List Building Strategy and Mastering Email Communications with Matt Rouse

In part 12 of the Masterclass Series on Building a Strategic Marketing Plan for Your Business, host Eric Dickmann interviews, Matt Rouse. Matt is the host of The Digital Marketing Masters Podcast and one of the founders of Hook SEO. He is the author of "Crush SEO," "Start Saying Yes," "Flattening the Hamster Wheel," and the "Inbox Mastery" email marketing course.

For additional resources on this episode and from our other episodes in this Masterclass Series, visit https://fiveechelon.com/masterclass

To learn more about Eric Dickmann and The Five Echelon Group, visit https://fiveechelon.com

For more information about Matt Rouse, Hook SEO, and The Digital Marketing Masters podcast, visit- https://hookseo.com

Episode #63

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Transcript

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Carla 0:01

The Virtual CMO podcast is sponsored by the strategic marketing consulting services of The Five Echelon Group. If you’d like to work directly with The Five Echelon Group and receive personal coaching and support to optimize your business, enhance your marketing effectiveness and grow your revenue, visit Five Echelon.com to learn more and schedule a free consultation.

Eric Dickmann 0:23

Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast. I'm your host, Eric Dickmann. In this podcast, we have conversations with marketing professionals who share the strategies, tactics, and mindset you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities and grow your business. Hey, Matt. Welcome to The Virtual CMO Podcast in our Masterclass series on building out a strategic marketing plan for your business. I'm really glad you could join us again today. It's great to see you.

Matt Rouse 0:50

Thanks, Eric. It's great. To be on a show.

Eric Dickmann 0:52

Yeah. You know, this is a, this is kind of a fun exercise that we're doing, going through the steps to really build out a strategic marketing plan. And as part of that this is now step number 12. We just did an episode where we talked about communications and PR strategy, we've talked about building social media. We've talked about the importance of automation, tools, analytics, CRM, a lot of great topic areas here. But I'm really looking forward to drilling into this a little bit more with you today because what we really want to talk about is how to leverage email and how to build lists so that you can communicate with your clients. You know, comms and PR strategy is one thing, that's a very intentional outreach, but when you can build a list of customers and reach out to them with meaningful communications, I think that's so important for businesses. So just by way of introduction, if you could tell the audience a little bit about yourself and Hook SEO and a little bit about what you guys do there.

Matt Rouse 1:51

Sure, so I want to managing partners of Hook SEO Digital Marketing. We are a remote digital marketing firm based out of Hillsborough, Oregon. But we also have employees and people in Costa Rica as well as Canada. We have clients in about 10 States in the United States as well. Am we have kind of a unique system that we use that's very similar to an approach that you would get with like keeping a lawyer on retainer. We're basically a marketing team on retainer, and a business can come to us and have us take the place of, instead of hiring a marketing team or to augment a marketing team, they already have. And we can. Do done for you marketing to the point where they have to make no decisions whatsoever. And we do 100% of the decisions creating the content advertising and everything or, you know, there's some combination in there were maybe there's an approval process. SAS or something like that, depending upon the company. And from there we try to figure out how we can get the most ROI for the least money. So we try to get the most bang for the buck.

Eric Dickmann 3:01

I think that's great. That's definitely a model that I think we're going to see a lot more of as people engage with agencies and freelancers and companies to help them execute pieces of their marketing strategy, so that's great. And we'll get a chance to talk a little bit more about that towards the end of the show. But what I really wanted to drill into with you first is, you know, let's just talk about this whole topic of email. I think some people would argue that email is dead and they couldn't be more incorrect, right? Email is still very much alive and a significant part of email or a marketing activities.

Matt Rouse 3:34

Especially since the beginning of the pandemic. So some industries have seen as much as a 450% increase in their email, open rates. And and including things like subscriber growth and. Just what happened was everybody got stuck in their house. And then every company in the world decided they were going to make a COVID-policy and send it to everyone, even if you'd never heard of them. But then after that people actually wanted to hear from the brands that they were interested in. Right. So, you know, you started to see places like food carts. Restaurants and retail stores going back to email and saying, this is how we can keep you safe. This is how you didn't get, take out. This is how you can do curbside pickup. You know, that kind of thing? And then because people were interacting with emails so much more it became a much more vibrant and active channel again. And that has not slowed at all. It's just getting more and more use now.

