Email Marketing Breakdown: How to Cut Through the Noise in 2025

But the reality of it is, if you don't get your email opened, who actually cares what's in your email now? Totally agree. That email no long open rates are no longer an absolute metric. You go in your tracking system, it says you have 32% open rate. You had 32,412 people open it. That's not true, okay, because there's too many inflated things. There's Apple stuff, there's bots, there's garbage. Who cares? But it is a directional metric. So if the last time you send out your newsletter, you, you had a 30% open rate, now this time, okay, you're going to do an a B test, you're going to stick an emoji in the subject line, and the other one doesn't have an emoji, and the one with an emoji this time gets a 45% open rate. Does that mean 45% of people open it? No, but it means the one with the emoji did better. It's like a survey, a Gallup poll on the tactic that you are trying. So to discount open rates and say there's no value there is bonkers to me because it is the thing that's going to delineate whether or not is this the right thing to go with or not. So I love open rates. And if you don't like it, I want to see you take it out of your tracking report. I want to see it. Just eliminate the field. You're not going to do it. That's garbage. I hate it. Anyway.

And we've reset the chat, so we got a whole new chat going. So, guys, throw in where you are from again, what you're excited about to learn about email in 2025. And remember to take good. You take good advantage of that Q and A tab. I'm excited. Yeah, Dan left him kind of hanging. He's probably still juggling. Let me see if I can see him backstage right now. He's still juggling, Dan. No, he's not. All right, cool. So super excited to have all of you guys here today to kick off our very first session of the day, which is email in 2025. What's in, what's out, what actually works. We have so many awesome experts just.

Just joining us today.

So I'm really, really excited about this. Do you guys know any of our experts? I mean, I know plenty of people. Probably know Jay and Beth, she's like LinkedIn famous. And then Jaina from Litmus, which is an awesome platform. And this session is brought to you by Nak today. So Jay is actually a good friend of nac, so. And he's a good friend of ours too. Yeah, Jay's a hero. We have it in the chat. I'm going to bring them on in just a few minutes, but just wanted to do like a quick little intro. We have Beth o'. Malley. She is the founder of Astral Digital. She is the email Queen on LinkedIn. She has so many hot takes and I'm very excited to have her on today. And then we have Jay, who as I can see in the chat needs no introduction, but he also founded something called subject line.com, which is super cool. I think he sent a great email out for us to let some of you guys know about this event today. And Guru Media Hub, which has probably some of the coolest virtual events around. Like they had what, like Sarah Jessica Parker last year and some really other cool guests. So we'll have him on another session later today on. On email or on event email as well. And then we have Gina Mistry, who I follow on LinkedIn and she's the director of brand and content marketing at Litmus. And if you don't know Litmus, also great email platform. You can kind of like test a bunch of things in email. I'm probably butchering that. Sorry, Jaina, but I am going to bring them up right now. So, guys, you're backstage. Get ready. Welcome.

Hi.

Excited to see you guys. All right, cool. So I did my little butchering of the email session or what, what you guys do. So if you want to just take like one, one little quick sentence, introduce yourself in your own words to the, to the crowd here. Yes. David, I'm sorry, the 20 minute intro is a lot, but we got to warm up the crowd, you know?

All right, who's going first?

Take us off.

Oh, okay. I'm, I'm. I don't know what I am. I'm incompetent. What? Everything you said about me was mildly accurate. I also have a demand generation agency called Outcome Media. I don't know. I think most emails that go out are epically horrible. So I'm excited to tell everybody they're doing a bad job.

Right.

Cool.

Jayna, you.

You pretty much nailed it almost with what Litmus does. Danielle. But I, like, I've been in email 15 plus years a little bit. I'm definitely an email geek at heart. Yes, I do brand and content now, but I can't leave email alone because like jic bad emails in my own inbox. So I'm really looking forward to this today.

Let me get Beth.

Hi. Yeah, you did a great job. I don't think there's anything more to add. I did add the Queen title myself. I'm definitely not the queen of email, but, yeah, I. If you follow me on LinkedIn, you know, I already roast quite a lot of emails, so I'm very, very excited for this event. Me too.

I'm so excited. So this panel today is all about email. In 2025, we're going to have a general discussion about it. Yeah. Beth does not hold back and it's great. I'm very, very excited about this. So please add any questions you have about, you know, email, B2B email in general, to the Q and A tab. And we're going to get to those in a little bit. But first, I wanted to kick off, like, is the inbox dead? You know, I see on LinkedIn all the time email is dead in B2B. We had someone come stand up at our event in Boston a couple weeks ago and say, email is the one channel not working right now in B2B. But what do you guys think? Roast. Roast that opinion.

I kind of want to agree with it to some extent, just to be very contrarian, because I love all things email. I think it's dead because it's so overfilled with just junk. There's just so much in the inbox. So it's kind of dead because you just don't even know where to start when you're in your inbox, when you open your email first thing in the morning, it's like, ugh, you don't even want to venture into it. So to that extent, I agree, like, the inbox is dead, but the other way is, like, if you ever ask a company to turn off their email channel, they won't do it because they know how much power email has. So that's my sense.

Caitlin had a funny comment in the chat. The amount of shamrocks that ended up in my inbox on Monday.

Shamrocks, rainbows, pots and gold.

Yeah, Jay's email. I don't know if anyone's seen Jay's email on LinkedIn. He was a very lucky guy.

Yeah, I got a lot of shamrocks. And, you know, to the question, email's dead. If you're. If you. If you stink at email. I think if you're still doing the same things for your B2B emails that you were doing 24 months ago, then email is in fact dead for you because you're doing a really, really Bad job. I mean if you think, you know, personalization, the subject line is first name, whatever. If your call to action button still just say like register or download. If your from name is still just your company name. If you're still doing the same things that you're doing two years ago and email is in fact dead for you, it's not dead for me, but I think that everybody needs to up their game. So no, I don't think it's dead.

