← The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
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- [00:00]
A
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.
- [00:24]
B
So what happens?
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A
Someone has to take that output and turn it into an actual email that renders an Outlook, so follows brand guidelines and ships. You know this story. The last mile still feels slow and manual. NAC has made this a lot shorter. They just launched an NCP server that connects your AI assistant directly to their platform. So now you can describe the email you need in Claude or ChatGPT and drafted 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 nac, MCP generates the email and a marketer refines and ships. This is the future of marketing. You should go check it out@knack.com that's K N A K.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. And 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.
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B
Go and check them out.
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A
It's Vector Co that's V E C T O R CO Vector.
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C
You're listening to the Dave Gerhard show.
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D
2, 3, 4. Exit.
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C
Hello, everybody. Just trying to get situated over here.
- [02:37]
B
I got so many apps every time. God. Okay.
- [02:41]
E
All right.
- [02:41]
B
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 four people backstage. We did a prep call on Tuesday. Everybody showed example of an email thing that they did at their company. And we're going to 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. We wanted to dive into email for this. Exit 5 live. We do these twice a month. We try to go deep on a topic that you care about. Email is always a popular one. And 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. Katherine 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.
- [04:26]
E
Awesome.
- [04:27]
B
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 going to be in the chat so they'll have time to go through any of the questions you might have during the session and then at the end. We should have 20 minutes at the end where we want to 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 want to give a quick shout out to Knack. Knack is one of our longest running sponsors at Exit 5. Three years running. Isn't that amazing? I got a DM from their CMO three 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, seen 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. Knack 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 Mac 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 NAC 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.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?
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A
Where are you?
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B
Where are you living right now? And then what are you going to show us?
- [06:52]
E
Yeah, sure. I'll try to tick off all of those. So I'm Ben. I work for a company called Quo. They do front office shared business phone solutions. They've got an AI offering there as well. I'm the customer life cycle marketer or manager for them and I'm currently operating out of Harlem, 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 five set up. So be with me. You're good.
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B
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 the end of year campaign. Yeah, I don't want to say the word because remember, we can't get in trouble.
- [07:35]
E
Yeah, it's pretty inspired. So I'm going to run through our year end 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 the features.
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B
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?
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E
Yeah, I did, I did.
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B
Okay.
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E
It was confronting the very first song
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B
that I ever Played on Spotify. This has nothing to do with him. It was like that LMFA party. Rocco's in there. Why? Why was I playing that? Why was it the first song I ever played?
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E
It's a banger dive, that's why.
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B
All right, you got it.
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F
All right.
- [08:23]
E
Happy days. I'll just quickly share my screen. So as mentioned, going through 2025 year in review campaign, we went into partnership with a 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 four 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, oh, this is what your activity was. No, this is actually what your activity was looking like. So we had calls, we had Sony usage, which is our AI receptionist offering, does a lot more than that. You should 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 Multiplied 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 four 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 Quo, 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 Pipetrain and then that kicked off a event sync. So that went into a customer IO campaign which then had five different APIs which we hit off on a platform called Quick Chart. 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 back end, we also generated unique shareable landing pages that our users, our customers, could share across X and LinkedIn.
- [10:56]
B
This is a perfect example of like, someone on the surface is like, yeah, cool email marketing team. And you're like, did you know how much work this was in the back end?
- [11:03]
E
Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. 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, year in review, email takes multiple months, like four months, and it takes a whole team of people to get going.
- [11:18]
B
Wait, sorry, I think I missed this in the beginning. Is Multiplied is the platform they used to do this on?
- [11:22]
E
No. So Multiplied's an agency, they work out of South Africa.
- [11:26]
B
They actually built this. You gave them all this and they built the design of this. Got it.
- [11:29]
E
They built the gif so that hero image at the top. So it's like, hey, Ben, your 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.
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B
That sort of jazz.
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E
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 gifts 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, all went well. Got some fantastic responses. Lots of people calling us open phone 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.
- [12:21]
B
But the idea question from Christina says just if you could frame that. So are these emails going to current customers in hopes of an upsell, or was this kind of just like a surprising delight, like get people to share your stuff campaign?
- [12:34]
E
Yeah, this one's 100% surprising delight. We do a lot of emails at Quo, 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 cool minutes come through or we had 8,000 calls this year. This is a massive improvement over the last year. These sorts of stats add sort of credibility to small businesses so we wanted to provide that.
- [13:12]
B
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 kind of sharing this link here.
- [13:27]
E
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 quote 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.
- [13:57]
B
And who is the person that you were sending this to like in the business who would be receiving this?