Eric Dickmann 4:31

You know, I have found that my open rates are a lot higher just in my own inbox. And I think it's because we're working remotely, you know, there's more time to sort of explore the email communications that are coming in. But you know, there is still this vast at. chasm, if you will, between emails that you want to open and read and the ones that you just can't click, you know, the trash bin icon soon enough. You think that people would have mastered email marketing by now, it's been a lot round for a long time. Why does.

Matt Rouse 5:05

been like a quarter of a century.

Eric Dickmann 5:07

Yeah. And there are still so many emails that are terrible.

Matt Rouse 5:11

They are, the internet is full of trash. And people send it out all the time. And it's weird, you know, because there's some companies and stuff that are generally pretty good at communicating with their clients. And then they go to do email marketing and they put on this, like, dunce cap. And they're just like, buy my stuff. It's like the only thing that they say. That's not what you want to hear from most brands, right? I mean, there's some exceptions, right? Like if I sign a sign up to a list that says, sign up to find out what we have sales, and then they send me when they have sales. That's fine. Because that's what I asked for. But if they say sign up and we'll give you like tips and tricks to do with hiking and camping and then the only thing they ever sent me is 20% off hiking boots then I don't care.

Eric Dickmann 5:56

Yeah, that's exactly right. I think, you know, it gets down to the same topic that we've discussed many times on here, which is you want to always be providing value and you want to be transparent with why somebody would sign up and what they're going to get for it. And that really is the first element of this, right? In order to have email marketing campaigns, you have to have names and email addresses. And one of the things that companies often stumble upon is they don't have a good process in place for collecting email addresses. So let's start there, how do you advise companies to begin to build their lists?

Matt Rouse 6:32

Well, the first thing you can do is you can take all the emails that you have of your existing clients. And I wouldn't just put them onto a list. What I would do is I would take it depending upon how many you have take sections of groups, of those customers. And send them an email and tell them what your email like whether it's weekly or monthly, whatever it is, tell him what you're going to send them. And how often you're going to send it to them. And ask them if they want to be on that list and give them a button that they can click to go subscribe to your new list. Right. And you don't have to call it a list. You can call it a email club or something like that. And now you're giving them the option to get on your list. So say you have a thousand customers, you send that out to all thousand customers. You know, if you have pretty good rapport with your customers and stuff, you could probably get 20, 25% of those people that joined a new lists. So now you've got an email subscriber list of 250. And then you need to make sure when you have any kind of communication with your client, especially if it's online, like a electronic shopping cart, e-commerce online, ordering online booking system, something like that. You want to have the box already checked that says, tell me about, and then the description of what your newsletter is going to be about. So example my newsletter that I send out every week. Is interesting stories and tips about marketing. So somebody wants stories and tips about marketing. Put that in a place where the box checked for them. When they check out a figure like a course or something from us. And if you are in a country where you have something like GDPR, then you want to make sure that the box is unchecked and that they have to actively check it to get on the list because that's the law. California is getting there too, but That's a good way to get people on the list. If you have an in-person store, you can have a sign up, right. And then the next thing you'd want to talk about is something like lead magnets, which is where you're offering them something in exchange for them signing up.

Eric Dickmann 8:32

So that's a great example of what you do with your existing customer base to now really take them from being customers to putting them sort of back on a marketing list. So now what you're talking about with lead magnets, He's really saying, Okay. these are people that are probably coming to my website, they're browsing around, but I don't really know who they are yet. So how can I get them to give me that email address so that I can start to market to them further?

