. People can't take your list away. Maybe if you're using whatever email marketing platform and something happens and you got to switch to another provider, you still have that list. You can pop it into your new provider and away you go. It is not like there are so many marketing channels we rent now, paid ads social, and there's nothing wrong with that those. But we really should be building assets that we own long-term. Do you feel the same way?

Matt Rouse
Absolutely, you don't want to build your house on rented land does, in fact, Cohen says from the iMac Geek Show, that was a really good live show on YouTube, by the way. And, man, so many people have been so sad and so screwed when they had something like, here's a perfect example. This happened just in December of 2020. Friend of mine, their business spent all their time building up their Instagram channel and then their Instagram account got blocked. They still don't know why. They still never got it back. They couldn't advertise on it. They couldn't send out any posts on it. And they didn't have an email list they didn't have and built up a Facebook or Twitter or anything like that. So they basically lost all of their contact with all of their potential clients and they still don't know why. So if you have an email list, also a tip here, keep a backup of your email list, right?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yes.

Matt Rouse
Keep it somewhere safe. Right. Save it on a thumb drive. Stick it on your shelf. You know, put it into your cloud drive whatever you need to do. Right? But always have a backup because then if you're using MailChimp or something and something happens and you've got to go start using and Send Fox or Clavier or Constant Contact or something, right? Then you can just upload your list again, you know.

Tim Fitzpatrick
And by the way, in most cases, if they're going to export from a platform, they're email marketing platform. In most cases that's like a CSV type export, is it not? Yeah. So just on personally me, I have a recurring task every for me it's every three months. I go in, I export the CSV, I put it in Google Drive and it's there. So that's a fantastic tip. And to your point, these channels we rent, you gave a great example. One of the most prolific ones recently is former President Trump, you know, getting shut out of Twitter. You know, it's like, come on, people, if they're going to do this to somebody like that, come on, this can happen to anybody. So I think we really need to be cognizant of using the channels.

Matt Rouse
All the time all the time. I get a call every week from somebody who's locked out of their Facebook account. Every week, I know that I've lost everything, their business. They don't have any clients. They can't post on their page. They can't post on their personal page. They can't pull on Instagram because it's all linked now. Like, it's a nightmare for a business to have that happen. But it's a worst nightmare if you don't have an email list.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I totally agree. So if you take one thing out of this conversation, that's a great one to take out of it. And I appreciate you sharing that. So we I think I feel like we've put to rest email marketing is not dead. It is still incredibly effective and it is a must-have in part of your marketing plan. 

The Easiest Way to Grow an Email List

Tim Fitzpatrick

So let's transition now and, ok, great. I should be building my email list. What's the easiest way for me to grow an email list?

Matt Rouse
There's a lot of ways to grow an email list. So that is kind of a difficult question because it's really going to depend on your industry. However, there's a few that are kind of broad strokes that you could do. One of them is if you are retail e-commerce, something in that neighborhood is you just have that thing. And I know you guys have all seen it. You go to like Shopify site or something or Woocommerce or whatever, right? Somewhere to go buy something online. And it'll say, "Hey, if you sign up for the email list, you can get a discount, get notified of sales." Stuff like that. Yeah, that's a super easy way if you have a retail place to sign up. I think one kind of hot kind of tip that's in there is you could save yourself a lot of money by having a system that generates a one time use coupon instead of giving the same coupon to everyone who signs up because there are apps out there like most people have them, like their shopping apps where you go to one site like Capital One and has one and there's a bunch of other ones. And you go to it and it will tell you if the product is cheaper on another website or if a coupon is available. Do you know how to get the coupons?

Tim Fitzpatrick
I don't.