I agree. I think email as we know it, like no one's moved on since 2004. Like 99.9% of emails in my inbox, BSP emails, they're all dead. So I think I agree to that. But I think evolved email marketing is not dead. If you know how to do it, it's 100% agree. No business will turn off that email and they'll always say if they needed some sales as they send another email, so know it has value but they just don't know how to do it. So if it doesn't work for them, they think we're not doing it. So yeah, it's kind of dead.

I think there's like a bit of a tunnel vision when it comes to email too. I hate to use this word, but like omnichannel marketing is a thing. Like I think sometimes we think of email as like one channel and like everything. If email isn't successful because all you're doing is email, you're not surrounding your audience through social, through paid, through live events, through virtual event slash roasts. Like there's so much more you could be doing that integrates email better into your entire marketing sphere. That makes email more powerful, that like elevates it a little bit more. So like, like Beth, Jay, both of you were saying, it's not just about doing what we're doing 2, 3, 4, 10 years ago, it's integrating email a whole lot more into like your Overall marketing sphere 100%.

And if, if it doesn't work, like I think B2B marketers, we get a lot of pressure from our leaders, so we'll send out some email. A lot of B2B cycles are a lot longer, so you're not going to get those sales. But those emails all stack up and then in six months, 12 months time, you helped bring that sale to you because of that. And a lot of B2B leaders will just be like, well, don't bother them, it doesn't work. So we're not going to do. We didn't get any leads off the back of that email. So it's looking at the bigger picture, really. Email is not a one stop. Like we're not B2C. We're not just like firing out an email to buy a cheap product. It's going to take a lot of time. So I think there's just a whole misconception around email as a channel, which is these people shouting around that it's dead. It's because they think that.

Yeah.

And you know, to your point, when you say the word leads, I think that's the biggest problem in B2B email marketing is that we bucket everything. Right. Someone downloads a checklist, someone registers for webinar, someone signs up for a demo, they're all leads. Which is totally ridiculous because, you know, somebody that's grabbing a free piece of content on a pop up form is very different than the person that's, you know, downloading a case study. Right. And then what happens is, uh, you're measuring them all the same way, like, oh, email's not performing for us. We got 500 new leads. And yet it's a mega top of the funnel thing. And you're giving it the same metrics as this case study that was downloaded and that case study crushed it to generate some real pipeline. So I think one of the things is really being able to delineate and break out what are your initiatives, you know, what is your benchmarks for each of those things. And not just saying email, because that is just moronic.

Yeah, I think there's a really good, I think it's, this is a number that has got thrown around a lot in the past few years. But I think from the, like the Ehrenberg Bass Institute says like 95% of your audience are not in market and 5% of your audience are. So if you think about email as like a conversion channel, you're just speaking to that 5% of your audience. You're not speaking to the like 95% that you should be speaking to because eventually they, you want them to turn into that 5%. So think of it less as a conversion channel. Think about like, how can I nurture these, these people? Don't think of them as leads. Like Jay said, they're not leads. They're people they want. You want to be able to like get them introduced to your brand, who you are, what you do, and then turn them into the 5%. But if you're just thinking it as like a conversion channel, you're just talking to that 5%. You're missing out on like the Majority of your audience, really?

No. And I think it's.

What is it?

Anne Hanley, her thing with her newsletters is like, email isn't a distribution tool or newsletters aren't a distribution tool. They're a relationship builder. And I think, like, we need to take that approach to email much more generally. It's like, they're not leads, they're people. And they're not just going to buy this. Like, and we're in B2B, so a lot of the contract values are pretty high. No one's going to get that email and be like, okay, like, I'm ready to sign up for 50 grand for this service immediately. But when they are in market, they're going to think of you. If you spent time building that trust, not sending shitty emails. Beth, you had a really good, spicy take on open rates. What do you think of open rates as a metric?

Yeah, I'm willing to die on this hill and I've seen it in the chat. So I hate open rates so much with a passion. I do think that they're dead, but I will caveat it before Jay falls out with me. They are dead if you think of them purely as a success and a positive metric. So I hear it all the time. My email did really well. We got a 45% open rate and they're giving themselves a little pat on the back. But actually a lot of people open to delete, they open to ignore, they don't open. And it doesn't mean that it's like a really positive thing. So for me, there's all the unreliability as well. I'm sure everybody knows that opens are just quite heavily unreliable now. But it's this positive thing around it and if you're using it on your own, if you are, I'm so sorry to call anybody out if you are like, oh, my email did really well. We got like pretty high opens. It doesn't mean anyone cared. I'm so sorry. Like, it's something just get out the window. But if you pair it, and I know that Jay kind of swayed me because I was 100% done with them, but actually they could be. They can be a really good indicator when you pair them up with more reliable metrics and you look at a time span. But for me, if you're, if you're pulling that and saying our emails do well because we get clicks and we get opens, if you can't measure the impact or the effect on the business that email has, like, just, just stop. So I would Challenge everyone to just try and report on your emails without, without the open metric. And honestly, it would. It will really help for sure.

Jay is so ready to fire back.

I mean.