Matt Rouse 8:57

Great. So there's two good ways to do that. And. One of them is kind of a magic trick that nobody knows. That's very recent technology-wise and I'll get to that in a minute. But the other one is you want to have something that, that is going to be instantly delivered to them when they sign up. It needs to be something good enough that someone would pay money for it, right? Like it should be, somebody would give you a buck or two for this information. That's valuable enough for them to trade their email address for it. And you want it to have like a quick win, right? So, it's really gonna depend on what your business is, but let's say, I don't know, you're a locksmith or something like that, then. What you would want to do is have something like here's three things you can try before you call a locksmith. Right. And so let's say instant, it's a quick, when you sign them up for the newsletter or whatever, right? But there's also a magic trick and I call it a magic trick because it works like magic and it is a piece of software called GetEmails. And if somebody comes to your website under the can spam act that actually counts as them giving you consent to email them, to contact them. And this software, will figure out who they are and take their email and put it on your list.

Eric Dickmann 10:16

Oh, you're kidding

Matt Rouse 10:17

With, without you asking them for the email. Now it's fairly invasive, obviously. You wouldn't want to use it in most cases, but this software does exist. So, and it's probably got about 25 to 40%. accuracy.

Eric Dickmann 10:31

That's really interesting. I didn't even know that existed. So I learned something new myself today. So I love this idea of you're going to give them something of value in order for them to sign up for whatever it is, whether it be a newsletter. I've seen this work very effectively for online retailers, they'll say, sign up for our list, we'll give you 15%, 25% off your first purchase, something like that. So you're getting a discount code in exchange for giving up your email address.

Matt Rouse 11:01

Those were good too.

Eric Dickmann 11:02

Yeah, or a white paper. But like you said, it has to be something of significant, something that you're willing to pay a buck or two for, even though you're not paying it, you are in a sense by surrendering your email address. So I like that. So all of these different lead magnets. What about just saying subscribe to my blog or subscribe to this. Do you think that is an effective enough offer to get people, to give their email address?

Matt Rouse 11:27

Yeah, I get notified when my next video comes out, get notified when I new article comes out. If they're a fan of your stuff, they will sign up to get that notification. When you talk about stuff, like if it's more of a B2B situation, like when you talk about a white paper. I wouldn't have somebody sign up to get my white paper, because if they're getting the white paper, they're trying to get information to figure out if they're making a decision to buy your product.

Eric Dickmann 11:48

Yeah, great point.

Matt Rouse 11:49

So what you should do though. Is anybody who goes to the page. Where you have the downloads for the white papers for specific types of products. You should be using some lead tracking company, lead tracking software, and there's a number of ones that do it. And what they do is they will reverse engineer the IP address to figure out which company it was that came to that page on your website, and then you can have your sales rep contact that company and say, Hey, I know I saw somebody there was looking at a white paper for our blah-blah-blah widget. Do you want to connect me with the right person to talk to and I can get them any information they need.

Eric Dickmann 12:27

Yeah. You know we had an episode on marketing automation technology, and there are so many things that you can tell just by having, you know, Pixels and things installed on your website to be able to see who's coming there, even if they don't leave a an email address, you can still see the company domains that are poking around your website. And there's a lot of intelligence that's out there. What do you think about pop-up boxes? So when somebody is has an exit intent or they scroll down halfway, you see a lot of websites that are using pop-up boxes to try to get people's email addresses. What do you think about those?

Matt Rouse 13:00

I think on an e-commerce site or something where you're saying subscribe to get notified. I think it's fine. I think most other sites. You're probably better off just having a button, so there's a couple of different ways you can do that. The worst thing that you can do, which was what everybody does is that the bottom of their website in the footer, they have a box that says subscribe to our newsletter and it says email and submit, and nobody wants your newsletter, right? What they want is whatever the offer that you're going to make to them to tell that you're going to send them things about you should be able to describe that in a way that they want to sign up for that thing, and you can put that in a block on your website or a bar at the top or something like that. That's persistent. That doesn't have a pot that gets in the way of what they're trying to look for because not everybody's come to your website is looking to sign up, right? A lot of them are there to look for something different. And if you're popping up something, getting in the way of them, trying to get that done, it's super annoying, especially the sites. And you know what it's like, right. You go to a website. For a large multinational corporation. And then there's a pop-up that comes up for something you don't care. Cause you just click it. Cause you're trying to find something like your account number or log in or something. And then the email Bob. Sign up for our email thing pops up and then the survey thing pops up and like, you can't even get anything done, right? You give up by the time you've clicked out. And do you agree to the cookies and whatever, right? Like just let me go find my account number. So you want to keep that stuff to a minimum.

