The Lead Nurture Email Playbook: What Works and What Doesn’t
The Dave Gerhardt Show
Evaluating Email Engagement
This chapter critically analyzes the effectiveness of a specific email campaign, focusing on design, content, and audience engagement. The speakers provide recommendations for enhancing emails through personalization and actionable messaging to better connect with recipients.
#247 Lead Nurturing | In this episode, Danielle is joined by Samar Owais, founder of Emails Done Right; Sheri Otto, CEO of Growth Lane Strategies; and Sofia Silva, Marketing Manager at Reachdesk.
These three email experts came together for a live roast of real B2B lead nurture emails, submitted by marketers from the Exit Five community. You’ll hear the good, the bad, and the fixable, with practical insights on how to improve your own nurture sequences.
Danielle, Samar, Sheri, and Sofia cover:
- The most common lead nurture mistakes B2B marketers make (and how to fix them)
- Why every email should be treated as a conversation, not just a campaign
- How to write nurture emails that create connection, not clicks for clicks’ sake
If you're building (or rebuilding) your nurture strategy, this one’s packed with real examples and expert feedback to guide your next send.
Timestamps
- (00:00) - – Intro: Welcome to the Lead Nurture Roast
- (02:36) - – Meet the Experts: Samar, Sheri, and Sofia
- (06:33) - – What Is **Lead Nurturing, Really?
- (09:26) - – The Problem with “We” Language in Emails
- (11:48) - – The Biggest Mistakes B2B Marketers Make
- (14:13) - – Why AI Isn’t Your Copywriter
- (16:08) - – Teardown #1: Subject Line Gone Wrong
- (20:38) - – How to Build a Nurture Sequence Around a Whitepaper
- (23:18) - – CTA Overload and Why It Kills Clicks
- (28:24) - – Teardown #2: Great Open Rate, Low Engagement
- (32:18) - – The One-CTA Rule (And Why It Matters)
- (35:00) - – Structuring Long Emails for Skimmability
- (37:32) - – Teardown #3: Cold Lead, Wrong Email
- (40:05) - – Re-Engagement Emails That Actually Work
- (42:55) - – Use Social Proof Instead of Product Pitches
- (44:35) - – Teardown #4: The Overloaded Onboarding Email
- (47:30) - – What’s a “Micro Conversion” in SaaS Email?
- (52:05) - – Time-to-Value and the First Action That Matters
- (54:20) - – This Email Is... a Whole Sequence in One
- (56:40) - – Teardown #5: Trust Email or Generic Spam?
- (59:35) - – Why Specificity Beats Industry Buzzwords
- (01:01:50) - – Final Scores and Wrap-Up
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Today's episode is brought to you by Knak.
Email (in my humble opinion) is the still the greatest marketing channel of all-time.
It’s the only way you can truly “own” your audience.
But when it comes to building the emails - if you’ve ever tried building an email in an enterprise marketing automation platform, you know how painful it can be. Templates are too rigid, editing code can break things and the whole process just takes forever.
That’s why we love Knak here at Exit Five. Knak a no-code email platform that makes it easy to create on-brand, high-performing emails - without the bottlenecks.
- Frustrated by clunky email builders? You need Knak.
- Tired of ‘hoping’ the email you sent looks good across all devices? Just test in Knak first.
- Big team making it hard to collaborate and get approvals? Definitely Knak.
And the best part? Everything takes a fraction of the time.
See Knak in action at knak.com/exit-five. Or just let them know you heard about Knak on Exit Five.
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Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production.
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