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E
So we did this to owners and admins. So you get different roles within quo. 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 in Netherlands is what we targeted.
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B
Do you have more slides or should I keep interrupting you? I have some.
- [14:23]
E
Interrupt me man, interrupt me.
- [14:25]
B
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 as to like you know why this was a good play for marketing to run?
- [14:36]
E
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. It gets buy in, gets credibility, is a cool thing that people can share more.
- [15:06]
B
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 five minutes per project. And 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, 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?
- [16:38]
E
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 four 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 Euro stuff.
- [16:59]
B
Cool. All right, Ben. We're going to send Ben back to the background. 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 Jayna. She's. And I think she's going to talk about newsletters, a topic near and dear to our heart. We love newsletters. Hi. I thought email was dead. Who does it? Why bother with a newsletter? What are you going to show us?
- [17:20]
D
I'm going to 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 because 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 it needs that. There's one of the best ways for
- [17:38]
B
someone to do that. All right, show us.
- [17:40]
D
Okay, so I head up the brand content marketing team over at nac, and Dave's already talked about who Knack is, so hopefully you're around at the beginning of the session to know what NAC is. And I've done just about every single part of the email workflow in the last 20ish 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 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 going to show 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. We had like multiple people involved in this one weekly newsletter. And I think there are really three big reasons it worked and one operating model. 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, 11:00am Eastern Time, but we had carved out exactly like which time is going to 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 touch point. Marketing sort of teaches us that you need like a stack of touch points to land a customer. So my argument is, even if you can't athletic track and count that someone has seen your newsletter and your brand in their inbox, I tend to think that that is a touch point 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.
- [19:54]
B
And also a lot of times we default to only doing things that have like selfish benefit to us. Like I'm going to, I have an offer, I'm going to 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 want to give you something useful to read and I'm going to show up in your inbox, you know, for good reason, every week type of thing.
- [20:19]
D
Exactly. You're not just shouting at your audience because you want something from them, you want to give them something for free that is going to 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 want to 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 want to know why. It's why they need to spend five 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 want to 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, I'm subscribing, blah, blah, blah.
- [22:13]
B
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 converted on this landing page six weeks ago.
- [22:22]
D
Exactly. That's the same thing that I do. I almost want to screenshot their. Like, this is where you came in. This is when you came in. It's.
- [22:30]
B
Sorry, sorry, I distract. That was unnecessary. I'm getting.
- [22:33]
D
No, no, it's totally necessary. I feel like we need to vent some of these things out every now and then.
- [22:37]
G
But, like, we started getting really cool
- [22:38]
D
replies saying, like, this content 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.
- [22:50]
B
Yeah.
- [22:51]
D
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 stop looking at open rates and Click through rates as a scoreboard as a way of 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 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 because I was people always ask like how the hell do you publish 52 weeks a year without burning out? And there are four 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. Two 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. Three, a fixed template. We didn't change any of the design, we just changed the content. The variable was the content here. And the fourth one is we work like two to three 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 head 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 pick a day, pick a time, pick a quarterback, rotate your writers. And I think newsletters are just a brilliant tactic for B2B marketers.
- [24:43]
E
Nice.
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B
Good work Jayna. A couple notes I had. It's funny because I still see so many companies they send the brand emails from no reply at and so like the other day I was dealing with something I just want to reply to get a service question. It's no reply at and so your point about the replies. We run this play with our newsletter and I get know 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 over complicating marketing and I had a hundred 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 begin the 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'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 five 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 do you have a way of measuring replies? Is there a way to do this in your product or are you like manually counting them? I know a lot of times if we look at reply rate, it's not always exactly exact.
- [26:28]
H
Today's episode is brought to you by Compound Growth Marketing. They're a full funnel demand generation agency that I've actually personally hired twice. That's right. Before I was a thought leader, I was an actual marketer, an operator, a VP of marketing myself. And CGM was one of the best agencies that I've ever hired. They help high growth Cyber security DevOps and enterprise software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are actually forming opinions about which products to use. CGM is great because they offer the combination of AI, SEO, modern paid advertising strategy, and a dedicated go to market engineering team that you need today. So Everything CGM does gets tracked, measured and improved over time. That means more pipeline for you. And this works because they were started by a former VP of marketing who gets this space. They really understand B2B. So if you're in search of a new agency that can help you hit the number this quarter and you need help with things like AI, SEO and paid media, you should definitely go and check out Compound Growth Marketing. I call them CGM Compound Growth Marketing. Go and check them out at compound growth marketing.com and tell them that Dave and Exit 5 sent you.