I do not believe open rates are so valuable. I get so worked up because it's completely ridiculous. First, all in B2B, what do we do? We all work on our creative, on our offers. We get legal to approve it. Oh my God, it's ready to go. And then we don't even care about the subject line. Right? But the reality of it is, if you don't get your email opened, who actually cares what's in your email now? Totally agree. That email no long open rates are no longer an absolute metric. You go in your tracking system, it says you have 32% open rate. You had 32,412 people open it. That's not true, okay, because there's too many inflated things. There's Apple stuff, there's bots, there's garbage. Who cares? But it is a directional metric. So if the last time you send out your newsletter you had a 30% open rate, now this time, okay, you're going to do an AB test, you're going to stick an emoji in the subject line and the other one doesn't have an emoji, and the one with an emoji this time gets a 45% open rate. Does that mean 45% of people open it? No, but it means the one with the emoji did better. It's like a survey, a Gallup poll on the tactic that you are trying. So to discount open rates and say there's no value there is bonkers to me because it is the thing that's going to delineate whether or not is this the right thing to go with or not. So I love open rates. And if you don't like it, I want to see you take it out of your tracking report. I want to see it just eliminate the field. You're not going to do it. That's garbage. I hate it. Anyway.

I really want to count a challenge that day because I think on subject lines as well, there's a habit of people really focusing on that to get an open so that the open is like the goal. But sometimes we subject lines, somebody will put something in and then the first thing that the user sees doesn't align with that subject line. They're so focused on getting the open that actually then they're classing that open is a great thing. But they didn't engage with your email. Nothing happened So I think it's kind of. I agree subject lines are so important that the entry into your email. But if you're kind of spending so much time looking at the open is the goal, I think you need to step away and look at the bigger picture. Like, and well, like people following up with people that don't open an email and then sending them the same email again. I know those people do that like will follow up if they opened or didn't open. And it's like, well, you wouldn't go around like knocking on someone's door like twice a day being like hello, like, especially if they open it and they're like I don't care. So that's kind of how I see it. But I, I agree that it's an indicator. You shouldn't throw it out if you want to track things over time. But if you're just looking at it on its own, it's. It's pretty pointless in my opinion.

I just saying I'm curious about all of you guys. I'm curious about something. You just said something. I want to know your opinion because I feel like I'm the minority on this. I'm a huge believer on resending to non openers. Okay, where. And I'll and I want to know. I'm going to tell you why I say that. And this is I want to know your take. And everyone in the chat's going to say I'm an idiot. And that's fine. That may be true. So you send 100,000 emails, okay, you get a 40% open rate and now you have 60% that didn't open it. Now you don't know for a fact that the 40% open the email, but you pretty sure the 60% didn't. Not 100% sure, but pretty sure. So like to me on our newsletter sends that we send out, we always do a resend two days later to non openers and it says something in the subject line like oops, you missed it or you scrolled past this or this one's really important. And it gives our newsletter an additional probably 25% of unique opens. And the newsletters are a giant pain in the ass to put together to send it out once is a crime and it changes the game for us. So I know that people don't like doing ring sends anymore. Do you guys say that that's bad? Are you telling me I'm doing the wrong thing?

I don't like resend primarily because. Okay, this is really going to get weird now. You. Yes, Open rate is a good indicator directionally of like telling you something about like the engagement of your email. But you also don't know the number of people who see your email and see your brand in the inbox and choose not to take an action. And they have chosen not to take an action because they've seen it. They're not, they're busy or they're just not interested in it right now. And we as marketers have got to be happy with that. We've got to be like, okay, they're not engaging with us at this point in time. And then so by sending to like resending to non openers, it feels like kind of like Beth, using your analogy. Like you just keep knocking on their door and you keep wanting to get in. Like maybe that's just not the right time. And we as marketers have got to be okay with that to some degree. But I do get your point, Jay. Like you spent so much effort and time on your newsletters. I'll count that with Send your newsletter once, repurpose that content elsewhere, repurpose it on LinkedIn, repurpose it on websites, repurpose it in like some other places so you don't feel like you're just completely losing value of all the content you've created there.

I file your newsletters away, Jay, in my folder and when you send it again, I get really annoyed with you. So I'm like, I'm going to read that later. We all have a folder, we never come back to it. It's like LinkedIn saved posts, I've got about 50,000. And I'm like, yeah, I will read that later. So yes, I think there is a good thing there. Like you reminded me to read it. But then I do get a bit like, yeah, I'm coming to to it. Please don't tell me what to do. But I definitely think it's going to be an argument that we don't get solved in the near future. I think it all depends on the business. It depends on what you're trying to achieve at the end of the day. Like if an open is you pair that with other metrics and you look over time and it really helps you understand engagement and impact, then absolutely use it. If you are just using opens and clicks and nothing else and that's your report at the end of the month that you sent a you bought us, you probably need to rethink your strategy. So I don't think we're going to solve this here. And I think me and Dragon Fall Out.

But yeah, wait, I'm going to say, I got to say I don't agree with something. I'm going to tell you why. One of the problems in B2B marketing is we all use our own opinion. Like, well, I don't like getting a resend, so I'm not going to do it. Okay. Or I don't like pop ups, so they're annoying to me, so we're not going to use them. And to tell you the truth, if you just focus on what you like, you're going to go out of business. Pop ups work incredibly well. You know, things like resends work incredibly well. And by the way, unsubscribes, like, oh no, we're going to get more of them. They're good. Unsubscribes are a good thing, they're not a bad thing. Not everybody needs to be on your list. They don't hurt your deliverability. Get them off their list. They're not going to be in your pipeline. So who cares if somebody unsubscribes? They're having a bad day. They're weird. Who cares? I think we have to get off this train of I don't like it, so I'm not going to do it.

Oh, for sure. Yeah, there you go. Twisted J. Like, data is my best friend. Evidence. You got to evidence this. Like if you, if you want to back up something. I completely agree that just because you don't do it doesn't mean somebody else won't. But I fundamentally agree on the unsubscribes. I encourage that in my inbox. Please tell me to go away.

