#241: Email Strategy | Email isn’t dead – it’s just changing fast.
It’s still one of the few B2B marketing channels where you can actually own your audience and reach your ideal customers with the push of a button.
In this session from the Ultimate Roast of B2B Emails, Danielle hosts Beth O’Malley (Founder, astral.), Jay Schwedelson (Founder, Subjectline.com & GURU Media Hub), and Jaina Mistry (Director, Brand and Content Marketing at Litmus) for a tactical session on what’s actually working in email marketing in 2025.
They cover:
- What an effective email marketing strategy looks like today
- Key elements of great emails
- How to write irresistible subject lines
- All the ins and outs of deliverability and landing in the inbox
Plus, they tackle a live Q&A, hot takes on open rates, resends, clickbait, personalization, and how to fix your email marketing strategy.
Timestamps
- (00:00) - – Intro to Beth, Jay, and Jaina
- (05:02) - – Why bad emails are killing results
- (07:34) - – How to think about email beyond lead gen
- (09:46) - – The real problem with how B2B measures email success
- (11:02) - – Open rates: Are they dead or still useful?
- (15:26) - – Should you resend to non-openers? The great debate
- (20:22) - – Deliverability basics: What B2B marketers miss
- (23:40) - – Personalization: What actually works (and what doesn’t)
- (30:16) - – Why exclusion (not just segmentation) matters in email
- (32:31) - – AI summaries and how they’re reshaping the inbox
- (35:16) - – Clicks vs engagement: What you should really track
- (37:41) - – Why structured clicks matter more than just "more clicks"
- (41:26) - – How to think about email length and structure in 2025
- (44:37) - – Technical tips: Avoiding clipping, formatting for mobile
- (46:35) - – Clickbait subject lines: Where to draw the line
- (48:36) - – Final advice for marketers
Send guest pitches and ideas to hi@exitfive.com
Join the Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletter
Check out the Exit Five job board: https://jobs.exitfive.com/
Become an Exit Five member: https://community.exitfive.com/checkout/exit-five-membership
***
Today’s episode is brought to you by Walnut.
Why are we pouring all this effort into marketing just to push buyers to a “request a demo” or “contact sales” button?
Come on, today’s buyers don’t want to talk to sales right away. They want to explore your product themselves, see how it works, and understand its value before booking a meeting.
That’s where Walnut comes in.
Walnut empowers marketers and GTM teams to create interactive, self-guided product experiences in minutes. Embed these experiences on your site, in emails, or anywhere in your funnel to let buyers engage on their terms, from awareness to close and beyond.
That's the beauty of Walnut - you're getting a platform that your sales and CS colleagues can use to showcase the product too.
And the best part? You get real intent data—see which features prospects love, where they drop off, and what’s actually driving pipeline. Demo Qualified Leads are the new MQL.
Over 500 companies, like Adobe and NetApp, use Walnut to drive 2-3x higher website conversion rates and 7 figures in pipeline on a yearly basis. So do you want to drive more leads, shorten sales cycles, and actually show your product instead of hiding it behind another typical B2B CTA?
Go check out Walnut.io. And if you tell them Dave from Exit 5 sent you, they'll build out your first demo for free!