Email Marketing

The pandemic has changed the way a lot of businesses offer their services. One thing hasn’t changed – email. When done right, email marketing is much more profitable than any other marketing method. 
But is email marketing as simple as just sending emails? 

Do it wrong and your email ends up in the spam folder, or worse – It never gets delivered at all! 

As a business owner, who isn’t an email marketing expert, you may never even know. You’ll be wasting money paying for subscribers who may never see you in their inbox at all.

Have you been doing email marketing wrong? 

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Our guest expert today is Matt Rouse, owner of Hook SEO. Matt helps his clients transform their business with the power of email. A few tweaks helped his car dealer client close a $38,000 DEAL IN JUST TWO DAYS!

In modern email marketing, Matt Rouse guides entrepreneurs on the ropes of email marketing and how they can increase sales and dominate their niche. He is the host of The Digital Marketing Masters Podcast and an international speaker and author that runs a bootstrap agency called Hook SEO. Matt Rouse is also the instructor of Inbox Mastery Course which helps entrepreneurs and business owners to master email marketing.

What is modern email Marketing as opposed to emailing?

Many businesses have lost foot traffic during the COVID pandemic due to lockdown, quarantining, and curfews. Many businesses found themselves closed or with limited service provision. 

As fewer people go to gyms, visit restaurants, retail stores and physical stores, these businesses are experiencing lower profits and even lower cash flow. 

Email marketing and social media are the two avenues helping businesses recover lost revenue. 

Now that everyone is working from home with a home email and a work email, email marketing has blown up. On average, the amount of sales coming from email marketing has risen to about 180%.

Matt Rouse went further to say that the biggest modern problem with email marketing is that there are too many technology options out there. 

Most people get into business because they are good at what they do, not because they want to figure out how many characters a subject line needs to be, or all the other technical stuff that goes into e-mail marketing.

Is SMS replacing email marketing?

Not at all! SMS is best when used side by side with email marketing. 

One of the biggest misconceptions is that  young people do not use email anymore, they only use text. But that is completely untrue because you need an email to sign up for almost anything. Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, Netflix.. All require an email address.

“I don’t think there is anything wrong with SMS marketing. In fact, I love it because it has huge open rates and is high on subscribe rate which is something that few people talk about.”

The biggest challenge of making email marketing work for you is the fact that most email marketing is garbage. 

Everyone knows this, just open your inbox and you will discover a ton of crap from people. If you are a business owner and you are sending emails to a lot of people, and you do not get any response, then your email may be crap too. But it is hard to look yourself in the eye and admit this.

What is the difference between B2B and B2C email campaign marketing?

There is only a slight difference because both emails get opened by a human on the other end. 

The question you want to answer for yourself is – “what is the end result that the reader  is looking, for, what are they trying to achieve in their life and how does your product and service helps them achieve that. Once you have that question, help them envision your solution.”

For B2C marketing, it is the same idea, but generally, your emails can be longer to consumers and it is a time based thing (it is not always the case). The length depends on the engagement and the buyer’s stage of awareness.

“The biggest problem I have noticed with companies in email marketing is that they send out emails just to stay in touch and not with a specific purpose of making sales. Their consumers on the receiving end of the emails somehow do not realize how vital the emails are.” 

In fact, your email is the only medium where your customers can communicate with you. It doesn’t matter how many listeners on your podcast or on your Facebook page. When you have your customers on your email list, you can be able to communicate more directly with them.

How has email marketing changed in 2020?

The formatting, heading, and visibility of your emails is still as important as ever. But let’s talk about the elephant in the room – the dreaded unsubscribe link.

While most people do everything in their power to keep their subscribers from finding that link, Matt says that “you should make it as easy as possible for anyone to unsubscribe from your email list” and here’s why – 

1. First, it makes you seem desperate when people cannot easily unsubscribe from your list. 
2. Second – you’re losing money!! You are either paying for the number of subscribers you have, or by how many emails you are sending. If there are people on your list who aren’t reading your emails, then you’re just throwing money down the drain. 

And here’s what most people don’t know – when you have a big list the server (Gmail server) only delivers your email to a portion of your list, to see if people delete them or mark them as spam. 

If they do, Gmail does not deliver the rest – nor put them in the spam folder. They are permanently deleted, without you ever knowing. 

It is part of a process called deliverability, and if your email doesn’t get delivered, you don’t even have a chance to have your email read, which brings us to the next hack in email marketing – 

The most important part of email marketing is to get engagement. Engagement means – opening your email, reading it, clicking or replying back. 

If a subscriber doesn’t engage with your emails, go ahead and delete them. They’re only costing you money. 

But before you do, you may be able to re-engage your email list with Matt’s secret power move – The Wind Back Campaign.

If there are people who don’t delete your emails, mark them as spam or fail to open them, you should not delete them, instead, export them to another list, and then do a Wind Back campaign.

The goal of a Wind Back campaign is get them out of your everyday campaign so that your emails will reach more active members. You can then do a Wind-back campaign to get them engaged again.

Here’s how Matt used the Wind Back campaign to revive a dead list:

“Before the pandemic we used to do an inbox mastery course in person, now because of COVID we will be doing that online in August.”

During one of the mastery programs, “one of my clients complained he never closed deals or even had any engagements from his weekly email campaigns, and he had a list of emails collected over 12 years.”