I think one thing about open rates we haven't talked about that is a good idea to track is your deliverability. Like if you are tracking your open rate over time and you are taking into account like you know, your open rates for different inbox providers and you kind of are gauging that over time, the minute you see that open rate dramatically decline, especially if you've got a newsletter that you're sending a regular cadence that is like one of the best indicators to be like, oh shit, something's going on with my email program. I need to stop everything and figure this out. So I think that's where open rate is so helpful for B2B audiences. Like that is like my, oh yeah, deliverability. I'm my open rates declining. I need to do something about that. So that's one place where I'm like, open rates are great.

Yeah, it's definitely quoting you.

You said that open rates are great. I'm putting that on LinkedIn, like one.

Of our T shirts we're going to launch. I think it also depends on like the frequency of the email you're sending because you're right, if you're putting together like a bi weekly or a monthly newsletter, which I don't think is quite frequent enough, or weekly, like the resend is a little bit more viable of an option than if you have like a daily newsletter and you're like sending it every day and you're so again, it's like you have to know your audience, you have to see what works for you. That's just my opinion though. Yeah, yeah.

Use tools as well that take out the unreliable. There are lots of tools out there that will capture those. They'll track if people are using Apple, if they're using Outlet, you'll be able to do those follow ups with a little bit more trust that you're not just like banging on people's inboxes that, that have opened or haven't opened. So I think there's lots of different tools now that you can use to boost Opens to be a bit more reliable. But the only other thing I think in B2B that's a huge challenge with Opens is where we're obviously we're emailing other organizations and other organizations usually have IT teams with lots of other protection and security and firewalls. So if you start to see a recipient or a subscriber opening every time and clicking on every single link in every single email, just know that that's a huge red flag. And if you are emailing to more than one person at that business and they're doing it, that will tell you that usually their IT team, they've got some sort of firewall security spam filter that actually just opens all your emails, clicks all the links and then actually holds them and releases them. And it could be up to four hours later that they get your email as well. So that's just meant to bear in mind as well. In the B2B world, it's not as simple as you send. They get it and they open and they click. You might have no data on these businesses and these subscribers because of that issue.

You know, just jumping in there on, you know, a really simple party trick hack which is super not scientific on, on how to know how inflated your metrics are, especially on your click metrics. Because, you know, to Beth's point, there's a lot of bot activity, there's a lot of network intrusion software that's automatically clicking on links on, on the emails being received to anybody that you're sending to. That's before it's delivered to the person's inbox. They're all being clicked on, but it's showing up in your reporting as a click. And you're like high fiving yourself that your click rate is something when in fact you, it's inflated. If you actually do a send to your database at a ridiculous hour, like 2 in the morning. Okay. And then you isolate out the click traffic that you have in the first 30 minutes of that send for local time zone. Just the first 30 minutes. You are not that cool. You're not that popular at 2 in the morning. And that first 30 minutes of click activity for those contacts is bot activity for the most part. And if you discount your tracking by that number, you'll get a much better view on how accurate your click, your click performance is. I mean that's super not scientific, but it works really well.

I think another thing a lot of people used to do, this is way back in the day when this was more common. But that like view and browser link that's right at the top of the, that people put right at the top of the email, that's often like the first thing that a lot of bots will click. And you will always see like inflated clicks on that. Like that's another great thing to see. Okay, so we've got like a 60% click through rate on that one click but everything else is much lower. Like that's another great indicator that again, oh, these are potentially bots that are clicking on this one.

That's super interesting. I hadn't thought of it that way too. That's usually like one of the lowest clicked links in our email. So maybe that's a good sign.

Awesome.

So what else do I have in my little list of questions? I think this is a good one because Jay, I know you have strong opinions about this on personalization and how we think we should do it and how we actually do it. So like are we over segmenting, are we overthinking personalization? Like are we overhyping this? Or do you think it's actually like the future of email and getting those genuine opens and genuine engagement?

Yeah. First of all, personalization is everything, right? The personalization in what you're sending, when you're sending all of that. But the Simplest personalization in B2B email marketing is often not used, which is in the subject line. Right. So so often we'll do people still do first name and the subject line as their personalization. And that's from 1995. It actually doesn't even have really a positive effect anymore.

If I see it, I delete it because I'm like, this is mass sense.

It's ridiculous. Like, hi Jay. It's like, really? Who are you?

It's always a lowercase because I always, I don't type a capital name and I put in forms and I'm like, I can tell.

I like, I also always fill out forms now, like right, like my name is loser or something. Because I like when it says like hi Loser. It makes me laugh. But what you want to do is some kind of personalization which crushes it. If you plant this in your mind, the faster you could tell somebody who they are, the faster it is that they want to engage. Okay, so if the subject line is something, let's say you want to put the person's industry, you know, just for retail professionals, like, oh, I'm a retail professional. It crushes it. The percentage of people open, every email jumps up. Right. Or if you actually put the company name, this is, you know, Litmus needs to know this. You're like, oh, I work at Litmus. What do I need to know?

Or fell for that. I felt that. Exactly.

Thing as soon as you tell somebody is this is only for people that work at enterprise organizations. This is for new business owners. This is for people that are CIOs. You tell them who they are in the subject line. That is the personalization that works because they feel seen. This is for me and not for everybody else. So yeah, personalization is gold now.

Like the company name one is, is great for B2B as well. Because I like I said I fell for that. I saw that in the subject lines like, oh, this is for me. This is going to help me. And that spoke to me more than my name. Which is kind of weird because it means I associate with my company that I work for more than my own name, which is a psychological hellhole. But it was like, oh, this is going to be more meaningful to me. The content in here is going to speak to help me on my day to day basis. So I like company name and subject line is great. I think the only way I think place, I think over personalization, hyper personalization segmentation going wrong is that I think it puts a blocker on people believing that you need to do that to be successful in email. Like if you're not personalizing the hell out of your email, your email is not going to be successful. If you're not, if you don't have every single data point to be able to personalize every single facet of your email, your email is not going to be successful. So people just hold back on even just sending email in the first place. And I think it's also put a bit of a block on people wanting to just send out a really humble good newsletter. Because newsletters I think are one of the those avenue there's like, there's channels. That doesn't necessarily have to be overly personalized. It doesn't. Especially in B2B. As long as you are like positioning yourself or the brand, whoever you are, as like a thought leader in your space and positioning the brands like they know what they're talking about. I don't believe newsletters need to be. Every single chunk of it needs to be massively personalized. It just needs to speak to the audience. So I think it's just like it's a balance like everything in email. Like yes, some things should be personalized, some things shouldn't be. But don't think of personalization as a blocker to stop you from just sending really good email.

