Email Marketing Breakdown: How to Cut Through the Noise in 2025

Listen to this episode from The Exit Five CMO Podcast (Hosted by Dave Gerhardt) on Spotify. #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 todayKey elements of great emailsHow to write irresistible subject linesAll the ins and outs of deliverability and landing in the inboxPlus, 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 (04:48) - – Why bad emails are killing results (07:20) - – How to think about email beyond lead gen (09:32) - – The real problem with how B2B measures email success (10:48) - – Open rates: Are they dead or still useful? (15:12) - – Should you resend to non-openers? The great debate (20:08) - – Deliverability basics: What B2B marketers miss (23:26) - – Personalization: What actually works (and what doesn’t) (30:43) - – Why exclusion (not just segmentation) matters in email (32:58) - – AI summaries and how they’re reshaping the inbox (35:43) - – Clicks vs engagement: What you should really track (38:08) - – Why structured clicks matter more than just "more clicks" (41:53) - – How to think about email length and structure in 2025 (45:04) - – Technical tips: Avoiding clipping, formatting for mobile (47:02) - – Clickbait subject lines: Where to draw the line (49:03) - – Final advice for marketers Send guest pitches and ideas to [email protected] the Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterCheck 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 Zuddl.We’re halfway through 2025, and one thing’s clear: events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking - you name it. Everyone’s leaning in.Events are a core part of our playbook this year at Exit Five. So far, we’ve hosted two virtual sessions each month, one large virtual event, one in-person meetup, and we’re deep in the weeds planning our Drive conference coming back to Vermont this September.Zuddl helps us run a smarter event strategy - from driving registrations, managing invites, automating comms, reminders, analytics, tracking. Their Salesforce integration also makes it simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without pulling in ops.On top of that, the differentiator with Zuddl is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us - and that’s how we’ve been able to keep the momentum going with 12+ events already this year, with plenty more to come.If events are part of your marketing strategy, you need to look at Zuddl to see how companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike, and Iterable are using the top event platform for Business events in 2025. Head over to zuddl.com/exitfive to learn more.