I had him make ONE small tweak to his emails – instead of his usual promotional email, I asked him to take a photo of the car he wanted to sell. He went out with his wife, took the picture, and then captioned ‘we have a 2018 model of XXX car in stock now’ No other text, no links, just the picture and the text.

He sent the email and two days later, he sold the car for $35,000. The guy who bought the car said he never thought he was on the list because he hadn’t seen an email from the client in two years!

The reason he got that email was because there were no links in it and that it was different from the other ones, so it didn’t go to the spam folder. 

What separates a good email from a GREAT email?

The answer you don’t want to hear is – It depends.

But that’s the truth. Every email starts with the end in mind – what is the purpose of the email you’re sending? Nurturing? Selling? Promoting?

In general, the difference between a good email and a great email is a story. Depending on what you intend to do, you need to have a story that is relatable with your audience because the best way to start selling is by not selling. 

Two things that determine how to tell stories on your emails are; WHO your clients are and WHEN they signed up to your list. 

You can tell stories in series, just like chapters in a book and each follow up email reveals the next step or you can create stories themed on special days, like valentines day, black fridays, etc. but you need to make sure that the stories align with your audience and the service you sell.

This method is perfect to drive up engagement and increase open rate as your subscribers keep opening your emails and reading the stories everyday to discover what happens next. 

Remember that getting people to reply is always the best way to increase deliverability, and so you can tease them with an email asking to reply if they want to hear the rest of the story…

If your story is any good, and has hooked them in, you’ll get many replies back, increase your engagement and readability. 

How can you make sure that your email gets read and not end up in the spam folder?

There are several ways that email providers filter emails these days.

The first thing email providers do is block malware and spam. If you have an executable file in your email, then it becomes very difficult to get your emails across because if the system detects any fault at all, the email gets deleted. 

You can also be blacklisted if too many people mark your email as spam.

Matt suggests subscribing to your own emails to make sure that they are being delivered. 

The next filtering system is pattern matching. The system looks at your email to know if there are any patterns that fit right in with other spam emails that they have seen before. If the answer is yes, they can either allow a few of it, and see if your members delete them, or delete the emails permanently. 

Do your emails appear spammy?

You want to make sure that your emails don’t look like spam. What do spam emails look like?

According to Matt Rouse spammy emails can look like any of these:

• An email with only one giant image and nothing else. Companies used to do this, but it no longer works.
• Links. Lots of links. Especially when the links are different from the website you are sending from.
• ‘Salesy’ text and a measurable amount of sales copy in your emails will make it look like spam too. 

Making it into your subscribers’ inbox.

With all the filtering, the GDPR laws and deliverability issues, has become more difficult to get your email into someone’s inbox.

What is your advice for creating the optimal email that hits a home run? 

The easiest type of emails that can get into an inbox are short emails with a few lines of text. 

You also need to be honest about what you are sending out to people. You need to be constantly providing value to your list (which is the purpose of email marketing in the first place). 

 The length of the email you send out to your lists also depends on your audience and your services. 

Here’s the formula – 

Find something that your prospects or audience enjoy, like or need, then ask them if they want you to send it to them, then send it to them. 

One way to do this especially if you are a big company is to interview or survey your customers. You’ll find out exactly what they’re into and it’ll make your life so much easier. 

What are the best email subject lines?

A good subject line will inspire your reader to open the email. The subject line I prefer is the question format. 

The next important line is the preview line. The preview line must align with your subject line if you want your emails opened. The preview line should reinforce the subject line. 

Lastly, break your emails into short sentences so that they are easier to read. Because without the sentence breaks, your emails can come across as a lecture or an encyclopedia especially on a mobile device 

Email width – size does matter.

If you want your emails to be easy to read on any device, make sure the email widge is around 500 pixels so that the email doesn’t flow off the screen on a mobile device. If there is any kind of friction to reading your email, it will get deleted. 

Your competition isn’t who you think they are!

When it comes to opening and reading your emails, you are not just competing with other businesses in your niche, but with every business your prospect is subscribed to. This is why all your emails should count. You only have about 50 – 60 seconds of your prospect’s time, and you should make it count. 

What are the best ways to build a list?

The most popular and effective way to build a list is using a Lead Magnet, which is a piece of valuable content (either a PDF, a video or a webinar) that people exchange their email for. The best lead magnet is one that gets people in your prospective market to engage with you

One of the best methods that most people don’t think about is physical products. You can grow your list by offering your referrals a physical product that you will ship to them when they meet a referral goal.  

For example; There is an email list for start-up companies called The Hustle. They have a point system where you can get a downloadable ebook if you can get up to 3 people on the email list and a customized socks if you can get up to 10 people. The ebooks and socks they share cannot be found anywhere else, which makes it a unique lead magnet.

Know WHO you’re talking with.

It is crucial that you create a customer avatar, know all the details about that person and write directly to them. 

Matt’s avatar is Janet. She does taekwondo and has two kids who are about 12 and 10 years old. She also runs a plumbing supplies business and the husband is the plumber. She also runs the office and she doesn’t have the time to do marketing. I know all these things about Janet and each time sit down, I write as if I was talking directly to her, saying what she NEEDS to hear.

When you provide value, they will come.

Remember. there are a million ways to get people to be on your list and they all start and end with providing value. Pick your industry, have something that people want, give value and your list will grow.

Your goal as a business person is to become the go-to person for your audience. You want them to think of you when they need help. The only way to do this is by providing value.