Matt Rouse
This is the magic part, OK? They get the coupons because when it's that app is in your browser, it's scraping the coupons that you're using. So when you go buy something right? It scrapes your 10% off coupon you used for signing up for the email list, and then when I come to the same website, it gives me that coupon without me having to sign up. So what happens is you're giving away 10% off of everything without people signing up for your email list and God forbid you use other coupons that are like wide open, like customer service, 50% off or something because of those apps will give those coupons to everyone else without it being a customer service problem. And you're just throwing your margin in the toilet. So.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So what about because I do still, you know, for people that are coaches, consultants, professional service type folks. I don't think the discounting to come on your list really works for them anymore. It's super common in e-commerce and I agree with you, I think it's still very effective there. What kinds of things should people that are selling their expertize for as part of their business think about from a list building standpoint?

Matt Rouse
I think challenges other sorts of gated content are really good, especially things that get delivered by email because the expectations there, most people have signed up for something where they get it delivered to them by email. So it could be like, let's say you're a health coach. Maybe it's the 7-day smoothie challenge. We'll send you an email with a smoothie recipe every day for seven days. Right? And then it automatically does that drip campaign and then drops them into kind of a monthly newsletter. It's a perfect example. If they're maybe a business coach or something, it could be something depending upon what kind of coaching they do. Like we have an outreach challenge that you can sign up for to get email addresses. And that it teaches you how to do business outreach. There's downloadables. Good example is if you go to Matthew Rouse dot com, you could sign up to get a copy of my book. And it's this book right here. Flattening the hamster wheel, it's the full book. It's not a very long book, but it's 106 pages. You get the full version of the book and then it signs you up to the email list, right? So you can have downloadables, you can have guides, you can have all kinds of stuff and I think once you get people on the list and one of the really important things to remember is that you want to tell them in advance how often you are going to send them stuff, what you're going to send them. You want to set the expectation upfront, right? So you want to say, "Hey, if if you sign up for this list to get 10% off your first order with our e-commerce company, we will send you notifications of sales, early access to clearance items." Something like that. And then you start sending them something completely different, that's a disconnect, and that's when people are going to start unsubscribing. So make sure that you tell them what you're going to send them. And then so. I like to say that this is the magic bullet of email marketing is, you want to figure out what people want to hear from you, not what you want to tell them, what they want to hear from you. And then you ask them if they want that things said to them by email. And if they do, you send it to them. You don't send them any other garbage. Right? Because our email boxes are full of garbage. They are right? How many emails, even with a good spam filtering system, how many crap emails a day do you get? And I'm asking still, you've really tied down our spam filtering and I still get a ton. And you know, that's not what people want and it's not the image you want your brand to have. How many of these emails do you get a day? "Hey, Tim, I was looking for someone with an agency like Rialto Marketing who would be interested in trying our new service." And then they email you every two days for the next two weeks. And, you know, with slowly more desperate emails, right? That's not what people are looking for. Nobody wants that.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I had one today. I should have kept it. It was it was clever, you know, and he was funny about it, but it was a follow-up email. And at the end of the email, he said to me, you know, "Just following up on, you know, following up on my previous email." And the previous email wasn't in the body. So I had no idea what the hell the previous email was even about. I had no idea who the guy was. And it's just like, OK, you know, I like the fact that you were clever, but I have no idea what the hell you even wanted from me. Delete. So, I totally.

Matt Rouse
I get this email all the time too. "I am the outreach manager for Blurbed Tech." Or whatever that made up word of their software, "And we wanted to see if you'd be interested in having a demo click to get on my calendar here." They haven't told you what it is. They haven't told you why you want it. They're not telling you anything that's beneficial about it. You don't know what it is because some B.S. word that they made up for their software, right? Just because they could find a domain name for it. I mean, the whole system is broken. What? What works in email is finding out what your potential audience wants, asking them if they will want that, and then sending it to them. That's what works.

Receiving Emails That are Not from a Company Domain

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I totally agree. And, you know, this this kind of brings up another question, maybe slightly off topic, but I think it's an important one. How do you feel about receiving emails that are not from a company domain? So rather than, you know, Matthew Rouse dot com, somebody sends an email to you and it's Matthew Rouse at Gmail dot com. How do you feel about that?

