What’s Actually Working in B2B Email Right Now

Hey, it's Dave.

I want to give a quick shout out to Knack for sponsoring today's episode. Knack is a purpose-built email and landing page platform, and they're also one of our longest running sponsors. When I create our newsletter each week, I spend a bunch of time, more recently, with Claude, my friend Claude, as my editor. But once I'm done editing the newsletter, it's not as simple as just getting my copy from a Google Doc and hitting send. If you're a B2B marketer, you know that.

So what happens?

Someone has to take that output and turn it into an actual email that renders in Outlook follows brand guidelines and ships. You know this story. The last mile still feels slow and manual. Knack has made this a lot shorter. They just launched an MCP server that connects your AI assistant directly to their platform. So now you can describe the email you need in Claude or ChatGPT and draft it like normal, but it automatically starts building in Knack for you. You get an email that comes out following your brand rules automatically. No manual cleanup, no broken HTML, and even better quality than anything your team built by hand. The marketing ops team at OpenAI is actually running this workflow right now. They intake internal campaign requests from Slack, an AI agent structures it into a ticket, Knack MCP generates the email, and a marketer refines and ships. This is the future of marketing. You should go check it out at knack.com. That's K-N-A-K dot com.

Hey, it's Dave.

I want to give a quick shout out to Vector for sponsoring today's episode. Vector is a contact-level ads platform. You probably have anonymous buyers lurking in your funnel, people you can't identify or follow up with, people you can't target with any real precision. So you end up throwing ads at job titles and hoping the right person sees them. Vector fixes that. Instead of targeting job titles and crossing your fingers, Vector lets you build audiences from actual people, the ones on your site that are clicking your ads and checking out your competitors. They're launching an MCP server that lets you connect AI like Claude or ChatGPT directly to their platform. It connects to your LinkedIn ads and site visitor data. So instead of clicking through dashboards, you just ask your AI a question and get an answer. Hey, which ad creatives are fatiguing? Which companies are engaging but not converting? What's actually driving pipeline right now? It turns your data into something you can use in the moment.

Go and check them out.

It's vector.co. That's V-E-C-T-O-R.co. Vector.

You're listening to the Dave Gerhardt Show. Hello everybody.

Just trying to get situated over here. I got so many apps every time. God. Okay. All right. Hey everybody. I'm pumped about this turnout. We have over 1,200 people register for this session on email. Email is not dead. So we have an amazing panel. We got 4 people backstage. We did a prep call on Tuesday. Everybody showed an example of an email thing that they did at their company, and we're gonna get into that today because it's really interesting. I actually just wrote about this earlier today on LinkedIn. You know, marketing is changing right before our eyes, and so it's like, what still works? What matters? And we wanted to dive into email for this Exit Five Live. We do these twice a month. We try to go deep on a topic that you care about. Email's always a popular one, and I'm excited to have our group of guests here. Today. But before we get in, just put me— I'm really curious, like your time is super valuable to me. It means a lot that you're spending an hour with us here on a Friday. So I just want you to put in the chat, like, who are you? Where are you writing in from? And then why are you taking the time out of your day to either be here for this live or watch in the future? I'm just curious. What do you want to learn about emails? It just— you're curious.

You—

these are really fun. We hang out. Email never dies. That's right, Andy. Put me in. Where are you writing in from? And why did you take the day out? Dan's the chief newsletter officer. He is. You want a CEO who can also grind on the newsletter. We love that. He keeps me honest. If I write something that's mildly inappropriate, he'll take it out of the newsletter. He doesn't edit a lot of my jokes, so it's good. Just glad to see a webinar without AI title and hype. Well, Beth, when we do the thumbnail for the replay of this, it's going to be like, you know, so this for now, it's not hype. So, okay. Awesome. Andrew's in Atlanta. Email's a big part of my job and always looking for ways to optimize. Catherine, lifecycle marketer and B2B and healthcare. Email still money, dollar for dollar, best return. What's new and working? Julie's in Napa. Emails are hit and miss, wondering how to improve. Chelsea tuning in from Philly. Shout out to Philly, home of the golf tournament that I'm currently watching. Not right now. My team does a lot of email marketing, so looking for new ideas.

Awesome.

Connor's in Farmington. This is great. Really good. People love email. I love email too. I got my first start in email working at Constant Contact back in the day, so I did my housekeeping. No more nonsense. So One of the best parts about doing these is the chat. So I want you to put your questions, put your questions in the Q&A, but as we're going through, you're all marketers here too. Add your comments, opinions, ask questions in the chat. I've asked all of our panelists to hang out, so after they present, they're gonna be in the chat, so they'll have time to go through any of the questions that you might have during the session. And then at the end, we should have 20 minutes at the end where we wanna bring up our crew and me and the crew, we will take all of your questions. We'll just kind of go around the horn and see who has email advice for you. But first, before we get into today's live session, I wanna give a quick shout out to NAC. NAC is one of our longest running sponsors at ExitFive. 3 years running. Isn't that amazing? I got a DM from their CMO 3 years ago and they've been running ads with us ever since. Have you ever had a really good marketing idea, but then it takes forever? You know that scene in The Sandlot? Forever. It's usually not because your idea is bad, but because the process in the middle is slow. Briefs, reviews, tiny fixes that turn into weeks. And by the time the campaign is finally ready to go out, it barely even looks like what you originally wanted to ship in there. NAC fixes that campaign creation gap. It's a purpose-built email and landing page platform that lets you build on-brand campaigns without code, collaborate and improve everything in one place, and use built-in AI to get a first draft out there faster. They also just launched an MCP server that connects your Claude or ChatGPT directly to their platform. This is feeling like the future of marketing for sure. More marketers working out of Claude. You can describe the email you need in your AI and automatically it will build the email in Knack with your brand rules intact. No broken HTML, no manual cleanup, no back and forth with a developer. The marketing ops team at OpenAI is actually running this workflow right now. Their creative brief comes in through Slack. They use AI to structure it, and then the Knack MCP server builds the email that a marketer refines and ships.