I see it as like so simple and I bang on about this concept all the time. Just read the room. Like if you someone's downloaded a white paper and you're going to do a follow up flow, just read the room. These people are potentially not ready to buy. Like don't start hammering them with a message about how they need to book a call with you. Like just with personalization. Just read the room, collect the right data and as long as you understand where people are in their journey, like you don't have to get to that level of hyper personalization. Like it's some, I've seen some crazy, crazy ones where they'll be, they'll spend so much money and time, it has very little effect. But actually the ones that work the best is just really understanding your audience when they come into your system, whether they've downloaded something, whether they filled in a form, you collect the right data, strategic data and then you send the right message. And it's, it's as easy as that. Like it's so over complicated and it's actually just quite like it's common sense. You're not gonna, you're not gonna try and sell something to somebody for the first touch point they've had with you, but they've just added a white paper because it's got a really interesting stat on that. They're just interested in Reading. So that's how I see personalization, I think. Yeah, name is just like dash. Like you don't even need to use it in an email anymore. Like, honestly, like it's everyone, everyone has just done it. But just reading the room will get you so much better results than just kind of assuming that everyone's in the same place. So that's how I think about and.

Thinking about the intent of the email too. If the intent of the email, you've got to think about that and think about how personalization is going to help with that goal and that intent. Like if you are trying to, I don't know, I think the one email that I got was, I can't remember which company was, so sorry if this is you. But it was about telling me how like Litmus as a company can relate to this customer success story. And it worked very well. It's like I was thinking about my company as I was reading the success story in the email. So thinking about intent and how you personalize based on that, I think again, like, it can be just very, very simple things like the company name or where someone is at in their life cycle or who they are from an industry or vertical perspective. But it's funny, it gets really smart when you start being able to combine all of those things too.

So.

But that gets complicated too.

You know, one of the weirdest personalization tests that we've been running that's been working, which I'm surprised about, is let's say somebody goes to, let's say a pricing page on your SaaS company website, whatever. What we've done in the past is you get an email with something related to that because you knew they were on that page, but you don't call them out and say, hey, we knew you're on that page, but we've been running a lot of head to head tests now. And in the subject line and in the headline it says stuff like, hey, we know you check this out. Or we saw you were looking at this. We're actually, instead of just sending them the thing because we kind of are doing it kind of low key, we're now saying we know and we're telling the person we know. And that's doing so much better, which is so strange to us because it's like it used to be like a creepy factor, like, ooh, we shouldn't let them know that we know. And now it's like, hey, everybody gets it. And so that's been a cool new personalization thing. That's a little Bit different than it.

Used to be, especially in B2B. Like, we know we're being tracked everywhere. We know that. You can see that I've been on that pricing page and I've been on that website 50 million times in the last week. Oh, hey, that's a great, great way to personalize an email.

Yeah, for sure.

And we all know we're going to get 50 emails from an unwanted brand that's just scraped our data from LinkedIn and sent out an email. We all know that's gonna happen. But yeah, no, the other thing to add or maybe like personalization, a good place to start is if you're. And more segmentation, you're more sitting there like, oh my God, like, we could include everyone. I think we see it a lot. Let's send it to everyone just in case it's relevant. We don't miss out on anyone. It's usually not the B2B marketers that do that. It's usually the people I'm gonna say up there. They're trying to. But the best place to start is for me, like, who, who shouldn't you send it to? Who should we exclude from this? Should we exclude them if they're having a really. If they've just had a really good conversation with sales, should we exclude them if they've just phoned up service and they've got a problem with the product? Who can you exclude from that email to personalize it? So if you're worried, if you're thinking about all the people to include, start with exclusion. That is probably the best piece of advice I can give you because it will make so much more sense. You can say, okay, we don't want those people, they've just interacted with that. But we do want these people. So that's a really good way to personalize and segment without going wild with your segmentation.

Let's get into some of the audience questions because there's some really good questions in here. This one from Brendan, I'm going to pin it on the screen because we got a fun little feature here. Thoughts on AI summaries in emails. How does this impact strategy, especially thinking about open? Because sometimes you just get that little summary and I'm like, okay, like, I got it, I don't need it. What do you guys think? I'm sure there's opinions here on AI and email in general.

I really like them from a, From a user perspective. Like, I really, I really like the AI summaries. I am a little bit gutted that we could potentially have a future without pre headers. I think pre headers are like the unsung heroes, but from a user perspective, I really like them. However, it's gonna massively impact our emails because if your content isn't very good, not very clear, your AI summary is not gonna be very good and not very clear. So it could hurt your email performance for sure.

Yeah, yeah. And I don't have any control over it either. Sorry, Jana. You don't have any control over what it's gonna say. It's not like you can put in the AI summary. So, yeah, like you said that making sure it's good. Sorry, Jayna, go ahead.

I was just gonna say, and I think, I think people are still testing and learning and seeing what AI summaries actually do. I don't. It's been confirmed whether the same email will have the same AI summary across different people and different devices. Like, I think that's something that's still up in the air. But one thing is clear is that you need to make sure that you have enough live text in your emails to make sure that that AI summary is going to be relevant to that email. Because if you are still sending all image emails and you're. Even if you're using alt text, it's not enough for that AI for the AI to generate a summary that is going to be a good representation of your email. So make sure that you are using live text in your emails to sure that that AI summary is relevant to your email that's going to get that open and eventually like click through too. So I think it's. It is going to impact strategy for people who are still sending all image emails.