- [27:34]
D
It's really manual and I think what we had before was we had Help Scout and we had all our replies go to helloitmus.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 replied. 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 using links from everyone else, including those new newsletters. 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 on people's content.
- [28:22]
E
Okay, all right, good work.
- [28:23]
B
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 debt 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?
- [28:45]
F
All right, I'm going to show you how to be more like Ryan Reynolds.
- [28:50]
B
I'm into that. Let me get some of that. I'm into that.
- [28:53]
D
All right,
- [28:56]
F
so a little bit of background. I run hypermedia marketing. We work with B2B brands, both service providers and software 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 because I love Ryan and I love his marketing, I developed this framework of how to basically do what he does in marketing.
- [29:37]
B
What's your company and industry? Hannah in the chat says it Tyler and healthcare. Speaking my language with these sales cycles.
- [29:42]
F
Yeah. So hypermedia marketing is my company.
- [29:45]
B
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?
- [29:54]
F
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's 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.
- [30:29]
B
I love the newsjacking idea. Nice. Good. Okay.
- [30:32]
F
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 five 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 Alert Mouse 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 will 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.
- [33:47]
E
Yep.
- [33:47]
B
Okay, I got you. So step one, get the alert set up. Number two is how are we going to use AI to monitor the inbox?
- [33:53]
F
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
- [34:10]
B
actually read, quote, unquote, what's doing that? What are you using to do that?
- [34:16]
F
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 you.
- [34:24]
B
Good idea.
- [34:26]
F
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 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 five 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 583 compound pharmacy named Southend Pharmacy. Last year there was a bunch of FDA updates about how 503A pharmacies could compound GLP1s, semiglutide and tirzepatide.
- [36:47]
E
Right.
- [36:48]
F
And so one of the alerts that we got right away was that the FDA took semi glutide 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 semi glutide 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 503A compound pharmacy 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, 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'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 illegal and things like that was critical for it looks amazing too.
- [39:06]
B
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 gonna like send someone like a two or three 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.
- [39:28]
F
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 the competitor.
- [39:54]
B
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? But 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.
- [40:17]
F
Yeah.
- [40:17]
B
Okay. Good job, Tyler. Tyler's gonna pop in the chat and then Cremy's batting cleanup for us and we'll have time for some questions at the end. All right, Cremy, 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.
- [40:31]
G
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- [40:32]
F
Yeah.
- [40:32]
G
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, creamy 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 occasional seal 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 many emails, but they were basically the short conversion focused style emails with the purpose of driving traffic to events, getting people to download new content pieces, 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 B2B brand, that's good. And for the large one, in just, I want to say like under three 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, a content piece where 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 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.
- [44:29]
B
Write to one person is always like the good.
- [44:32]
G
Exactly, exactly, exactly. Yeah. One on one communication. Yeah. That's literally how the structure of the newsletters that I'm producing right now, you can see my picture down here, my name, my title, my everything. And then only after this, a long note, which it absolutely has to be something relevant to what your readers care about. 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. So pulling that conversion copywriting principle post, talk about something that your reader is going to 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 want to 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.
- [45:44]
B
Love that.
- [45:45]
G
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 Jan 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 more conversion elements, or if you're running just 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.
- [46:37]
B
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 a thousand 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 sent out a newsletter, we got to send our newsletter, sent the newsletter out and it's like, well, okay, but who's actually going to spend the time? Like, would you take the time out of 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?
- [47:35]
G
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 he 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 touch points 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.
- [49:41]
B
Okay. Hey, Allison, will you roll our group
- [49:44]
E
up here real quick?
- [49:45]
B
Thanks, Ky. Good job. There's nothing specific in the Q and 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's 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 going to 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 Cremi on LinkedIn and just say hi. But I appreciate everybody coming out for this Exit 5 live session. I've said webinar twice. I'm going to get dinged in my performance review after this. It's definitely not a webinar. Appreciate all you email marketers out there. Thanks to Knack for helping us present this session and we'll see you in, I think, two weeks on our next Exit 5 live. I'll see you in the inbox. I know a bunch of you get my newsletter in the podcast and we'll see there. Good luck. Happy email marketing. Watch out. Claude's coming for you. So you just got to keep running fast and keep innovating and staying ahead and we'll be okay. All right. All right, we'll see y' all later. Good job, everybody. See you later.
- [51:05]
C
Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review, because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit 5. And you can go and check that out instead of leaving leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5, 000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day, asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of knowledge marketers who are doing the same thing you are. So you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days, so you can go and check it out risk free and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community.