Sponsored by
IN THIS ISSUE 🌱
Good Morning {{first_name}}!
It’s Monday - and that means it’s time for your CRM Dispatch - an issue where we dig into ways your CRM could be serving you better. ✨
This week, I want to talk about B2B emails. While nothing has really changed in email in the past week, I have run into several different email scenarios and I thought I’d just share some interesting insights from multiple conversations.
One of the biggest mistakes I see in B2B email is marketing teams looking at all emails the same and holding them to the same KPIs. So, this issue is about giving every campaign type its own scoreboard, and why that matters more for retention than most people think.
Let’s dive in.
BENCHMARKS ARE FOR REFERENCE ✨
CRM FOUNDATIONS THAT BREAK THE SYSTEM
It’s not always about the opens and clicks
In every email campaign I send out, I always set up benchmarks for comparative analysis. I need some kind of guideline as to how it worked.
Were the open rates horrendous? How was the deliverability on that particular segmented list? Were clicks comparable to the industry? Were the unsubscribes and bounces within expectation?
If you spent money on a CRM like HubSpot instead of going the MailChimp route, and you aren’t using it the way it’s meant to, you could potentially be looking at the wrong metrics to determine the effectiveness of email.
Plus, not all emails are alike.
WHAT ARE WE TRYING TO DO HERE? 🌊
THE PROBLEM
Know what you are measuring
Most in-house teams run every email through one reporting template, so onboarding gets graded like outbound and win-back gets graded like a newsletter, and none of those numbers are honest on their own.
That confusion costs more than a bad Monday report. It hides exactly where retention is leaking, because the campaigns doing the retention work are being measured by a metric built for a completely different job.
You can’t measure apples to oranges here - every email campaign has an objective, audience, and should be measured accordingly.
WHAT THIS SHIFT ACTUALLY MEANS ⚡
BREAKING DOWN THE FIX
Five emails that shouldn’t be measured the same
Every email type exists to do one specific job, and the KPI has to match the job, not the format. Here are some examples:
Onboarding and activation emails exist to move someone toward a milestone, so the real signal is whether the tied CRM event fired, not whether the email got opened, and with median activation sitting around a third of signups, this is where retention is quietly won or lost.
Nurture and lifecycle drips exist to move a contact toward sales-ready, so click-to-open and MQL conversion tell the truth here.
Cold sequences exist to start a conversation, so reply rate is the only number that counts, with 3 to 5% considered healthy.
Win-back emails exist to recover revenue you'd already written off, so reactivation rate within a 60 to 180-day window is the KPI, and open rate is nearly irrelevant since the whole list already stopped engaging once.
Promotional sends exist to move a segment right now, so CTOR by segment beats blended open rate every time.
CLAUDE PROMPTS UP FOR GRABS 🧪
SPONSORED POST
Save 10+ Hours a Week With 37 Claude Prompts
Every manager faces the same situations before lunch: a message to land, a meeting to run, a hiring call, a report due. The AI Report built 37 Claude prompts for exactly those moments, organised by the situations every manager faces.
Copy the prompt, fill the brackets, run it in Claude, and get back 10+ hours a week. Oh, and it's free.
All you have to do is subscribe to The AI Report, a 5-minute daily AI brief read by 400,000+ business leaders at IBM, AWS and Microsoft, and the full prompt pack lands in your welcome email. The newsletter and the prompts, both free. Subscribe and grab both
THE PLAY TO RUN THIS WEEK ⚡
YOUR HOMEWORK THIS WEEK
Let’s check where you are
Pull last month's email report and sort every send into one of these five jobs before you look at a single metric. Then reread the "wins" and "losses" against the right scoreboard. I do think you'll find at least one campaign that was never actually broken. In addition, see if you can tie it to a campaign to track actual revenue.
44FJORD COMMUNITY ✨
WHAT’S HAPPENING INSIDE OF 44FJORD
Signals report will be released in two weeks
Our Signals report will be ready for mid-July. Turns out, it is quite big - lots of things are happening in marketing, CRM, and AI. Who knew?
CLOSING THE LOOP
💡 Final thoughts
TL;DR
Many people still think that B2B email marketing is just sending an email once in a while and hoping it turns into a sale or a meeting. But it is so much more than that. It’s about putting the right content in front of the right people and tracking behaviour across the entire channel.
How was this issue!?
P.S.
Are you only sticking to opens and CTR metrics when measuring the effectiveness of email? What are some creative ways you’ve found to track email success? Shoot me a reply!
Until next time!
Ships three times a week.