Yeah, listen, AI somebody's right now, they stink, but they're going to get better. And in general, you know, a lot of this has is coming from Apple's update to iOS 18 on the mail app on our phones. And the Mail app is. The new Mail app is bad on a good day. I mean, it is horrendous. And thankfully we've seen through a lot of the data. A lot of people are turning it off. Right. They're switching from having the categorizations of their mail in the mail back to all mail. I know I did because it was horrendous. So like everything on the Mail app, it will get better. It has to get better. So I'm not putting a lot of energy behind trying to make sure the right stuff shows up. But the live text tip is spot on. That should be your North Star as It relates to the AI summary.

Awesome.

Love it. All right, cool, Finish that one. I'm going to grab another one out of here. Oh, there's so many good ones. Let's do this on answer live pin on screen. This is from Melody. Instead of open rates, what about click to open or click rates for focusing on improving CTRs, which I think is a good judge of engagement. But what would be the advantage of using click rates?

I think click rates can tell you how well the content may be resonating. Like the email content may be resonating with the recipient. But I still, I still think you need to go deeper. Like, you need to see, like once they click through, are they being sticky on the page that you sent them through? If it's a blog post, are they reading the blog post? How long are they spending on it? If it is a, oh my God, I'm going to say a demo form, are they going to actually complete the demo? Are they going to fill in the form? Are they going to get a demo? Like what is happening afterwards? I think a click rate is a good sense to help you understand. Okay. Okay. So is this copy resonating? Is this, this CTA text resonating? Is this, is it like working in that moment but then take it further to see if like that email is actually successful at what you want it to do further down the line?

Yeah. Has it hit its goal? Like every email or every journey should have a objective. You shouldn't just be sending emails. That's willy nilly. So has that email met its goal? And it might not be. I think as well we have a habit of reporting like in the first few days, like lots of people come back to emails. Like lots of people search in the inbox. So it's a long term thing. Thing. So has that email met that goal that you wanted? Did you just want to inform people? And then have you seen a spike in search? Did you just want to educate someone? Did you want it. So it's a, it's a long term thing. So has that email met that goal that you wanted? Did you just want to inform people? And then have you seen a spike in search? Did you just want to educate someone? Did you want to entertain someone? And then you can go on social media, Social, listen, people are talking about this. So it's, it's way wider than just, you know, clicking. But I agree, I think click rates are great for knowing. Have we, have we enticed an action? Have we. Have we really resonated with that person that now they want to go check this out, they want to go do that thing that we want to, that we're giving to them. But yeah, don't stop tracking at the click. Keep going and make sure you've got this whole wide world of stuff you can look into. But it's very time consuming to track emails, which is why I think people just do opens and clicks because it's, it's easy, right, to just stick to that.

But you know something about the click rate, people think, oh, I just want to get my click rate higher. And that's, that's what I want. And I don't necessarily think that that's the case. Having a low click rate in certain situations is really, really valuable. Like so for example, what you want to be doing is with any click throughs, you get an email, you send what the person is clicking on. So let's say it's a newsletter and you have like, you know, one segment about HR tips for new HR leaders, right? Because you're trying to carve out in your database who's a new HR leader in my database. Now the click rate on that may not get you the percentage that you normally get, but then you want to tag everyone who does click on that thing. You want to be intentional about the content that you're putting out there. And then you could build micro segments, right, based on what they are clicking on. So it's not always like how do I get the highest click rate but how do I get organized clicks based on these different buckets? So in the future I could segment them and market to them. So just trying to get higher and higher and higher I don't think necessarily is the way that we should be, you know, looking at our metrics.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. And what if, what if the content inside of the email is enough if it's to inform you you're not going to get any clicks and that will skew your figures if you look at your average click rates. Because you do a lot of emails in B2B that don't require clicks or don't require them to take that next step. So yeah, I think maybe stop focusing so much on them just like on their own and look at like what impact does email have have as a business for us? And what can we attribute back to email? It's a big project, it's a huge, it's a big amount of work but it takes the pressure off you trying to hit that click right every time you send an email. And then when leaders look at it and you're reporting, you are sat in that room having to answer those questions and it's really hard to explain, well, why didn't we get that click? Why has it come down? But they don't have the education and the knowledge to be able to, to, to know that. So that's kind of our job is to educate the business on what these metrics are and how you're going to report email going forward.

It was a great. In the chat I just saw from Cassandra, she's like, it's hard with nurture emails though because often replies questions are much better indicated in clicks replies. I know it's harder to track but those are a great metric to like even from a, from an inbox service provider. Like if you are always sending to people on like Gmail and inbox and people are replying to your emails, Gmails are seeing that as like a positive indicator. So I think like if you can track those or tag those replies that are coming in, to be able to quantify like this is a good thing that's happening here, I think that's an awesome metric to be able to track as well.

Big fan of the replies and I do it for a newsletter at exit 5 too and I try my best to reply to everyone. I probably get to like 95% but it also like helps you start a little conversation.

Yeah. And I think at litmus when that happened, when we, when we, when I was the one who's replied to our newsletter, a lot of the times people don't know that there is someone at the other end of that reply and they'll just say whatever they want. And it's funny how you can change a person's mind about the brand by replying and by like, like changing like their opinion on them because they had such a strong opinion that you had to reply and then they're like, oh, I'm sorry, I was a person there. Yeah, I'll, I'll check you out a little bit more fairly now. So yeah, it's funny how like replies have a really strong like brand effect too.