Check it out.

This is the future of marketing. I believe it. Go to knack.com. That's K-N-A-K dot com and check it out and we'll put the link in the chat. Right now. Okay. Without further ado, speaking of email, hot off the presses, my first guy, I wish I knew his background, riff it off the top of my head, but let's bring Ben up real quick. I'm going to let each panelist give a quick intro and then everybody has something that they're going to share their screen and show to you. So Ben, why don't you pop in here, grab the mic. Good to see you, sir. So quick background. Who are you? What do you do for work?

Where are you?

Where are you living right now? And then what are you going to show us?

Yeah, sure. I'll try to tick off all of those. So I'm Ben. I work for a company called QWO. They do front office shared business phone solutions. They've got an AI offering there as well. I'm the customer lifecycle marketer or manager for them. And I'm currently operating out of Haarlem, the Netherlands. So if I'm coming through a wee bit spotty, it's because I'm on a mobile hotspot before we get our fiber set up. So bear with me. You're good.

Netherlands, one of the best trips I've ever been on. Highlight of my life is going out there. I'd love to make it back, especially this time of year. Beautiful. All right. You got the mic. So what are you going to show us? I think you were the guy that had this kind of interesting take on an end-of-year campaign. Yeah, I don't want to say the word because remember we can't get in trouble.

Yeah, it's pretty inspired. So I'm going to run through our Year in Review campaign that we did last year. It was one that we've run in the past, but we really wanted to iterate on it in a more creative-heavy way. We're always sort of striving to make things more personalized, and I think this sort of hits personalized on the head. So I'm pretty excited to run through with you guys.

I did get an email last night from— I did get my Spotify. It's a 20-year anniversary of Spotify and my wife and I were going through ours. Did you get that last night?

Yeah, I did. I did. It was confronting.

It was the very first song that I ever played on Spotify. This has nothing to do with him. It was like that LMFAO party rockers in the— why, why was I playing that? Why was it the first song I ever played?

It's a banger, Dave. That's why. All right, you got it. All right, happy days. Um, I'll just quickly share my screen. So as mentioned, going through 2025 Year in Review campaign, we went into partnership with an agency called Multiplied, Multiplied Media. They operate out of South Africa where our contact there, Lloyd, was awesome. Highly recommend reaching out to him if you've got any personalized video or GIF stuff you want to be doing. But this was the output that we ended up with, which I think was pretty clean. So yeah, we basically went from data to a fully personalized 4-bucket dynamic GIF that we had per user. I'll let that finish up just because it's so nice looking. Look at that in motion. And then yeah, so we also doubled up on that with some pretty crisp looking graphs. These are all real graphs. It's not just placeholder images that you quite often see in emails. It's like, ah, this is what your activity was. No, this is actually what your activity was looking like. So we had calls, we had Sonar usage, which is our AI receptionist offering. Does a lot more than that. Just check it out. And also call minutes, messages sent. And then one of the cool ones we did was what's your busiest call time over the year? So you can see some pretty cool visualization there. The process for sort of getting this kicked off from a GIF perspective is we provided Multiply with basically a nice tailored CSV. To create that nice tailored CSV. We pulled together 110 lines of SQL, but the idea was that we wanted 4 buckets: Dial Dynamo, Message Maestro, AI Innovator, and Platform Innovator. And then within that, we also wanted to shout out whether you were top of your industry, whether you had some massive year-on-year growth that we wanted to shout out. And we also wanted to shout out how long you'd been with QWO, formerly OpenPhone, because we really wanted to shout out our loyalty numbers there. So this is sort of how it operates as a schema. So we had the initial Snowflake query that went to Multiplied. They provided us with URLs, which we then put onto the person object. We had Census, which is mixed in with—

pipeline.

And then that kicked off an event sync. So that went into a CustomerIO campaign, which then had 5 different APIs, which we hit off on a platform called— Quickchart. So each of those had Chart.js, which would return us a URL, which showed the chart for that individual user. And then on our backend, we also generated unique shareable landing pages that our users, our customers could share across X and LinkedIn.

This is a perfect example of like someone on the surface is like, yeah, cool email marketing team. And you're like, dude, do you know how much work this was in the backend?

Yeah.

Yeah.

100%. It was one of those things where. I did like a wee video for Multiplied's referral and we sort of went through and it's like for a lot of people, uh, year in review email takes multiple months, like 4 months and it takes a whole team of people to get going.

Wait, sorry, I think I missed this in the beginning. Is Multiplied the platform they used to do this on?

No, so Multiplied's an agency. They work out of South Africa.

Multiplied, they actually built this. You gave them all this and they built the design of this. Got it.

