Seen differently, best practices are a race to an average. Maybe it's time to rethink your email strategy and challenge the status quo. Because, innovation happens when you try new things.

1. MOVING BEYOND
(EMAIL) BEST
PRACTICES
Modern Marketing Bootcamp Series
Brian Maschler
Chief Creative Officer

2. Best practices are a starting point,
not the destination.

3. THE “BEST PRACTICE” PARADOX
INNOVATION INVOLVES TRYING NEW THINGS
DO YOUR HOMEWORK
Research what experts say works
best. Try that. Measure the results
to get a baseline for your brand.
LEARN,ADJUST
Be patient. Measure everything.
Get real, human feedback.
BE CREATIVE
Develop new ideas to better
capture the attention of your
audience.
Rinse, repeat
Where innovation happens
“Best Practices”

4. BEING
HONEST
ABOUT EMAIL
INTERACTION
How real human beings actually engage
with email – and what that means for
marketers.

5. Email is always going to be a great place to reach
people because it’s where work gets done.
To paraphrase Seth Godin, email is the pinnacle of “permission marketing” –
so the stakes are high. Users must allow you into their inbox. Put your
agenda in front of theirs and you’re out of the club, permanently.

6. Attention vs. Engagement
Email Content

7. WHEN IT COMES TO OPENING EMAILS,
PEOPLE ACT ON EMOTION, NOT LOGIC.

8. TWO CONVERSIONS. TWO CONVERSATIONS.
What looks
important?
What looks urgent?
What looks fun?
Do I care?
What do I need to do?
Do I have time to look
at this right now?
Open Click-through

9. CREATING
INSPIRED
EMAILS
So, what’s the secret to writing
better emails?
How do B2B marketers send
more relevant content?

10. STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST
Austin Kleon offers insight into practical
approaches to taking inspiration from
the world around us.

11. CREATIVE STRATEGY
TRACK YOUR INSPIRATION
Would you pay attention to that?
…Would you really?
Many people aren’t great at
analyzing their own behavior.
Start paying attention to what
captures your attention via email.
Keep a “swipe file” with notes
about what you liked.

12. “Modern marketing, the craft of getting ideas to spread, has split.
On one side are the roboticists. They test and measure and do what works. They do it with no
interest in how people decide or what they believe or what story they tell themselves. Instead, they
treat the human as an ant in an ant farm, a robot that does this or that. They're behaviorists.
On the other are those that seek to get to the heart of what makes us human. These marketers know
that fear, shame, desire for gain and culture are the quartet that drive just about every decision. They
know that…truly understanding our narratives is the essence of doing work that
matters, that connects, and that spreads.
There are ever more tools for folks who do the former, but the problem is that this is work that gets
easier to automate and easier to hire for.
On the other hand, the ranks of people who understand, who understand well enough to lead, to
decide and most of all, to see... There are never enough of these people doing the work that matters.”
—Seth Godin, 5/2/17

13. EXAMPLE: SYMANTEC RENEWAL NURTURE
HUMANIZING THE BRAND
Before
Refresh
AfterBulldog Solutions redesigned Symantec’s customer
renewal program and instantly saw a 20% increase in
engagement. The simple shift from brand-centric
communications to customer-centric communications
made all the difference.
• More personal, more tangible
• Align to how IT professionals think about web
security solutions (They aren’t trying to be warriors,
they just want to avoid headaches)

14. THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: CONTENT
Most emails are about conversion; a means
to an end. So, start with the content, then
work your way back to the email
design/theme, etc.
The email is designed to sell the content –
so you can’t write/design that in a vacuum.
Normally, email is a vehicle… not
the destination.
Read more about matching content to
the buyer’s journey.

15. Measured engagement
Insights, scoring, qualification, segmentation
Behavioral Email Nurture

16. INTERACTIVE CONTENT
Learn about the person receiving your
emails to deliver real value.

17. BEHAVIORAL EMAIL NURTURING
Better client service at lower cost Efficiency Lifestyle
Based on how they interact with those fun experiences, you can nurture them with thoughtful
communications that are aligned to what you know about them.

18. LEAD SCORING – BEYOND EMAIL…
How B2B Marketers score leads shouldn’t be limited to email. What if you could track and
score the behavior of your audience based on how they moved through educational sessions
at a physical conference?
With new technology, you can. We’ve done it.

19. ALWAYS BE
SELLING
TESTING
It’s a way of marketing, not a phase of
your program. Every email send is an
opportunity to learn.