But can we just, can we just talk about though the, the, the businesses that have the no replies like sending.

From like reply at like no reply.

And then this inbox is unmonitored, like don't talk to me. And I've seen B2B businesses do this and like I had, I don't, I'm not going to name them but they were sending me loads of emails like you are a member. How is it going? I'm not a member. I'm not a member of the bank that this business bank. I'm not. And I tried to reply and they clearly put in their email, do not reply this inboxes. And it's no reply at da da da da. So, yeah, if you want to get replies, like, definitely don't do that. Like, I just hate that. I think it's the most rudest thing ever. Like, there is a person that's written, sent, and crafted that email. Like, come on, you can set up a reply to an inbox that's getting monitored. But anyway, that's a whole other session.

All right, Next year, that's what we're going to do for a session. All right. This is a good one. And selfishly, I want to know how you guys feel about this. Does length matter if the content is good? I've been dinged lately for longer emails that have great content. We've been hitting that too. We use HubSpot to send our emails and sometimes we get that little, like, this is too big. It's going to get clipped. But it doesn't actually get clipped. So what do you guys think on the length here?

Well, I think it depends on who you're sending it to, Right? So you have to think about if you are sending something like prospects or somebody that's kind of new to working with you, whatever. You have to be really tight with a number of words, like under 75 words, because nobody cares. They. They barely opened up the email. They barely read the headline. Right. They don't care. Right. And then if it's somebody that you have been communicating with a lot and been a customer for a while, you could be more verbose. But one of the things that B2B marketers make the mistake of, they become visually boring. Right? You open up the email and there'll be a block of text with like, you know, five or six lines. It's like when you get a text from a friend and it's like a big, long text, you're like, I'm not reading that. That looks like a disaster. I'll read that when I get home. It's drama. I don't want to deal with it. But when you get an email with a big block of text, anything over four lines, you shouldn't have anything over four lines in any email that you send. You got to break it up, up. If it's over four lines, you look at like, oh, this is terrible. You don't care, and you immediately discount it. So you can be. You can have More words. Just think about your structure and think about how it feels when you open it up.

I think about the type of email that it is as well. I think I, I won't call a brand out on here, but I did post on LinkedIn, but they sent a really good re engagement email. Like I hadn't been engaging with their emails for a very long time. They sent me a re engagement email but it was so long and I was like, I was like split. I was like, I love the story and the visuals that they're telling in here, but like this is a re engagement email. Your main goal of this email is to get me to understand why I received it, what I should be doing next and what is the consequences if I don't take action. And like I had to scroll like twice to get to that point in that email. So I was like, for things like that, I love the visual storytelling they have have because it's so on brand for them. But at the end of it I was like, okay, so what am I supposed to do here? Like to, to Jay's point, like it was way more than four lines and I was like, where are we going with this now? And I knew what I had to do because I've seen these emails before. I work in emails, so it makes sense. But again, there's a time and a place for certain things in email, especially when it comes to length.

100%. It's the, it's the death by white space that I don't like with B2B emails. It's just like, oh my God, it's, it's just floating text everywhere and it's just like text, text, text. And Jay's right. Like if you, you're building this email on your desktop so you might write two lines as soon as that goes onto mobile, it's like five lines and it looks just like you're not going to read it. So I think you're absolutely right. Like, length, length does matter. Guys. In email, make sure you make sure that you test it and test what works, what doesn't work because there's emails that I know I just won't read. But like, visually you don't have like death by white space. Just be really conscious of like, yeah, this looks really, really blocky. Like, just avoid that. Split it up with bullet points. Split it up with like layering in your email using different colors, having blocks. It's just, yeah, like length will definitely, it's definitely a question I get asked a lot. But you can send really long Emails, like, I've been proven my point because I used to be on the side of, like, don't make them really, really long. I do read HubSpot's newsletter, which is like, really, really long. But I won' email. So it totally depends on your audience. It totally depends on what you're saying, and it totally depends on how you break it up. But just remember to test it on mobile because, like, and no one wants to hear your memoir or like, your life story on email. Just make it email ready, which is like, bite size, what they need to know, get to the point. Especially after they've opened. If you don't get to the point and they're expecting to see something, they're not gonna. They're not gonna sit and read it to find the point. Like, we all engage with email quite.

Differently now from a technical perspective, I think if you know that the majority of your audience are, like using gmail, for example, 102 kilobytes is what the maximum length of your email needs. Like the. Not the length, the file size of your email. After that, your email will get clipped. So that doesn't necessarily mean, like, the length of your code could be absolutely beautiful and perfect compressed down to under 102 kilobytes, which means it won't get clipped. It gets. When it. The concern when it gets clipped is if you're like unsubscribe links and things like that are outside of the clipping area, you could get landed in hot water because you doesn't look like you've got an unsubscribe link there. So just be cognizant from a technical perspective of like, making sure that it's under 102 kilobytes as well.

Yeah.

All right, I think we got time for like, one more. Let me just find a good one in here.

I spicy one.

Yeah, I want a spicy one. Oh, okay.

Okay.

I like this one because I have strong opinions. What are your opinion on? Not quite clickbait titles, but really they're clickbait titles. Like open for tacos. First name where my tacos. I am scarred of this because when I was at one of my. The staff, not my SaaS company, but when I was working at a SaaS company, we sent one that said, like, credit card failed. Your credit card failed. Not my idea. And oh, my God, we got roast, like, roasted. Like, you think today's gonna be a roast that was like the worst ever and wasn't my idea. And it was about like, you know, we were a company that helped with D2C companies if someone had their credit card failed when they resubscribed. So I have scars around this topic.