They built the GIF. So that hero image at the top. So it's like, hey Ben, you're 2025 year in review. Here's what you got up to. You were a message maestro. You were the top 2% in the home services industry, that sort of jazz. But yeah, it takes a bit, but it can be done with just one or two people in your team. I'm proof. So well worth giving it a crack, but this was the workflow. So you can see we had those API calls at the top that generated those GIFs. And then that last one generated the shareable link. And of course we had some verification steps in there to make sure we're not sending anything out too rogue. But yeah, it all went well. Got some fantastic responses. Lots of people calling us OpenPhone because we had just recently rebranded. But yeah, it was really, really well received. People were able to share what they wanted to share out of it. Some people opted to share their stat page, as you can see there. Some people opted just to share the stats directly. But the idea with the questionnaire—

Question from Christina says, Just if you could frame this, so are these emails going out to current customers in hopes of an upsell, or was this kind of just like a surprise and delight, like get people to share your stuff campaign?

Yeah, this one's 100% surprise and delight. We do a lot of emails at QWO trying to like visualize data for people. So we do a monthly analytics email that we send out, which is along the same vein as well. But we wanted to sum up the year in a nice, fun way and in a way that sort of added legitimacy for people that wanted to share it online. A lot of people's businesses are like pretty black box. So it's quite nice for people to share online. Hey, actually we had, you know, 50,000 call minutes come through. We had 8,000 calls this year. This is a massive improvement over last year. These sorts of stats add sort of credibility to small businesses. So we wanted to provide that.

And so all these, all the, like the link that someone shared, did that actually drive traffic? Like, did that give you a personal page? And so was there like a, some type of viral loop from this? Like I get the email, I'm going to go brag about my stats and then share it. Like I see everyone's just kind of sharing this link here.

Yeah, absolutely. I think it was less of like an SEO and sort of trying to get people on site push and more of like a social awareness thing because all of these all tagged in Quo as well. So we got a lot of just sort of cross-pollination there, which was quite nice. I don't have the stats on how many people landed on the web pages, but we got a really decent click-through for something that's quite personal. Like a lot of people don't want to share their stats. Like it can be a bit close to the chest in terms of business. Other people obviously do for the aforementioned reasons, but we got pretty good engagement just off that as well.

And who is the person that you were sending this to, like in the business, who would be receiving this?

So we did this to owners and admins. So you get different roles within QWO. You can get invited on as invited users and you can have different permission sets within this, but we wanted it to represent the people that were really sort of seeing the analytics within the platform. That were responsible for setting up different feature sets, those sorts of things. So owners and admins is what we targeted.

Do you have more slides or should I keep interrupting you? I have some questions.

Interrupt me, man. Interrupt me.

So I just have a couple of questions. Like, so number one, I think obviously a bunch of us like, okay, this is cool. Like, how do you talk about the success of this to the company? And so like, you know, why this was a good play for marketing to run?

Yeah, I don't think it's a hard sell with email. And I think that's one of the benefits of email is that it's very low cost. Obviously we had to pay the agency, but to be fair, like it was a fairly reasonable rate and pretty well set up. So they do ongoing campaigns. They do a whole bunch of different stuff. So it's well worth the money on that front. But yeah, like in terms of getting buy-in, I don't think there was anyone in the company that was like, why are we doing this? It's just on the face of it, a good idea, but gets buy-in, gets credibility, is a cool thing that people can share. More eyes on Quo. Okay.

Got it. My two notes back to this is number one, I think this just shows like for marketers out there, how important, like if you have a company that's enabling you to get product data, like the product data can often be the best like ammo for marketing. And so it's clearly you were given the freedom to like, let's use this, let's use this for ammo. And I, I love that in the absence of news, I think great marketing teams can kind of manufacture a reason to go and talk about their product and talk about the company. And in this case you said, hey, everybody's been using our product, let's use the product data. So I think that's a great example of that. Like I like the idea of like, look internally, like, what do we have? What can I just use inside of the four walls of the company? I don't need, you know, Gartner to write about me or something. We can go create our own little micro news cycle. And I thought you did a cool job of that. This should have been like a contest exit. We should have had a prize. I'm like rating all these in my head.

It's okay.

And then the other thing, and Hannah kind of said this in the chat, like we were joking about marketing and that, you know, this is why everyone wants everything yesterday. Marketing doesn't take any work, just a wave of magic wand, about 5 minutes per project. Obviously that's a joke, but what made me think of is like, we're now in the era of like, because AI has commoditized everything, this is almost like the 10x content version of email, right? It's like if you're sending out kind of like shitty transactional emails all day, no one's going to stop. But you actually put the time and put the effort into make something that was worth opening and worth reading and worth sharing. And the result is like, you get a lot of shares and you get lots of people talking about you. And so I thought this was a good example of like a 10x type of email play as opposed to like, let's just, you know, send an email out, blast an email out to our base, right?

Yeah, 100%. And I think like you can leverage AI, like the things I'm thinking about for next year, right, is using AI to further personalize what we provide to our agency. So like we have recently provided 4 buckets, but you could provide 60 buckets. You could provide personalized insight on what the themes of their calls were. You could do a whole bunch of different stuff. So yeah, with AI, the world's your oyster.

Cool.

All right, Ben, we're going to send Ben back to the background and he'll be in the chat. There's a couple of questions in here. Like you should pop in and answer the questions from Hannah and a few others in the chat after this. And then we'll pull up Jaina. And I think she's gonna talk about newsletters, a topic near and dear to our heart. We love newsletters.