Eric Dickmann 14:27

It can be very invasive. That's true. And I have read some statistics that say like when people are coming into a blog post that having that pop-up on exit intent or something is a fairly decent way to collect names. Because if you just have a static panel, like you said, at the bottom of your blog or something, the chances are very small that somebody is actually going to sign up for that. But sometimes if you prompt them, they will.

Matt Rouse 14:49

Well, it works pretty well. Is having it in the blog, like, like halfway or three quarters way through the article. And they're reading and they're like, Oh, I like this article I'll type in my email address, hit submit, and then they'll read the rest. But when they hit submit, don't take them away from the rest of the article.

Eric Dickmann 15:05

Right, right.

Matt Rouse 15:06

They want to read the rest. They just signed up for it.

Eric Dickmann 15:10

Well, I think that actually brings up another good point in that sometimes the forms that businesses ask you to fill out, just to sign up for a marketing list, they want way too much information. The key is you really don't need anything, but an email address to get started.

Matt Rouse 15:27

Yeah, I kinda like to go name and email. And so there is. In some instances, you may get a lot of people on your list that you don't want. When you know, if you have kind of a two-sided industry like a good example would be property management. If you are trying to get signups from people who want to rent their properties. Instead of people who are renters. Then you've tried to put information in that weeds out renters.

Eric Dickmann 15:55

Makes sense

Matt Rouse 15:55

So you can do that for certain things, but for the most part, you know, yeah. Name and email is fine.

Eric Dickmann 16:00

Yeah. And sometimes it can just be first name. Every field that you add is another point of resistance, which will further like key people from doing it because certainly there are many people, I see it on my own email lists that you can tell the email that they're giving you is their spam email list. Right? It's not their main email address. It's the one that they use to collect all the marketing information. Okay, so now we've collected some names. We've got some lists. Now comes the hard part, right? We've got to compose a compelling message. So we've already created our brand story and some of our marketing messages, but how do you recommend people structure an email campaign so that it's not just a single message that's going out, but it's a series. You know, we talk a lot about the buyer's journey, sending the right message at the right time. But how do you advise clients to start crafting sort of an email strategy, now that they've got names in a list?

Matt Rouse 16:54

Well, once you're creating your list. An extra step that you should be doing. Unless you're creating from scratch is you should be tagging those emails or separating them onto different lists. So, yeah, cause you don't want to send the same. Message to your existing clients. That you would be sending to someone who's maybe a prospect. And it may not matter if you have a smaller company but as you get bigger and you're going to have bigger lists. Then you're going to want to have your lists either segmented with tags, where a tag could be something like client versus prospect or you know, some they you could have, if you have multiple lead magnets, you could say tag them with the one that they downloaded it from. And then once you have your list segmented, or you have them on separate lists that you want to craft an email. That is along the lines, at least in the same neighborhood is what you told them. You were going to send them. And of course, that's going to be different for everybody because you want to have a compelling reason for your list, but there are millions of ways. To send people interesting. Personable emails where you're building a relationship and building a rapport with them and making them want to keep hearing from you. And there are a million other ways to throw that trust in the garbage and send them a bunch of crap that they don't want. And unfortunately the sending crap is what seems to happen most of the time. Because a lot of times, email marketing is an afterthought. It's they don't have a plan. They don't have a content calendar. They don't have You know, any kind of creative writing or anything involved in it, and there's no copywriting involved a lot of times. And what you really want to do is be crafting. The messages that your clients, what they want to hear from you, not what you want to tell them. Does that make sense?

Eric Dickmann 18:45

It's so true and you know there are a lot of different tools that you can do this. You know you can do it from your marketing automation tool, which I would recommend because then you get all the tracking and the analytics that are around that. And it's like many things in marketing. It's about experimentation. It's about seeing what works and what doesn't and trying different things. Doing AB testing and seeing what works. You know, I get emails from some very reputable companies that are text-based they know images, that's just all texts. I get others that are very rich with images. I don't really know which one works the best. That's what you have to experiment with. You have to try different things and see what your particular audience responds to. The best. There is no sort of magic formula that says if you put your email in this form or in this format, it'll magically work.