Matt Rouse
Yeah, you know what, honestly, I'm OK with it, I don't think. I don't think it really matters as much, depending if I asked for it, right? So if it's opt-in, I don't care where they send it from, right? But if it's some kind of cold email, then it's going to get filtered anyway, so I'm not going to see it. So let's you know what we should talk about spam filtering for a minute. Spam filtering is super important. OK? Spam filtering is important on two ends. Number one, it's and it's important so you don't get a bunch of garbage in your email. But number two, it's important if you're trying to send people email because you don't want to get spam filtered, right? So how do you fit in this box? Right. You have this little space and you're like, I have to not only do I not want a bunch of crap, but I also want to send things to people and not get filtered out as crap. So how do you fit in the middle? And there's understanding the system of how spam filtering works will get you a long way. And it's basically like a scoring system and every spam filtering software is different. But this is kind of painting it with a broad brush. So if someone sends an email and it's coming from Gmail dot com instead of a domain, right? Like Rialto marketing dot com or something, right? The spam filtering system may say, "OK, this is two points, points being a bad thing." OK, so this is two points. And let's say my email server, we have the threshold for spam set as 6. So 2 points out of six. And then they say, you know, the first line of their email is, "To view this in your browser, click here." So that's another point, because the spam filter knows that that's commercial software, not from somebody you know, right? And then you say, "We're having a massive whatever sale." OK, two points, because as they know, it's commercial email. It's about sale. Let's say that the link in the e-mail goes to a different domain than the sender. That's another point, right? So at this point, it's already at six. So even no matter what else is in the email, my email filtering system would have already put that in the spam box. So, there are things that trigger those points and those points add up, and once it gets whatever passed, whatever the threshold is, then that's how it ends up in the spam filter. So there's ways to avoid being in the spam filter. One of them is watching what language you're using around things like the words, like free and sale and, of course, you don't want to use commonly spammed things like the word Viagra and this kind of stuff. And so you want to avoid that kind of language. You want to avoid stuff like using all caps. You want to avoid like super kind of salesy language, which I think we all know. You know, if it's something you would hear in a used car commercial, then you don't want it in your email. Also if you use too many like emojis in the headlines to get attention, that's a signal. If you have too many links in it, that's another signal. If there's information in there, like buttons, things like that, those are signals that it's spam. And so, people a lot of times they go, "Well, how do I even get an email in the inbox? Because I'm an e-commerce store and I have four products with four links that each have a button and it says sale Friday, 20%t off." Right? Well, the trick here is that when people sign up for it, you need to send them emails that they're going to read because the most spam software doesn't automatically send everything to spam box. It will usually test it. Right? So to see, if the user marks that as spam, if they delete it before they look at it, that kind of stuff, it's looking for an engagement signal. If there's no engagement, is going to dump it in the spam box. So and different like I said, different filters for different companies work different ways. There's also deliverability is an issue. Deliverability is a word that most people in the email marketing for their small business or their company deliverability is not a thing that even is on the radar at all. Deliverability is super important, and they think that the deliverability is because of the provider they're sending the email with, so they think, like MailChimp has better deliverability than Constant Contact or something like that, which can be true, but it's usually a percent or fractions of a percent of the difference in deliverability. And the real deliverability problems are because they don't have their domain set up properly to send email. And there is things there's SPF right center policy framework, there is DMARC, DKIM. DKIM and I don't know how many people use it. DMARC and SPF are more common. These are things that need to be put in your DNS. They need to be at your hosting provider. Those are technical things that happen behind the scenes. Have your I.T. person or your administrator take care of it, or just type like Shopify SPF if you have a store, right? And see how that works, make sure you have it set up. Make sure your domains are verified for email. If you're using something like Shopify, WooCommerce, Wick's, whatever. You want to make sure that stuff's done, because that tells you that that is a conversation from your mail server to the other mail server that says we have verified this sender is the one from this domain. So this is not some spammer in Russia pretending to send email from this domain. This is the real one. Some providers will not accept mail if it doesn't have these records.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Interesting. So you need to set up how many records with your domain host?