Hi Dave.

Hi.

I thought email was dead. Who does it? Why bother with a newsletter? What are you gonna show us?

I'm gonna show you that a newsletter, especially in B2B audiences, is probably the most slept on channel to build trust with your audience. And I think we forget about building trust in B2B 'cause we're just kind of like, we just need a lot of customers, we need to send emails. But trust is so hard to build up and I think a newsletter is one of the best ways for someone to do that.

All right, show us.

Okay, so I head up the brand and content marketing team over at Knack, and Dave's already talked about who Knack is. So hopefully you're around at the beginning of the session to know what Knack is. And I've done just about every single part of the email workflow in the last 20-ish years, like designing, developing, copywriting, everything. And newsletters are very near and dear to my heart as part of this. Like I said before, if your B2B brand doesn't have a real newsletter, and when I say real newsletter, I'm talking about not like a digest or a campaign blast. But like a real newsletter, a newsletter that you're putting out full interesting, unique content to your audience, you're leaving like one of the best trust channels on the table. So I'm gonna share you what kind of I mean here. In a previous company, I helped build a weekly newsletter. So the same day, the same time every week, like clockwork. Each issue was written by a different person on our marketing team. So we had the demand gen lead writing one issue, the content writer writing another issue, and our brand designer writing another issue. You get the idea. Like multiple people involved in this one weekly newsletter. And I think there are really 3 big reasons it worked and one operating model. And I think that operating model is what we often forget about when it comes to running a newsletter that all made all of this possible. So I think the first thing was cadence. And this is the one that nobody really gives credit to when it comes to sending a newsletter, just showing up in the inbox at the same day, the same time. Every single week, we kind of treated it like an old school TV show where you have to tune in at a certain time. I'm not talking about Tuesdays, 11:00 AM Eastern time, but we had carved out exactly like which time is gonna work for our audience. So even on the weeks that people didn't open it, that name in the inbox still showed up. And it's a touchpoint. Marketing sort of teaches us that you need like a stack of touchpoints to land a customer. So my argument is even if you can't actually track and count that someone has seen your newsletter and your brand in their inbox, I tend to think that that is a touchpoint that counts. So that was like the one thing. The cadence is I think the most important part about running a newsletter for your organization.

And also a lot of times we default to only doing things that have like selfish benefit to us. Like I'm gonna, I have an offer I'm gonna email, I have a campaign, I have a promo, I have a follow-up. And it's like, I'd like a newsletter because it kind of gives you a reason to stay top of mind, but it's not based on a transaction. It's not sign up for this webinar, you know, click on this thing, do this thing. It's like, hey, I wanna give you something useful to read and I'm gonna show up in your inbox, you know, for a good reason every week type of thing.

Exactly. You're not just shouting at your audience because you want something from them. You wanna give them something for free that is gonna help make their lives easier, their jobs easier, what they do on a day-to-day basis easier. So yeah, absolutely. I think, and that kind of segues really nicely into the second point that I wanna talk about, and that's the trust part of it. So every single week we packed the newsletter with the most useful content we could find. So it was a combination of our thoughts as individuals, as marketers, as people at this brand. And when I say useful content and thoughtful, unique perspectives, I really mean that. I don't mean just like throwing a link in there saying, hey, this is really interesting. It is the writer actually saying, hey, this is really interesting because X, Y, and Z, and this is why it matters to you. So that kind of thought process and the curation process behind what we were putting in the newsletter was what really sold the value of it. Readers of newsletters want more. They want more than just like something to read. They wanna know why it's fun, why they need to spend 5 minutes of their day really reading this. And what we noticed as well is because we were sharing, so we weren't only sharing our own content from like our blog and our website and our socials, we were sharing content from the wider email marketing community. So we were finding what other people were writing about, what other unique thoughts and perspectives other people were thinking about and brought it into this newsletter too. So again, it became less of a vehicle of us promoting ourselves and more of a vehicle of, hey, this is what we think. And we think the community is so amazing, so awesome and so thoughtful and so clever. We wanna raise the kind of like value in the community as well. So, and because we started doing that, we noticed some really cool things happening. So people started replying back to us and I don't know, I've worked in email for a really long time and yes, you get the really negative reply of like, this email sucks. I'm unsubscribing, unsubscribing, blah, blah, blah.

There's always one guy, all caps to me. How did I get on your list? And my favorite thing is to go show him. Well, actually, certain converted on this landing page 6 weeks ago.

Exactly. That's the same thing that I do. I like almost want to screenshot their like mockup, a little like, this is where you came in. This is when you came in. It's so frustrating.

Sorry, I distract. That was unnecessary. I'm getting—

No, no, it's totally necessary. I feel like we need to vent some of these things out every now and then.

But like we started getting really cool replies saying like, this content's so amazing.

Like this is the only news that I want to read every Thursday. I take time out of my day for this. So that is immeasurable stuff, but it really, really matters when you're trying to build trust.

Yeah.