Matt Rouse 19:34

Right. My email lists that I get the most response from, I send texts, emails that have the odd animated GIF in between them. Where I tell a story that is anywhere from half a page two, sometimes three or four pages long, and then it wraps around to have some kind of moral or marketing message or business information. But the story relates to the message and then people I don't know how many times I've heard it. They lived there like how long can your email B and the truth is it can't be too long. It can only be too boring. right? So if you can only write three sentences and make it compelling, then you should have a three-sentence email. Right? But if you can write, you know, a short story or an informational piece or something. You know, you don't want to go crazy, write a whole book, but you know, there's no game play there that says like game plan that says it has to be this long. Right? Another thing when you're talking about kind of split testing and stuff. It's easy to test formats with your audience when they're when your audience is fairly small. And I would say the way to know that you're on the right track is when people respond to your marketing email. And nothing makes your client feel like you don't give a crap about the more that when you send them an email marketer, like a marketing email that says do not respond@company.com. Right because that's not conversation, then that's just somebody yelling at you with a megaphone. Right. And. I would say I mean, I have a list that I send my marketing tips list is, you know, it's under a thousand people and I get anywhere from three to eight responses every week of people telling me that they liked the story or whatever it is. Right. And that list generates thousands of dollars in his business for us. And then I've worked with companies. I was a contractor working with a marketing agency for a nationwide furniture company. That had more than a million people on their list. And. After, like I took over for someone who had like left or something, I don't know what happened to them, but anyway, it was like emergency. I need somebody to send an email to a million people right now. I'm your guy. So I go down, I started doing this several years ago, but. After we kind of got the ball rolling again. The next strategy that we implemented was separating their list into smaller chunks. So we would send an email to about 10,000. And then we would send an email to another 10,000 with a different headline, whichever one got the most sales or responses we would run with that headline. And then we would run a new one with a different photo and we'd split test the toe photo to another 10 or 20,000 people. And we would do that two or three times. We had iterate through until we got the best email and then we would send it to the other 900,000 people. That was the way that we could get the biggest response through split testing. And we could do all of that split testing and one day.

Eric Dickmann 22:37

And I think, you know you've mentioned a couple of really important things here, the first thing that you mentioned a few minutes ago, as you segmented your list and figuring out what content that you want to send is make sure that what you're sending is appropriate to the person you're sending it to. A great example would be, you know, I sign up to a few clothing retailers, they send me emails, there's nothing that drives me crazy more than getting an email from a company that I follow with women's clothes. While I'm a man I'm not buying any women's clothes, so don't send me advertisements for women's clothes. That's a pretty basic distinction, and it's a way that you can actually really offend people. I hate it when somebody sends me an email as a prospect when I'm a customer. Don't you realize that I'm a customer? So you really do have to be careful with how you send emails out to people. I think another mistake that companies can make is either just spamming everybody, buying email lists of people that don't know who you are, and then spamming them. I think what often gets missed is that if you start sending out too many emails and people start unsubscribing in mass to your email, You can get blacklisted by a number of email service providers so that none of your emails actually get through, you do have to be really careful, and I think that's, you mentioned the the laws over in Europe now and probably coming to California. A lot of that is because people were being spammed with unsolicited emails. So you do have to be careful in what you're doing.

Matt Rouse 24:05

Now. I wouldn't say you can't buy a list. I'm not a huge fan of it. And there's a lot of reasons for that. One of them is there's a lot of Trojan horse emails in those and what those are is MailChimp and constant contact. And other companies create emails to put on those lists so that when you upload that list that you bought into their system, they can detect that you bought it. And then can just straight up block you. The other thing is tons of those email addresses are going to be crap. So you pay by the amount of emails, either the amount of subscribers you have or by the amount of emails you send or both, depending upon the provider. So if you have an email list and 30% of the addresses are no good, 30% of your money's wasted. Right. However, there is a way to clean those lists. So you can use a list, cleaning service to clean that list, get it down to. Kind of a manageable amount of real addresses. And there's a number of ways to clean a list. And then you can break that into small pieces and send small chunks of subscribers out so that your spam percentage is not too high. So you don't get blacklisted. And that's kind of an advanced topic. You can always hit me up with a message or something. If somebody wants to know more about that.