Matt Rouse
Usually of two or three. It kind of depends on who's hosting your domain. And if you're on a sales platform like Shopify or something or Squarespace or. It's going to be different for each one. But I think you just want to Google that, right. SPF, DKIM, DMARC it's D-M-A-R-C. So those getting those set up is super important especially gmail and most Microsoft mail Comcast, a couple others Yahoo! Mail. Pretty much won't accept mail without those records of it, so...

Tim Fitzpatrick
Interesting.

Matt Rouse
Say you don't have an SPF set up or it's set up incorrectly that's which is even worse, like, God forbid that somebody set it up before and you moved your website or your email provider and now it's wrong, that is going to murder your deliverability. Let me tell you what deliverability is, because we didn't really cover that, OK? What happens is, is I'm Gmail, right? And we get billions of emails a day. So what happens is we have a spam filtering system that puts stuff in the spam box. But before that, we have another filter, and that filter is made to get rid of stuff that is bad, like viruses, encryption, emails, like there's all kinds of stuff that it filters out. So if they think that your email address is being spoofed, which means someone else is sending mail pretending to be from your domain, this is what SPF DKIM and DMARC, this is what those things are for, is to protect your domain against those. And if you have it incorrect, it looks like you're spoofing and they will delete your email, it doesn't go into the spam folder or the inbox or anywhere, it just gets deleted.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So I was just going to say so, this SPF DKIM those settings are those let's just take a theoretical example, OK, let's say I'm using Google Suite, right? There's tons of us using Google Suite. Is the SPF or DKIM a Google setting that I am then putting into my DNS settings for my domain? Is that how it works?

Matt Rouse
Yeah. So like you would just go you would go like Google Suite SPF and then the first thing that comes up is about SPF and it tells you what it is and how to set it up. So it tells you like this is how you define the record. This is where you put it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it. So those are its settings for your mail provider that you then put and basically you're making a note of it in your where your domain is being hosted.

Matt Rouse
Yes. So it's going in your DNS record. So your domain name server. I know this is a bit technical for the non-technical people, but that's why I'm saying Google it to get the instructions or try to get your IT person to do it. You don't want to be like if you don't understand how DNS works, you should not be in there futzing with those kinds of settings because you can really screw something up. So, yeah, make sure you have somebody who knows what they're doing or follow the instructions very closely. But it's super important. Right, because I'll tell you a perfect example. Somebody messages me on Friday, they said, "What's a good opener for my type of business?" And I'm on her list so I see her emails and I say, "Well, you know, for your industry, maybe 16 percent ish, you know, 16 to 18." She's like, "Well, I'm at eight." And eight is not good, right? So that means for every thousand emails she's sending out, there's only like 80 getting through or, you know, like that's really bad. So we looked at it and her SPF record had been set up previously, but she moved her website and her domain to another company. But those records still existed, pointing at the old company. So that looks like she's spoofing email. So we fix those two things that the DMARC and the SPF. I just gave her the instructions. She did it herself. Next email she sent out, she had a 13% open rate, 5% improvement, adding those two records. It took her about 10 minutes. Right?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. It's fascinating.

Matt Rouse
So it's a massive improvement. Now, of course, there's other things she should be doing. You know, my email list that I send to our clients, we get between 26 and 45% open rate. Which is massive, can you imagine if you have a list with 10,000, 20,000, 100,000 people on it and you can go from, you know, an 8% to a 13% or to a 20% open rate? Right? That's that's tens of thousands more people getting your emails.

Best Way to Clean Out Your Email List

Tim Fitzpatrick
It's significant. So that leads to another question. How what are your thoughts on, you know, cleaning out and or purging your email list, you know, regular intervals, you know, getting rid of those people that are not opening, not getting. What are your thoughts on that?