20. TESTING & OPTIMIZATION
Let’s take a look at a full year of email testing for Oracle.

21. AUDIENCE
SEGMENTATION
Question: Will creating a definition around new, actives and inactives help
with targeting our audience?
Hypothesis: If we categorize records into buckets of new, active or inactive,
then we can get better insight into what content is engaging our audience.
Findings:
By creating three segments for
deployments, metrics could be
reported for new, active and
inactive audiences. This gave us
the ability to determine what
worked with engagers and what
converted inactive contacts to
active contacts.
Hypothesis confirmed.
Combined
Audience
Reporting
Segmented
Audience
Reporting

22. AUDIENCE:
THE PURGE
Question: Should we continue to email contacts who have never been active?
Hypothesis: If we remove inactive contacts from the database, then we will
have better insight into what the engaged audience wants to consume.
Findings:
By sending the unsubscribe
email, we could determine
records that no longer want to
receive emails (unsubscribers),
records that want to stay in the
communication stream (open,
no unsubscribe) or records that
truly are inactive (no open).
Unsubscribes and no-opens
were then purged from the
system to allow for
communication with a truly
active audience.
Hypothesis confirmed.
Message Sent to
Inactive Contacts
June saw
highest open
rates to date.
Subject Line:
Hello, <First Name>? Are you there?

23. THE CREATIVE – A BREAK
FROM THE ROUTINE
Question: Would engagement increase if we offered a different kind of content?
Hypothesis: If we offer hyper-personalized content, then engagement will increase.
Process:
Worked with Vidyard to create
personalized holiday videos for
our audience.
Findings:
December saw the highest
conversion from inactive to
actives and, with lag considered,
the highest meetings set to date
in the campaign.
Hypothesis confirmed.
Within one month of this campaign,
meetings reached a high to date.

24. SUBJECT LINE TESTING –
THE PROGRESSION
Introduction of
Personalization
A: How will <Your
Company> manage all
that data?
Open Rate: 11.24%
B: <First Name>
<Last Name>, here’s
your guide on storage
arrays…
Open Rate: 9.68%
A: I heard a lot about
Cloud at OpenWorld,
but...
Open Rate: 5.56%
B: Will the Cloud make
data backups...
Open Rate: 6.19%
Introduction of
Subject Line
Meta Data
Testing of over 180
subject lines allowed
for categorization of
metadata to create
the ideal subject
lines.
Goal: Use A/B subject line testing to increase open rates with a fully purchased
audience by understanding what subject lines resonate more.

25. SUBJECT LINE TESTING –
CATEGORIZATION
Question: Do we have enough subject line testing data to write the perfect subject line?
Hypothesis: If we analyze all historical subject lines, then we will be able to write a formula for the ideal
subject line.
Process: Tested over 180 subject lines to provide statistically significant data around what engages the
audience more. Throughout the process, subject lines were tagged with the following pieces of metadata:
Type
Asset: [ARTICLE] How cloud security has evolved.
Benefit: Don’t open unless you’d like operational savings of up to 50%
Ellipses: 80% of businesses have experienced it...
Question: 44 zettabytes by 2020?
Personalization
City, Company, First Name, First Name & Company, First Name & Last Name, or State
Product Reference
Has <Your Company> asked the #1 cloud security question?
Brand Reference
<Your Company> could save up to 50% with existing Oracle technology
Number of Characters Used
50% ops savings by modernizing IT
Character Length
Drive <Your Company> cost efficiencies with PaaS. (49 Characters)
Forty Four X (12 Characters)

26. SUBJECT LINE TESTING –
FINDINGS
20%
40%
60%
-20%
-40%
-60%
Personalized
Questions
Non-
Personalized
Questions
First Name &
Company
Personalization
Not
Personalized
Brand
Reference
Number of
Characters
Used
60–79
Characters
Used
City
Personalization
20–29
Characters
Used
Avg. Open Rate
Findings: The ideal subject
lines for this audience:
• ask a question,
• are personalized,
• reference the brand,
• use a number
• and are 60–79 characters.
• <First Name>, are
your competitors
outpacing you with
the best-of-breed?
• <Your Company>
could save up to
50% with existing
Oracle technology

27. CTAS – NUMBER OF
ASSETS
9%
below avg.
conversion
7%
below avg.
conversion
22%
above avg
conversion
Question: What is the right number of assets to be offered in an email?
Hypothesis: If we promote one asset per email, then subject lines and copy can
be more aligned with the offer, which may increase engagement.
Findings:
1 asset outperforms
any other number
of assets