And then the last thing kind of ties into that, and I want every single email person on this webinar to write it down, is that we stopped looking at open rates and click-through rates as a scoreboard, as a way of like measuring the success of this newsletter. We measured the replies and we measured the DMs. We measured the people in our community talking about the newsletter. And I understand that's really hard to put on a dashboard, but that's the metric that like maps back to trust. And the trust is why we were putting this newsletter out. So I think you always have to track back your metrics to like the why of your newsletter, the why you're putting your emails out there. But I will say if you want and need a number, count your reply rates. If you're even just getting like one or two replies and you have a list of a few hundred people, I feel like that's still a really good thing because we are are so ingrained in not replying to newsletters that come to from brands. So I think that's a really good number to track. And then quickly on the operating model, 'cause I always, like, people always ask like, how the hell do you publish 52 weeks a year without burning out? And there are 4 things that really helped us here. One, a single owner, like a quarterback, essentially that one person who calendars all the writers, picks all of the themes, ties it back to our existing campaigns and product launches, basically keeps the train running. 2, rotating bylines from the team. So obviously it's not just on that one person to write every single issue. That's always really hard. 3, a fixed template. We didn't change any of the design. We just changed the content. The variable was the content here. And the 4th one is we work like 2 to 3 weeks ahead of time, always. Like the week of panic is real and you always have a million different things trying to juggle as an email marketer. So I think that working ahead is always going to be really helpful. And the quarterback, the one who's owning all of this is the one who really feels all of that. So I would say like Pick a day, pick a time, pick a quarterback, rotate your writers. And I think newsletters are just a brilliant tactic for B2B marketers.

Nice. Good work, Chana. A couple notes I had. It is funny because I still see so many companies, they send the brand emails from no-reply@. And so like the other day I was dealing with something and I just wanted to reply to get a service question. It's no-reply@. And so your point about the replies, we run this play with our newsletter and I get dozens of replies every week and I, we don't really count them, but I feel it directionally and we talk about it. And I also feel like the more I respond, like it earns you points for the future. People know that it is really being sent by a human. There's someone there. And I think like, I also get a ton of like qualitative feedback for the content and the newsletter. Oftentimes I'm like, hey, did this topic land with you? And some newsletters we send out and I get a couple responses. And then like the other Tuesday I wrote a newsletter about like overcomplicating marketing, and I had 100 responses. And that's just a signal to me. And then we share that back with the team. It's like, okay, let's do more on this topic. Like, there's clearly something here. And so I think like, that's a part of reading the room beyond the metrics. The other thing that you mentioned is like, I love counterintuitive marketing and sales advice. And I'll say sales in here because ultimately we, you know, you're trying to sell someone something at the end of the day. But oh my God, how dare a brand feature other people that are not affiliated with their brand or promoting other voices and it's like, this is so counter. We, we're afraid to do this. What if I drive traffic to someone else's thing? It's like, that's, well, dude, that's how you build trust. Like, if you're like, oh, I don't care, I'm going to showcase 5 people in my newsletter and like, yeah, go visit them. Like you then gain trust as the brand. So I thought that was a really important piece of this here. And then I just was going to ask you if you have a way of measuring replies, is there a way to do this in your product? Are you like manually counting them? I know a lot of times if we look at reply rate, it's not always Exact.

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It's really manual. And I think what we had before was we had Help Scout and we had all our replies go to hello@litmus.com. And that was like where all of our replies went. So it was very easy and it was all tagged. So it was very easy for us to figure out like who has replied, which issues have got replies. So we had Help Scout, that was really easy for us to do it there. But honestly, I think it is just a bit of a manual process. I haven't found like a single ESP or map or anything that actually counts that reply rate yet. And I think the numbers are going to be low. It shouldn't be too hard to do it manually, but it was like on the, like the using links from everyone else, including those in your newsletter. That's another really good way of making your brand look amazing in the industry because it knows who to elevate to, and it knows the kind of content that is going to be valuable as well. So I think there's so much value in sharing other people's content.

Okay. All right. Good work. There's some questions for you. I would take the time to do them now, but I think it's better for you to pop in, in the chat and answer them. And I think the other thing on this is just like the consistency of it, having to have a day, like this is going to go out every week. Like, I think we need those rhythms to create this kind of marketing, like, you know, air cover machine that's always happening. So I like that.

Good job.

All right, Tyler, what's up? Good to see you. What are you going to show us today?

All right, I'm going to show you how to be more like Ryan Reynolds.

I'm into that. Let me get some of that. I'm into that. All right.

So a little bit of background. I run Hypermedia Marketing. We work with B2B brands, both service providers and software as a service companies with really long sales cycles. And so one of the challenges that we've always experienced with email marketing is how do you keep, if your sales cycle is 12 months long or 18 months long, how do you keep your subscribers engaged with you over time so that when they do enter the buying, that buying market, that you are the brand that they think of? And so, love it because I love Ryan and I love his marketing. I developed this framework of how to basically do what he does in marketing and convert.

What's your company and industry? Hannah in the chat says, is Tyler in healthcare? Speaking my language with these sales cycles.

Yeah. So Hypermedia Marketing is my company.

Okay.

Can you explain why you— people might know who Ryan Reynolds is, but might not know what he's known for in marketing. Just what's the elevator pitch on that?

All right. So the elevator pitch, or at least what I'm going to show you that I've always admired about Ryan is Ryan is really has a unique skill of seeing something that is trending online and taking that trend and fitting it within whatever he's trying to market and make it super relevant for the audience. And so he is basically, I've always heard it be called like newsjacking, but he's basically taking that trend, fitting it within his business to ethically steal attention from whatever the trend is. And point—

I love the newsjacking idea. Nice. Good. Okay.