Matt Rouse
Well, first off. If an email address is bad, like it no longer exists, then I would take those off your list. OK. A lot of email providers get rid of those automatically, but get rid of the dead ones, right? Now, if you're talking about people who haven't opened it, say, in 6 months or something like that, I would segment those people and try and target them specifically with emails just to get them to open the email. So, there's a whole bunch of different ways to do this, kind of my favorite way to do it is to actually try to segment your list into people who've opened stuff, you know, in, say, the last 6 months and people who haven't opened anything in the last 6 months and the people who haven't sent anything in the last 6 months, I would send them an email talking about kind of maybe what's been going on with your company lately. No links in it. Maybe just a photo. Make it super simple. No templates. Not a bunch of emojis and crap in the headline, you know, just kind of keep it super simple and see if you get a response. I would send probably 3 of those maybe 1 a week for a few weeks. And you'll see how many of those people open them, then the ones who open them, you move back onto your normal list and the ones you don't. I would export those out of your mail service.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it.

Why Unsubscribes are Good

Matt Rouse
Because you pay by the number of subscribers and if you have subscribers who aren't open your email, you're paying for them to not open your email. And you don't want to pay for people to not read your emails. So you want to get rid of those people, right? It's just like people who are going unsubscribe, encourage people to unsubscribe if they don't want it, right? And I mean, there's some cases you wouldn't do that. There's some lists you wouldn't do that for, but you shouldn't be hiding the unsubscribe button, right? Somebody doesn't want your emails, don't keep them on your list, because all that's going to happen is a couple of weeks from now, they're going to go, "Oh, I thought I unsubscribe to this thing, but they keep sending me mail." And then they're going to market to spam. Then they send in spam reports. And then your emails don't show up to as many of the people who actually want to receive them.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I have a list that I got added to in some way, shape or form. I've unsubscribed from the list like three times and I'm still getting emails.

Matt Rouse
I know it's terrible.

Tim Fitzpatrick
And it's like that is just I don't want that to happen to anybody that you and I, you or I work with, right? It's just not a good look.

Matt Rouse
We submit them for blacklists.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Right.

Matt Rouse
If they want to unsubscribe us and we tried a few times, you know, I mean, once maybe it's broken or something. But if they keep sending us emails after we keep telling them not to, then, you know, as a service provider, we will send that into a blacklist. And once they get too many black list reports, they actually get blacklisted. That means that none of the major email providers will receive any emails from that domain. But if that happens, no one even gets not just your marketing emails. That's all of your email.

Tim Fitzpatrick
When that happens, though, is, because most reputable email marketing software, the unsubscribe is like built into it, I mean, it should just automatically be doing that. So when that's happening, have those people missed a setting somewhere or done something wrong or like why? How is that fall into the cracks?

Matt Rouse
That's unlikely. Let's say they're probably using a service that doesn't require it an out-of-country service. You know, there's email services that don't automatically put them in there or they give the option to remove the unsubscribe, which technically in the United States is against the law and as well as Canada and Europe. Right? So, we just let people unsubscribe and there is this one email newsletter I get that I actually really like, it's called Trust Insights and they have a pretty big unsubscribe button, but they used to have an even bigger one that was across the whole email and it was an animated GIF of the guy pointing at it. And he was like unsubscribe. He was like, if you don't want our emails, just unsubscribe here because you don't want to pay for those people. Why would you want to pay to send information to someone who doesn't want it?

The Secret to Effective Email Marketing

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yep, totally agree. So let's talk about what you've shared a ton of value here, Matt. Are there any other secrets that you want to talk about that may help people with effective email marketing?

Matt Rouse
Well, I think that the secret just kind of as I had said earlier, and maybe for some people who started watching this kind of later into it, is to send people what they want to hear from you, which is not necessarily what you may want to send to them. You want something that you send, that's what they want to hear. And you tell them in advance what the expectation is. My email list says, "Get weekly marketing tips and stories straight to your inbox." That means they're going to get marketing tips, they're going to get stories, and I'm going to send them weekly. That's all you got to do, set the expectation, right? And you know what? I still get that person once in a while who sends me back an email and says, "I didn't sign up for blah, blah, blah." Whatever, and they go off or whatever, I just unsubscribe them. I clicked unsubscribe button for them just to get them off the list. Who cares? I mean there's some mad bad day. I don't know. His underwear's in a bunch. You're going to get that when you get to get more of them as your list gets bigger, right? But if you're sending people what they asked for, for the most part, you're not going to see that kind of stuff happen.