Eric Dickmann 25:21

No, I think it's good. Yeah, it definitely is more on the advanced side, but it's important to know. And I would add the other thing is that at some point, if you're emailing a customer, I think Gmail even does this now. It'll say, well, you know, such and such as sent you 15 emails and you haven't opened any of them. Do you want to block them? And I think HubSpot's rule, I think is 11. I it's either 11 or 13 emails if nobody open those emails, you know, they'll come and flag them as being an inactive contact, I believe. Yeah, so you do at some point, you just have to say I'm going to stop now. Maybe you can revisit it a year or something, but don't keep sending emails to customers who clearly aren't interested.

Matt Rouse 26:02

So there's a process you should use. To clean up your list and the number one part of that process is making it easy for people to unsubscribe. Cause you don't want them on your list if they don't want to be on the list. Cause they're not going to buy from you anyway. So you might as well get them off your list and start paying for them. And then the second thing that you should do is you should be able to segment your list by people who haven't opened any of your emails in say the last six months or 12 months, or whatever, that time figure that you want to use this. And what you want to do is take anybody. Who hasn't opened one and say, let's say your time period is six months, anybody, six months in one day or longer. Since the last time they opened one of your emails. You export them out of your mail program. And you just keep a copy of those and you will use those later for what's called a win-back campaign. So you keep emailing your regular people, and then you take this chunk of people who don't open your emails in the last six months or more. You make a new list with those people. And you send them straight text email with no images, no pictures, no nothing, no fancy language. And you just send them a couple emails, something to the effect of, you know, I'll give you an example. So. A friend of mine runs a auto. Business. He's like, an auto broker car broker. So he did a win-back campaign with his people and said I have some fabulous pictures. We shot of this new ADI in the Moonlight. And if you'd like to see them click here and they put a link on it. And he sent that out. And within a month he had a guy emailed them back and said that he saw the photos, asked him why he hadn't gotten an email in the last, like six to 12 months from them. And he was like, I didn't even, I thought you took me off your list. And he bought a $35,000 used car from him, right? And that's somebody who you normally would have deleted because they're not a contact anymore, but what happens is the delivery, the deliverability of the emails can go down to a point where somebody emails are just constantly getting put into this spam folder. So they're not even seeing them. Even if they do still want to get them. And the ways to get around that is to sometimes send emails, very similar to what a person would send another person. And normally people send emails back and forth. It's just straight text or it's like no buttons, no like fancy language or anything in it. Right. Or maybe just a few photos. It also, if you send an email with no links in it at all, That can really help get you out of the spam box and back at the inbox, at least temporarily. So somebody can start seeing those again.

Eric Dickmann 28:44

Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to the podcast. But first, are you ready to grow, scale, and take your marketing to the next level? If so, The Five Echelon Group's Virtual CMO onsulting service may be a great fit for you. We can help build a strategic marketing plan for your business and manage its execution, step-by-step. We'll focus on areas like how to attract more leads. How to create compelling messaging that resonates with your ideal customers. How to strategically package and position your products and services. How to increase lead conversion, improve your margins, and scale your business. To find out more about our consulting offerings and schedule a consultation, go to fiveechelon.com and click on Services. Now back to the podcast. You know as we're going through this, you know, some of our listeners may say, well, you know this is complicated, you're talking about different campaigns, list segmentation, and there is a lot of complexity to it. And that's one of the benefits of having a marketing automation tool, especially when you can get workflows and things involved, because then you can create these campaigns, you can create these automated emails and when you add these people to a list. It just triggers an event which starts sending them emails on a regular basis, and that is definitely an advanced topic, which is more than we'll cover here today. But the point is that email is still a very valid marketing communications tool, and if you do it right, you can see some pretty big success with it.

