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

The Exit Five CMO Podcast (Hosted by Dave Gerhardt)

#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
• (04:22) - – Why bad emails are killing results
• (06:54) - – How to think about email beyond lead gen
• (09:06) - – The real problem with how B2B measures email success
• (10:22) - – Open rates: Are they dead or still useful?
• (14:46) - – Should you resend to non-openers? The great debate
• (19:42) - – Deliverability basics: What B2B marketers miss
• (23:00) - – Personalization: What actually works (and what doesn’t)
• (29:12) - – Why exclusion (not just segmentation) matters in email
• (31:27) - – AI summaries and how they’re reshaping the inbox
• (34:12) - – Clicks vs engagement: What you should really track
• (36:37) - – Why structured clicks matter more than just "more clicks"
• (40:22) - – How to think about email length and structure in 2025
• (43:33) - – Technical tips: Avoiding clipping, formatting for mobile
• (45:31) - – Clickbait subject lines: Where to draw the line
• (47:32) - – Final advice for marketers

Send guest pitches and ideas to [email protected]
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 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.

***

Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production.

• They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.
• Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.
• Visit hatch.fm to learn more