Conclusion

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yep. Do you any last-minute thoughts or words of wisdom you want to share with us, Matt?

Matt Rouse
I think a lot of times people, they take off. They're like, I'm a consumer hat and they put on their business hat and then they go buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff in their emails, right? And you guys should buy my things. And they send emails that they don't want to get, right? And what you really need to do is think about what are the emails that you read on a regular basis. What are the things that people send you that you subscribe to, that you don't unsubscribe from because you like what's in them? Are they stories? Are they data? Are they insights? You know, what are the things that keep you coming back? And then how can you generate those things that keep you coming back for your own prospects and your own customers? Right? And your email can be different depending upon the type of business. So if you could have a separate list for prospecting that you would have a separate list for current clients and you would send those people different things and you may also send them different frequencies, right? You also if you're in the e-commerce world, you can really drill down and you could have an email list that goes out to people who are prospects, right? People who may want to buy your thing. You can have one of people who are clients or recent clients, and then you can also have transactional emails. So you can have something like I like to use a series, but the most time they're called abandon cart emails. Somebody add some stuff to the shopping cart and email them, says, "Hey, you know, did life get in the way? Here, we kept this stuff in your cart for you in case you still want to buy it." You know, you could do that. You can also have things like some some product intelligence kind of things. So good example would be if somebody comes to your website and buys a barbecue, you want to send them an email and ask them if they want to buy a barbecue tools and then next week maybe a barbecue cover and, you know, like maybe a couple of weeks later, here's a, I don't know, pellets for your pellet smoker, whatever it is, right? So you can have product-based emails and you can do those with a system like Drip or Clavio. If you're a freelancer, maybe you're a small business owner, you want something super cheap and simple where you just want to send email to your people, have a sign up page and you don't want all the bells and whistles. You can use something like Send Fox that's free to start out and then it's a one time $69 payment, I think it is right now, and you don't have to have a subscription, right? And then you can if you need a little bit of transaction, but you don't want to go all the way up to business intelligence level like Clavio or like getting into HubSpot and stuff like that, you could go with a Constant Contact, Active Campaign, MailChimp, right? Those are kind of middle-of-the-road ones. And the weirdest thing happens with email marketing software is people don't shop it like they would other products. They don't go, "Well, what is the need for my company? And should I find the best email marketing software?" Instead, they go, "Hey, Janice, what do you use?" And she goes, "I use MailChimp." And they go, "OK, I'm going to start my list on MailChimp." With no idea of what the features are or what any of it they need or what they're going to do, right? And they probably, I would say 85% of the companies that we talk to that are using software to send out emails, don't do anything but send emails. They don't use any other features of the software whatsoever. So, you know, there's a lot of choices in there. And I think some research would pay off in those cases.

Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it. Matt, thank you so much for taking the time. And you've shared a ton of valuable information here that I know people are going to that's really going to help them. Where the best place for people to learn more about you?

Matt Rouse
You can go to our website at Hook SEO dot com or if you're in Canada, it's HookDM dot CA, or you can go to Matthew Rouses dot com. That's Matthew with 2 T's and R-O-U-S-E dot com. It's also on the screen down here. And we're on all the social medias, it's /HookSEO. You can find me at Matt Rouse on LinkedIn. I love to connect on LinkedIn and sign up for my mailing list. Clickthe button on the top of our website.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I love it. Guys, if you need help, you run into roadblocks with this type of stuff, you can obviously reach out to Matt. He is shown in this conversation that he knows what the hell he's talking about. And I know that he can absolutely help you. So I want to thank you guys for tuning in today. Again, I am Tim with Rialto marketing. If you want to gain some clarity on where to focus your marketing efforts right now, hop on over to our website at Rialto Marketing dot com. That's R-I-A-L-T-O marketing dot com. Click on and get a free consult button. Guarantee you'll get a ton of value from that call and walk away knowing where you need to focus right now to get the best return. Til next time. Take care.