And we've made a really simple process to make this really easy to do. So I'll share my screen and we can jump in. Here's the deal. So what is newsjacking and what have I seen Ryan do? So something starts trending on the news, on social media, and usually within hours, Ryan has published a reactive ad that plays directly off of that trend. And so what happens? Is there's massive engagement because it felt current. It's unexpected. It's relevant. And the principle that I've seen and how it applies to long sales cycles is relevance plus speed typically equals more attention. Right. And so what makes it work is it's the timeliness, it's the relevance, and it's the speed. So many brands oftentimes will miss this window. Because trends don't stay trends very long, right? Especially with TikTok, things are moving very, very fast. But then there's also like the process for this is often manual. Like you need to see the trend, you need to understand how the trend can fit within your business. And then you have to figure out the angle and the review process to get that actually published. And then usually by the time you send the thing, The conversation's gone. It still might be relevant, but you've missed the window of time that makes it relevant and will drive action. And so we built this system that collapses that timeline into a very, very short window of time. So the 5-step system at a high level is this. We use an alert monitoring tool. You can use Google Alerts because it's free. There's a bunch of other tools that you can use. Like we've used AlertMouse by Rand Fishkin before, and that one works awesome as well. But the idea is you need a way to monitor these trends very quickly, and then you need AI. We're using AI to help us digest these trends very, very quickly, right? From there, the AI is scanning for primary and secondary topic angles for email marketing, right? And then AI will also build the briefs. And then it delivers us the briefs and we basically choose, okay, we like this angle. We know that this is going to be highly relevant for our audience. It hits the pain points that we want to hit, and then we approve it. And then the AI system will write it, design it, and basically get everything ready to send in under an hour. So the first way that we do this, right, going a little bit into Google Alerts, if you've never used it before. For every client, we research and we configure specific keywords specific to their niche, specific to their audience, specific to who they are trying to talk to. So sometimes that's job titles, things like that. Keywords you can see, we'll cover examples, industry topics, regulatory updates. We love regulatory updates and then trends, right? And it delivers either a daily or a weekly digest of everything major that's happening in there. And so we're just getting this, right? We don't have to do much of the research.

Yep. Okay.

I got you. So step 1, get the alerts set up. Number 2 is how are we going to use AI to monitor the inbox?

Yep, exactly. So we have a specific folder that all of these emails flow into. We have a system that's directly connected to that. And so as the new email comes in, AI is scanning that digest. And so we don't really have to manually review anything. It's clicking through to actually read, quote unquote, what are you at?

What's doing that? What are you using to do that?

So we're using Claude for that. And then we have a routine or a scheduled task that pulls in and it's just constantly scanning that inbox for me.

Cool.

Good idea.

From there, like I said, it's reading that article in full, not just the headlines, so we can get the context for it. And then the two things it's looking for is what are the primary topics? So what is directly relevant? To the audience that we're sending to and directly relevant to the brand that we are sending from, right? So we're connecting those two things and then we're also looking for secondary topics. So what are other angles that we know would still be relevant to our audience that if we put in front of our audience builds a lot of trust with our brand and we're using it more as like a brand awareness play instead of a direct conversion play. Right. And then the fourth piece is our, we have an email writer skill that categorizes it, does all the additional research that it needs, and then proactively builds the email briefs that we would need. So the hooks, the topic, the concept, and the design, and then we get all of that proactively and then we review and we choose which one we want to roll with. And then once we've approved that, We have the copy, it goes through our, you know, copywriter reviews it to make sure that the copy is good, that the AI didn't hallucinate anything, that we're not taking anything out of context or twisting it too far, right? It's all relevant. We QA it. And then once the design is on brand and finalized, we deliver it to the client for final approval. So end to end, this process takes us less than an hour. We get 5 unique angles for each relevant article. All of the copy is timely and relevant. So each email feels very current and very like reactive to what's happening in the market. And it's always on, like there are times where I will sit down at my computer and there's already 20 email ideas across our portfolio of clients of like, oh, this happened. Overnight, we should send an email about this because we know it's going to affect the subscribers. Right. And so just as an example, we work with a 503 compound pharmacy named South End Pharmacy. Last year, there was a bunch of FDA updates about how 503 pharmacies could compound GLP-1s, semaglutide and tirzepatide, right? And so one of the alerts that we got right away was that the FDA took semaglutide and tirzepatide off of the shortage list, which essentially means that compound pharmacies can't produce those treatments anymore. Right. And so what we were able to do is we were able to track that OFA, it's a compound pharmacy group. They actually started to sue the FDA for basically breach of process. They just kind of like jumped into Removing semaglutide and tirzepatide off of the shortage list without going through their normal process of like ramping it down. And so the OFA sued the FDA and the FDA then changed their policy a little bit to basically say it's off the shortage list, but we're not going to take any action against 503 compound pharmacies specifically for continuing to compound. And so literally within an hour of this happening, you can see the example email on the left. Of what's happening, who's suing who, and very clearly what we are doing about it. We are, are, we're still compounding. We're still compliant. You can still purchase prescriptions through us. Nothing has really changed for you. We're actively monitoring this. You can see the article that we used to write the email. And then the main CTA for this was to reply back to their account manager. If they have questions or they have concerns and things like that. And so because we were able to move so quick on this, we ended up getting a 67.3% open rate. We had just over a 4% reply rate of people either saying, yeah, I want to hop on a call to go through this a little bit more deeply. Or we had people saying, you know, this is great. Thank you so much. Like, let us know what the updates are. It was a huge trust builder for South End Pharmacy, and then our unsubscribe rate was very, very low because this was super duper relevant to providers. When they saw that compounders shouldn't be manufacturing this, the first question is they're like, I, I'm meeting with patients that are prescribing this. Can I get this from you? And so having this email out the door very quickly approved by legal and things like that was critical for—

it looks amazing too. At first I was like, what do you send out? Like if you're not driving someone to like a blog post or an article, but it's like And then you're not just going to like send someone like a 2 or 3 line plain text email about the news and like link to something else. But this format feels very like high end, like, oh, this feels like a premium product almost that I'm getting an email about as opposed to like, hey, I'm a sales guy, like check this out. Did you know this happened? We want to book a call.