You could get landed in so much hot water with like anti spam regulations. Because if your subject line is misleading, that's. You get reported, you get fined. Bad, bad name for your brand. So, like, there's a scale, I think something fun like this. I get it. Credit card failure. Oh my God. That's gonna just. I know I'm getting heart palpitation just thinking about an email like that in my inbox. And also like the re and forwards that you get in. In. In emails too.

I hate that.

That's terrible. That's like it.

That's.

You're. Again, you're misleading your audience. That's not legal. Do not do that. Like, you. This is not a reply or a forward. This is just you trying to gain the inbox. You're gonna get like, either unsubscribe, which is fine, marked as spam, and then you're relegated from the inbox forever.

Trends like that are dangerous. Like, I know we're in beat. We're talking about B2B, but B2C, do it with like your order confirmations and you haven't ordered anything. Like, it's just, it's not worth the risk. I think you can have a joke, but I agree, there's a scale, there's a line. Just don't cross the line. Like, just be careful. If you start talking about tacos and you can do like a taco metaphor in your pre header and then you know there's a giant taco dance thing in the email because you've just. They've just signed up for something about tacos. Like, yeah, go for it. But like, don't say like, open this for a free something. And then you have to, like, you don't get anything free. It's just. And also, that's the thing that you're doing it again to try and get the open, but you're actually doing, just pissing people off. So just be careful.

My view is that the only difference between clickbait and a great hook is that a great hook gets delivered on in the email, right? If you write a great hook and you don't deliver on it, that's what makes it clickbait, right? And so the word clickbait, I think is just. It's just you're doing something completely wrong. And the fake reply and the fake forward, you are a loser. If you do that. You should quit your job. Get another industry. You're actually. I want to go to the cold email session because somebody recommends that I'm going to go in the chat and say you're a loser. Because that's.

Agreed.

Yes, agreed. I hate that. I hate it. All right, I think that's good. All right. Anything you want to close with on email? This was like such a great conversation. I wish we could go on for even longer. Someone said, how do you really feel, Jay? I love it. I love the sign and cowl of email. Big L. If you could wrap up, tell. Have something. Have something about email stick in everyone's head today. What would it. What would it be for you guys?

Just don't be. Don't be a silly billy. You know, don't, don't.

I love that phrase. My mum uses that silly billy.

Deliverability. Yes. There's some tech about it, but it's common sense. Content selling is all. Just don't be a silly billy with it. Like, again, think about your audience. Always put them fast. Educate the business. If you are one of those B2B marketers that has a real challenge with trying to like show the value of email, how to get away from just tracking opens and clicks. Definitely powered by knowledge. So learn as much as you can and start to pull together the impact of email and quantify, you know, the cost of action. If we keep doing this and batching and blasting, this is what it's costing the business. This is where we're going to be. But just don't be a silly billy. Like that's. That's my advice. Hopefully that helps. I love it.

I'm going to write that on my wall.

I hope I'm not a T shirt idea. Can we get that on the thing?

They already got the chat. They want it. Don't be a silly billy. Oh, back be the goat. I like that. All right, Jana, hit us with your. Your piece of advice.

I think from. From a B2B perspective, really think about email as a relationship building channel. Don't think of it as like the conversion centric channel. It is where you build relationships with your audience in partnership with other channels your brand or your business is on. Like it doesn't work in a silo. So connect the dots with the email. Surround your audience through. Through primarily email, but then everywhere else where you show up and build a relationship with your audience, make them understand who you are and so that they can make an informed decision as to whether they want to buy from you or not and be okay if they don't want to buy from you yet, because further down the line, they may change your mind to continue building that relationship with them.

I guess my thing is, you know, a lot of times in B2B, you're like, oh, I'm in a boring industry. I'm in a regulated industry. I have to be conservative. I can't do this, that, or whatever. And that's a recipe for failure. Now, I mean, we have to treat each other like humans. We have to talk to each other like humans. You have to try to do things that stand out a little bit. You have to push the agenda within your own organization and try to fight for those tests, because we have this tidal wave of AI garbage, this generic tidal wave of garbage. And if you don't try to stand out a little bit more than you have in the past and you think that, oh, I'm in this boring industry, I can't do that, then you're never going to succeed in the email channel. So now is the time. You have to be a little bit more human, stand out a little bit more and try. You just have to try.

Yeah, I think this is all great advice. I think don't be a silly Billy is going to be stuck in my head for the rest of the day, if not a lifetime. It's fantastic. Jay, I thought yours was going to be like, don't be a loser.

Well, obviously, don't be a loser. That goes without saying. No losers here, though. Absolutely not.

No, definitely not. All right, awesome. So I have two. I have exciting things. I got prizes, all right? Got prizes to give out to people in the audience. But first, I would love if you guys could I. Beth, I saw you. You do this. Throw your LinkedIn profiles in the chat so that. That all of the silly billies in here can follow you guys. Just kidding. No silly billies or losers here so that we can all stay connected. Because this was just like such an awesome session dream way to start off the day. Super excited about that. And all right, I'm going to get to our prize winners. All right, awesome. So, first winner, a free year of nec. And we will follow up via email after the session. Will probably be later today just because I'm a little busy, but we will follow up with how to redeem everything. So for a year of nac, we have Kate Pletneva. Sorry, I'm going to butcher some names today. She's the marketing operations lead at Semrush. Semrush. So congratulations, Kate. That is very exciting. And then for the meta Ray Bans, we have Marissa Timko, who is the content marketing manager at CallRail. So this is very exciting. Thank you guys for joining us. Let's give another virtual round of applause to our amazing panelists today about email in 2025. Go follow them on LinkedIn. Right now, I'm going to kick off a little break. So we're going to have just a little fun message from our partners. And then we're going to also have that first QR scan to get some coffee for the first 50. So hang tight. We're going to do that. And then we will be back here at, at 12:30 Eastern Time for our next session on Weed Generation. So thank you guys.