Matt Rouse 30:16

Yeah. And another thing that you could do when you have a well- segmented list. As you can upload those lists into your advertising. All right? So you can make an audience in Facebook and Instagram or LinkedIn or Pinterest or Twitter or Google, right? Out of your audience of say active subscribers, and you send a different marketing message to them on Facebook, than you would to somebody who's never heard of you. And then, you know, And people just like they have people where they're sending emails to that are inactive subscribers, or they're sending prospect emails to clients. They do the same thing with the retargeting ads on Facebook. I don't know how many times I've signed up for something or bought something, and then they're still sending me prospect emails for the next is. There are advertisements, retargeting advertisements for three months. What a waste of money,

Eric Dickmann 31:02

It is a waste of money, right? You've already bought.

Matt Rouse 31:04

put in to it. It's like a two button thing, right? You just have, you have an audience of clients, right? And you just say exclude the client list and that you look, there you go, people I've saved you thousands.

Eric Dickmann 31:16

Now there's a lot of mistakes that are made and some of it can be very complicated especially in larger organizations with a lot of products, it can be tough. But if especially if you're a smaller business, this is manageable because your list probably aren't that big. But when you get to a point where somebody identified themselves to you and you've got the ability to market to them, especially if they've showed some kind of interest. Email can be a fantastic tool for reaching and moving that buyer throughout the buyer's journey. And I know that you've even put together a little course. They're at a Hook SEO, right? That helps people with email marketing.

Matt Rouse 31:51

Yes. We have a course called Inbox Mastery. Which I like to say, it's like getting your master's degree in email marketing. Cause it's not quite as hard as an actual master's degree, but. You know, walk you through the basics, and if you are more of kind of an intermediate email marketer and has a lot of more complicated things in there that we've explained well, And it'll swap file. So email types that you can use for different types of industries that you could just take them a reword them. It'll tell you how often to send what you should send when you should send it. And I think the best part, which I've never seen in another email marketing course, which kind of gave us the idea is that actually can teach you which software you should use to send emails with. Rather than what most people do is they use whatever their company was already using or whatever their buddy told them they should use. But that's not always the right tool for the job, right.

Eric Dickmann 32:45

No, that's right. Having the right tool for the job can make all the difference. You know, Matt, if you would just run through where people can find you online working, they can find Hook SEO and how they could get access to the course.

Matt Rouse 32:58

Sure we're at hookSEO.com. And there is a training button at the top that you can click, There's also at the top, there's a button to sign up if you want to join my email list and see how we do it. And we also have about eight or nine other free courses on there under our training tab as well for other topics. And you can always hit me up on LinkedIn. And I'm Matt Ross. One I believe is my tag on LinkedIn. And you can tell I got the same spiky hair on LinkedIn.

Eric Dickmann 33:26

That's the dead giveaway.

Matt Rouse 33:28

that is that's the giveaway. If I have my hair flat people don't recognize me for some reason. But are you good to go on the podcast? Digital Marketing Masters, which is my logo on my shirt. And you can listen to Eric's episode, which just came out two days ago.

Eric Dickmann 33:43

Yeah. I was very fortunate to be a guest on Matt show, it's a great podcast. I'd encourage everybody to check that out on Apple podcasts or wherever you happen to listen to podcasts. It's a good show. And I do appreciate you having me on as a guest as well. I think this has been very useful information. I will make sure that we have all of those links in the show notes so that people can can find it. Matt, I really appreciate your time today and the value that you shared here with the audience on list building and email marketing.

Matt Rouse 34:10

Well, thanks for having me on, and I hope this helps everybody kind of read the internet, have more of the garbage email that's getting sent out there.

Eric Dickmann 34:17

Absolutely. Let's hope so. Thanks again, Matt.

Matt Rouse 34:21

Thanks.

Eric Dickmann 34:21

Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Virtual CMO podcast. For more episodes, go to fiveechelon.com/podcast to subscribe through your podcast player of choice. And if you'd like to develop consistent lead flow and a highly effective marketing strategy, visit fiveechelon.com to learn more about our Virtual CMO consulting services.