Yeah. And so we use this system for increasing relevance because again, these, for many of the brands that we're working with, their sales cycle is just very, very long. And so How do you continue to keep them engaged? This is one of the ways that we found to keep your open rates very, very high to continue building that brand awareness. So then when that subscriber or prospect moves in market to ready to buy, you are the brand that they think of instead of a competitor.

Cool. Nice. This is great. A bunch of questions in the chat for you. So you, I'm going to throw you backstage and you got a bunch of people want to know how do you do it in Claude? How did you set it up? What else can you do with the content? This is great. And I think really useful for B2B where like so much of it is like, we don't always have big news, big announcements. And so we're trying to triangulate like what's happening in the industry to try to reach out with something relevant. I thought this was great.

Yeah.

Okay.

Good job, Tyler. Tyler's going to pop in the chat and then Kremi's batting cleanup for us and we'll have time for some questions at the end.

All right.

Kremi, good to see you.

You got the mic.

I want to try to catch up on some time a little bit. So I'm going to skip over intros and we'll get right into the meat with you.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So thank you for having me. I'm also going to talk about newsletters and it's really funny because Jane and I didn't know each other before this webinar, but it's very interesting how our experiences are very similar and, you know, everything that we've seen with newsletters in B2B specifically, I also agree that they are absolutely slept on. So yeah, Kremi here, B2B content and growth marketer. I'm in-house. I'm working in-house as a conversion copywriter right now. But I have been a fractional email marketer for B2B brands before as well. So here I want to share a couple of insights from email work that I've done for two B2B brands recently. Didn't get the memo about the slides, but I will share a sample a little bit later. I just want to kind of walk you through, you know, what I did, what happened, what the results were first. So one of the brands is a smaller brand that had basically a dormant list of a little under 10,000 contacts when I started working with them. And they were sending, you know, occasional sales sequences, but nothing really consistent beyond that. And the other brand is a large enterprise B2B brand with over 100,000 contacts, and they were actually doing the opposite. So when I joined, they were sending, you know, many emails, but they were basically like the short conversion-focused style emails with the purpose of driving traffic to events, getting people to download new content pieces, you know, stuff like that. So for both of these brands, we introduced newsletters. But what was interesting was that this kind of like this decision, you know, it played out differently for both brands. For the smaller one, introducing a newsletter meant kind of going from sending almost no emails at all to sending emails consistently every week. And for the bigger one, it meant basically the opposite, slowing down, reducing the number of emails and diversifying the type of content in those emails. And then after we introduced the newsletters for both brands and kind of established, you know, a good cadence for these nurture style newsletters that we were sending out, then we introduced an additional second email in the week, which was a little bit more heavier on the conversion elements, you know, again, to drive traffic to major campaigns and things that were going on at the company. Again, similar approaches. Completely different companies. The results were great across both brands. For the first one, we maintained consistent 40 to 50% open rates with, you know, about 2 to 3% click-through rates. And in terms of attribution, I think the owner said that email marketing has influenced nearly like half a million in revenue over the course of a couple of years, which for a very small bakery brand, that's good. And for the large one in just, I want to say, like under 3 months after we restructured the whole email engine, we basically reduced the unsubscribe rates by 20% or so and then increased the click-through rates by 40%. Again, very, very big improvements on both ends. TBD there on attribution because it's a little bit more complicated to track, as you can imagine. And I would like to share my screen very quickly. I want to share a sample that I was kind of referring to when I was, you know, deciding on structuring the newsletters for both of these brands. I can share samples from them, but I kind of want to give you like a visual representation of what, in my opinion, you know, a good newsletter could look like. So the Content Marketing Institute, I love their newsletters. As you can see, it's a weekly newsletter. They start with a couple of sections that are basically highlights, you know, campaign highlights, you know, something big that is going on, you know, content piece that they have produced, a research, you know, something like that. And then this is the crucial part. This is how I approach all of the newsletters that I produce. Dave, I know that your newsletter is approached in a very similar way, and I love that. So this is the quote unquote personal note. I absolutely love this idea of making the reader feel like there is literally a person that sat down and wrote a note.

Write to one, write to one person is always like the good things.

Exactly.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. One-on-one communication. Yeah. That's literally how, you know, the structure of, of the newsletters that I'm producing right now. You can see, you know, my picture down here and my name, my title, my everything. And then only after this, a long note, which, you know, it absolutely has to be something relevant to what your readers care about. You know, it could be everything that all the other panel speakers, they talked about. Of course, talk about news, talk about campaigns that are going on, talk about pain points, right? So, you know, pulling that, you know, conversion copywriting principle suppose. Talk about something that your reader is gonna care about. Make it in a very, you know, approachable, very conversational way, like a peer talking to a peer. And then after that, I also include sections that highlight, you know, for example, events that are coming up that we are hosting or that we are participating in, anything else, any other campaigns that we wanna kind of, you know, drive traffic to. So yeah, so this is something that I wanted to share as a sample because I saw quite a few questions in the chat, you know, about people asking where do you get content ideas, how to, how to structure them and so on. So yeah, I guess this is a good example. And again, Dave's newsletter, very, very good example as well.