28. THE
RESULTS
88%
Increase in unique
open rate
31%
Decrease in dials
to deliverables
64%
Increase in
scheduled meetings
November 2015 compared to June 2016 (allows for two-month onboarding period)

29. WHAT TO KEEP IN MIND
WHEN OPTIMIZING
• Determine a question you want to answer through testing. Don’t make assumptions about
anything. Best practices may work, but test them before trusting them.
• Test one aspect at a time to know what resonates with your audience. Testing multiple pieces
at the same time will limit your ability to tie back increases or decreases in performance.
• Optimization is not limited to subject lines. Make sure to consider messaging themes, type
of content, system configuration, etc.
• Optimization testing doesn’t always mean you will see improvements. Lots of the results
above were surprising and wouldn’t have been determined without testing. If something doesn’t
work, take it as a lesson learned and keep going.
• There are always going to be factors outside of your control that may have an impact on
performance, e.g., list degradation, employee turnover.

30. ADVANCED
MANEUVERS
• Alternative ideas for using
video in B2B
• Animated formats to bring
motion into your email

31. USING VIDEO AS TRANSITIONAL CONTENT
Most Marketers think of video as the content. Sometimes, it’s just the content that carries
your audience to your real content. We call this “segue content” or “transitional content.”

32. Using platforms like Vidyard,
Marketers can use interactive
calls-to-action within
entertaining video content to
introduce audiences to more
academic learning material
(white papers, e-books, etc.)
In this case, Bulldog Solutions
created a video series with tips
for IT professionals to survive
their family over the holidays.
The main call to action:
download a white paper.
This approach saw over
300% increase in content
conversion.

33. TO GIF OR NOT TO GIF
10 Great Email GIF Examples
(#6 is a B2B example)
Guide to GIFs in Email
If you decide to GIF, a few words
of advice:
• Use animation judiciously –
and rarely
• Use it purposefully (to add
value to the email)

34. GET PERSONAL…BUT NOT TOO PERSONAL
B2B Marketers can use new
techniques like Personalized
Video (also available from
Vidyard) to create truly 1:1,
authentic experiences at scale.
Ex: a personalized client appreciation
video we created for our clients…

35. GETTING PERSONAL WITH ABM

36. TOP
TAKEAWAYS

37. 5 IDEAS TO CONSIDER
1. Email Marketing is a battle for attention. Keep track of what grabs your
attention. Start an email “swipe file.”
2. Get to know the people you’re sending to. Talk to them from where they
stand today. Learn more.
3. The best email nurturing comes from behavioral insights
Read 10 ways to engage your audience with interactive content.
4. Always be testing
See Marketo’s Guidance on Optimizing Email.
5. Tread carefully when using personalization and motion. With great power
comes great responsibility. Check out Hubspot’s blog on great examples.

38. Bulldog is a modern marketing agency
exclusively focused on complex B2B.
Channel Program of
the Year
SiriusDecisions,
2016
Best Video Content
“Finny”
Killer Content Awards
2017
Best Direct Mail
Campaign
BMA Global ACE Awards
2017
Best Integrated
Media Campaign
FCS Portfolio Awards
2017
“StackMaster”
Revvie Finalist
Marketo Revvies
2017
Highest Conversion
Response from a
Content Program –
Content Marketing Awards
2016
Best Integrated
Marketing Program
BMA Global ACE Awards
2016
Kapost
Top 50
Kapost
2017
2017 B2B
Top Shop
Chief Marketer
2017
ABMie
Finalist
FlipMyFunnel
2017
Best Social
Campaign
Oracle Markies (Gold)
2017

39. WILDLY CREATIVE.
“Would this stop me in my
tracks?” That’s the question
we’re asking when we develop
your campaign. Your creative
needs to be bold—to fight
through the noise. So, we blend
just the right balance of
entertainment and education for
every stage of the buyer’s
journey. At a glance, we may blur
the lines between B2B and B3C.
But make no mistake—we’re all
B2B—all day, every day. Are you
read to pick a fight with the
status quo?
TOTALLY GEEK.
Founded in 2003, we were the first agency to
partner with Eloqua. Today, we’re a larger,
technology-agnostic band of renegades—
pushing tech to its limits and then writing
custom code to take it even further. We see
creative opportunities to connect the dots of
complex, omnichannel marketing programs.
Managing all of the marketing technology,
data, systems and integrations can be
paralyzing for many marketers. Our teams
geek out on it.

40. THANK YOU
bmaschler@bulldogsolutions.com
linkedin.com/in/brianmaschler
@brianmaschler
bulldogsolutions.com