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Hello and welcome to the Exit Five Weekly Newsletter - read by 37,000 B2B marketing professionals around the world. Exit Five is a membership site designed to help you build a successful career in B2B marketing. Join 5,000 other members at exitfive.com.
By the way - this email was designed in Knak which helps you create email and landing pages in minutes without having to write code. Learn more about Knak here.
📬 92% of Teams Miss the Mark on Post-Event Outreach
After months of planning and an all-out event day, the real challenge begins the moment attendees head home.
According to Forrester, 92% of event teams say they need to improve post-event outreach and for good reason. The follow-up emails, lead hand-offs, and content repurposing? That unglamorous work is what makes or breaks your event ROI.
The team at Zuddl put together a tactical guide to help you lock in that post-event momentum and make every follow-up count.
Inside the playbook, you’ll get ready-to-use templates for:
- Internal comms to align your team
- Follow-up frameworks for external outreach
- Plug-and-play ideas for repurposing event content
Grab the guide here and learn how to turn every post-event touchpoint into pipeline.
📧 What’s Actually Working In B2B Email
Email is only dead if you’re doing it wrong.
If you're still putting first names in subject lines, using "Register" as your CTA, and sending from your company name, then yeah, maybe email is dead for you.
But there’s a ton you can do to actually be good at email in B2B.
And luckily, the bar is pretty low.
Jay Schwedelson (Founder of GURU Media Hub and subjectline.com), Beth O'Malley (Founder of astral), and Jaina Mistry (Director, Brand and Content Marketing at Litmus) shared a behind-the-scenes look at what’s working in B2B email.
Understand your audience
Here's the biggest problem in B2B email marketing: we bucket everyone as "leads."
Someone downloads a checklist? Lead. Someone registers for a webinar? Lead.
Someone requests a demo? Also a lead.
But these aren't the same person at all. And only about 5% are ready to buy.
You have to read the room and understand where people actually are in their journey to be able to send them relevant messages.
Be obvious about what you already know about them!
Nail personalization
How quickly do you delete an email that has your first name in the subject line?
Guess what. So does everyone else.
But you know what actually works? Telling people who they are. Make them feel seen.
Examples:
- “Just for retail professionals” (by industry)
- “Litmus needs to know this” (by company)
- “The best CIOs are doing this 1 thing” (by job title)
Anything that will make someone say, “Wait, that’s me!” That’s gold.
Start with your exclusions
Segmentation can get overwhelming…fast. It’s so easy to go overboard. But starting with who you *shouldn’t* send to can keep you from spiraling.
Think about excluding people based on things like:
- The conversations they’ve had with others on your team (CS or Sales, for example)
- Issues they’re having with the product (AKA anyone actively engaged with support)
Starting with your exclusions is the secret to segmentation without going wild.
Get more accurate data
Your click rates are lying to you. Bots and security software often automatically click every link in your emails before delivery, inflating your metrics.
The test: Send an email at 2 AM and check click activity in the first 30 minutes.
You're not that popular at 2 AM. Those clicks are almost all bots.
Use this "bot baseline" to discount your regular click rates and get a realistic view of actual engagement. That "view in browser" link getting unusually high clicks?
Another bot indicator.
It's not scientific, but it works. And it'll give you a much clearer picture of what's actually happening with your email campaigns.
Engage with every reply
Most people don’t actually think about the fact that a real person is behind your emails.
But this means you have so much room to build a relationship with them. It gives you a chance to change their mind.
Most brands aren’t responding at all. Think about the impact you can have by responding 100% of the time.
The takeaway: Most people in your database aren’t ready to buy. Stop thinking of email as a conversion centric channel and start thinking about it as the place where you build relationships and trust.
P.S. Make sure you’re not sending all-image emails. AI summaries use text to generate the takeaways that’ll hopefully get you more opens.
📺 UPCOMING EVENTS
📬 [MAY 27TH] How to Lead a High-Functioning Marketing Org (Avoid Meeting Overload, Fix Communication Bottlenecks, and Ship Meaningful Work)
Marketing leaders are stuck in back-to-back meetings. Team updates are scattered across channels. And actual work? It gets squeezed into the margins.
In this live session, we’re exploring how to fix that by teaming up with Loom to talk through what actually works for modern marketing teams when it comes to faster, clearer communication and getting time back.
Join Dave for a conversation with Ashley Faus (Head of Lifecycle Marketing at Atlassian) and Dr. Molly Sands (Head of the Teamwork Lab at Atlassian) as they break down how today’s best marketing leaders are reclaiming their time, and building more effective, better-aligned teams in the process.
You’ll walk away with tactical tips on:
- Running fewer, better meetings
- Using Loom to align your team without more meetings
- Making your team’s work more visible through clear, internal comms
- Managing up, down, and across, all while doing hands-on work
- Capturing informal ideas so AI tools like Rovo can fuel better thinking
- Creating space for strategy, clarity, and creativity every day
Dr. Molly Sands leads a team of researchers that study how distributed teams collaborate. Her latest research shows how quick, async updates help managers improve connection, recognition, and clarity, without adding more to the calendar.
You’ll also hear from Ashley Faus, author of Human-Centered Marketing: How to Connect with Audiences in the Age of AI, on how to lead with clarity and keep things human, even in the age of automation.
Whether you’re a new team lead or a seasoned manager, you’ll get real, actionable advice for leading a more productive org, without burning out or defaulting to more meetings.
Join Live or Get the Recording
🏢 OPEN ROLES
Who's hiring right now?
🔥 HOT JOB OF THE WEEK: Animalz is hiring a Senior Content Marketer to own and execute content strategies for B2B tech clients, manage freelancers, and turn complex product stories into high-performing content. The ideal candidate is strategic, editorially sharp, and knows how to deliver content that drives actual business outcomes.
Other open roles on the Exit Five job board this week:
- Ceipal is hiring a Director of Content
- TuMeke is hiring a Senior Marketing Manager (Demand Gen)
- Boost My School is hiring a Mid-level or Senior Marketing Manager (Demand Gen/Events)
- Walnut is hiring a Senior Content and Brand Strategist
- Buddy Punch is hiring a Head of Marketing
- Clearscope is hiring a Partnerships Marketing Manager
- New North is hiring a Growth Marketing Strategist
- Valence is hiring a Product Marketing Manager
Have an open role and want to make sure the best B2B marketing talent sees it?
Just reply to this email and we'll send over more info on how you can post it on our job board + get it in front of 25k+ marketers.
Join us in Exit Five
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