Love that guy.

Yeah, me too. So yeah, anyways, these are kind of like my two examples that I wanted to share about these two brands. And I do want to kind of, you know, summarize what Jaylen and I were talking about because We are very passionate about the power of newsletters for B2B marketing. But I guess the underlying concept that I want to point out to everyone to make this approach with newsletters successful, even if you're running just newsletters that have, you know, more conversion elements, or if you're running just, you know, one newsletter that is very nurturing, educational, and then other campaign emails that are more conversion focused, the underlying concept is that you are willing to give away tons of free value before you expect anything in return, right? So I think this is, you know, a problem that many B2B brands have. It's the gatekeeping, right? Like they never give away anything from their IP, from, you know, the frameworks.

Well, everything has to be justified. All of the time we use to create things in marketing need to be justified by what are we going to get back from this versus if we're going to create something that's valuable. I shared this yesterday in somewhere and I forget where, but there's a great book by Steven Pressfield called Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit. And it's basically like If you can adopt this attitude, this mindset of like almost empathy for who's in the inbox, like I'm assuming like, look, I know that everyone doesn't get just my email, they get 1,000 other emails. And so what am I going to do to make mine worth reading? And then like operate from there versus like so many people are just like, yeah, my company, we send out a newsletter, we gotta send out a newsletter, boop, sent the newsletter out. And it's like, well, okay, but who's actually gonna spend the time? Like, would you take the time outta your day to come to this webinar? Would you take the time out of your day to go through your inbox and read that email. And like, I think I've always tried to operate from that position. Like, I assume that nobody wants my marketing and then therefore I'm going to like take this pill and understand how do I like work with that as the key factor, you know what I mean?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. No, 100%. That's exactly what I was trying to share, you know, basically earn the right to expect engagement and to expect any sort of clicks or anything else that you're trying to achieve. And Dave, a note on what you just said. My manager actually taught me something very, very very valuable, shout out to him. He always insists on writing in a you-focused language. So instead of saying, you know, like in the copy of your emails, you know, we are doing this or we're hosting this event, we're hosting this webinar, always say you will learn this, right? Like you will get this out of whatever we're asking you to do. So absolutely echoing what you just said and think about what you are giving before you expect people to give you. Anything back. And yeah, everything else, you know, that Jenna said and everyone else here, you know, the consistency is super important, whether it's, you know, like ramping up to send more emails, but being consistent with it or scaling down to, you know, send fewer emails, but don't just, you know, send salesy emails, give away value, show up consistently. And then, yeah, I guess like one other note, someone, I think it was Jenna, she talked about how they stopped looking at open rates, click-through rates. One thing that I've noticed with email that is happening, it's very interesting right now, is there are many lurkers. There are many people who open your emails, you know, they read them, they never engage, even if you try to invite some sort of engagement, you know, tell me about what you think, you know, what else do you want to hear about? They lurk, they don't engage. But at the end of the day, all of these touchpoints through the newsletters, through the emails, they add value to, you know, the final decision. If person is going to become a buyer or not. One of these brands that I supported, that I mentioned, they actually did something interesting. So instead of, you know, like necessarily looking at how many people clicked on the CTA buttons that we included, they looked at all of the people who became buyers and they tracked how many emails had they opened, you know, the 10 weeks before they became a buyer, for example, right? So like that kind of, yeah, just look at engagement through a more creative perspective, not only necessarily through like the link in your CTA buttons. So yeah, that's me.

Okay. Hey, Allison, will you roll our group up here real quick? Thanks, Kremi. Good job. There's nothing specific in the Q&A, so I gave everybody time to just punch away in the chat, but I just want to give a quick shout out to everybody that came today. I hope, I think email, like somebody said this earlier in the session, which is like email is still one of the last channels that you can truly own your audience. Now there's a lot of nuance that happens in the inbox, but I think there's a lot of regular recurring rhythms and systems you can get into. And I hope this was— gave you a little bit of inspiration to think about what can I do better with my email? We'll send out the recording to everybody after this, but real quick, we like to just measure everything. Allison, can you just run the poll so we can get a quick vibe check on this session? Also, we're gonna send out— we'll send out everybody's LinkedIn here. I think a lot of people like to continue to ask more questions so you can connect with Jaina, Ben, Tyler, and Kremi on LinkedIn and just say hi. But I appreciate everybody coming out for this ExitFive live session. I've said webinar twice. I'm gonna get dinged in my performance review after this. It's definitely not a webinar. Appreciate all you email marketers out there. Thanks to Nak for helping us present this session, and we'll see you in, I think, 2 weeks on our next ExitFive live. I'll see you in the inbox. I know a bunch of you get my newsletter and the podcast, and, and we'll see you there. Good luck. Happy email marketing. Watch out, Claude's coming for you, so you just gotta keep running fast. Faster and keep innovating and staying ahead and we'll be okay. All right. All right.

We'll see you all later.

Good job, everybody. See you later.

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