The Gist

  • Aligning email marketing with company goals. Bailey International ensures their email marketing aligns with overall company objectives, focusing on personalized customer experiences.
  • Testing and iterating for better results. Through A/B testing, Bailey International refines email marketing content based on customer preferences, enhancing both engagement and results.
  • Email marketing as a customer-first strategy. For Bailey International, email marketing is an opportunity to deliver value to customers by focusing on retention and not just acquisition. 

In this episode of The Digital Experience, Dom Nicastro, editor-in-chief of CMSWire, sits down with Brianna Langley Henderson, marketing manager for Bailey International. The conversation dives deep into how email marketing strategies can be personalized and aligned with company objectives. Brianna shares insights on A/B testing, retention marketing, and how email can provide genuine value to existing customers. They discuss real-world examples and explore future trends for email marketing in 2025.

Table of Contents

Email Marketing as the Fast Food of Marketing Tactics

Dom Nicastro: Hey, everybody. Dom Nicastro, editor-in-chief of CMSWire. Back at it for another edition of CMSWire TV’s The Digital Experience. And joined by my pal, Brianna Langley Henderson. She’s the Marketing Manager for Bailey International. But more important than that, she’s a CMSWire contributor. What’s going on, Bri?

Brianna Langley Henderson: Not much. I was talking to one of your producers right before you hopped on, and he was like, “Do you know Dom Nicastro?” And I was like, “It’s been probably like, two or three years now that we’ve been working together and collaborating,” which is crazy.

Doubling Down on Email Marketing

Dom Nicastro: I’m making notes here to reprimand some of my staff. I mean, who doesn’t know me? I mean, come on, that’s so silly, so silly. But we’re here today to catch up on all things AI. Just kidding, just kidding. We’re going to get into something that’s actually like you’re doing—like nuts and bolts. Not to say you’re not doing AI, but it’s like, this is like, actual, tangible results, clear cut, no questions about it. And it’s the wonderful world of email marketing. And I love this topic. You know why? Because, first of all, yeah, we all do it, and we don’t like to admit it—it’s like the fast food of marketing tactics.

Aligning Email Marketing With Company Objectives

Dom Nicastro: Brianna, right now, why are you doing this? Why are you doubling down on email marketing?

Brianna Langley Henderson: Yeah. Um, so one thing about email marketing that I always emphasize to my team is the importance of aligning with our company’s overall objectives. Because you’re right, it can quickly become just the fast food of marketing. And I know marketers often express frustration, sometimes rightly so, about being excluded from those kinds of strategic discussions.

But to me, it’s crucial to make the most of that opportunity once it’s given. So it’s kind of a two-way street. I think it reflects poorly on us if, after receiving the chance to have a seat at the table, we just sit there and listen and then do our own thing anyway. So that’s why I always start with aligning with company goals. It’s always my top priority.

More specifically, I work in the mobile equipment manufacturing sector, and a big company differentiator for us is exceptional customer service and technical support.

So at Bailey, we want to be a valued partner for our clients, not just a transactional entity. That overall company approach really opens up a multitude of opportunities for content and email marketing. I just think my team is really lucky to get to explore those with so much executive support. Despite being a pretty small team, we’ve been able to establish a pretty sophisticated AB testing process, which I think is absolutely crucial if you’re going to go down the email marketing road.

This success measurement is strongly supported by our executive team because it directly enhances personalized customer experiences. For instance, if our customers prefer conversational language over formal, we want to know that so we can provide it to them. Embracing a customer-first mindset and the ability to test and iterate has really transformed our overall marketing strategy, particularly with email.

Related Article: The Email Marketing Trends That Are Seeing Adoption & Success

Debunking the Myth: Is Email Marketing Dead?

Dom Nicastro: People say email’s dead, right? Email marketing is dead. I mean, who doesn’t have an email, right? It’s the easiest path of least resistance. The targeting is there. People offer up their emails all the time to get things like white papers. Actually, that’s a question for you. How does email collection go? That’s the name of the game, right? So are there some efforts that you’re doubling down on in that sense, to simply get emails?

Brianna Langley Henderson: Yeah, sure. We have the traditional lead magnet stuff in the works. We could do a lot more around that, and that’s kind of the next step in my personal strategy with the team. But I like to say that we shouldn’t just be offering valuable pieces of content to leads or prospects. Our existing customers shouldn’t be excluded from that, and email marketing is a great way to make sure we are providing valuable content and resources to our existing customers as well. Just because you’re not a lead or prospect doesn’t make you less important. In fact, retention marketing and retaining customers is usually a lot more cost-effective than acquisition.

Engagement Tactics for Email Marketing

Dom Nicastro: What are some of the tried and true tactics for you for engagement? We go through this every day at CMSWire. We send out all our articles, including wonderful articles from Brianna Langley Henderson, in fact. So if Brianna writes an article, she’s one of, like, you know, six articles that go out in an email every day. We need to make the recipients’ experience valuable, because we know when people are scrolling through emails, they’re looking for their boss or family member. So, how do you get their attention when they didn’t go to their inbox for CMSWire?

Brianna Langley Henderson: I’m going to start really high-level here. First of all, if you’ve been given someone’s inbox to send messages to, that’s a huge responsibility. My team agrees that emails should not be sent to fulfill an internal monthly quota. Every email should serve a purpose and offer value. You mentioned the emails from your boss—there are brands whose emails you probably delete immediately without opening, but I bet there are other brands whose emails you actually look for in your inbox weekly or monthly because they enrich your life or work.

Real-Life Example of Effective Email Marketing

Dom Nicastro: Exactly. My monthly Bark Box subscription for my dog. I’m excited to see it!

Brianna Langley Henderson: Exactly. It could be a market research study that’s tailored to your industry or a newsletter offering editorial best practices in your case, Dom. Or maybe it’s a discount alert or notification about products retiring soon. These add value and prompt you to open the emails. Here’s a real-life example from my experience as a consumer.

I work in equipment manufacturing, and we’ve placed ads with several industry publications. One of them, Farm Journal, started a newsletter called Breakthrough, specifically for marketers in the agricultural industry. It’s very niche, but I clicked on it and found a lot of good content. I even forwarded it to my team, telling them to subscribe because it was really good and beneficial. That’s something that happened to me recently as a consumer.

Targeted Email Marketing for Better Results

Dom Nicastro: That’s huge targeting. I mean, that’s like jackpot. That’s everything that you dream of email marketing doing—it was targeted, it got your attention, and you shared it. That doesn’t cost them anything, you shared that.

Brianna Langley Henderson: No, no, it was great. And that’s kind of, you know, the approach I want us to take as a business doing these emails.

A/B Testing and Refining Email Strategies

Dom Nicastro: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re doing A/B testing a lot too, and trying to come up with a couple of subject lines a day, a couple of subheaders. I call those subheaders the text where you’re in the inbox, and you see the subject line, and then there’s a little tiny text next to it—the preview text. We call it sub. I don’t know why. I think our marketing department calls it something different, but who knows? With that said, KPIs obviously matter as well. So what do you want to get out of your email marketing? KPIs? What numbers are you looking at constantly? For us, it’s like, did they click on it, open it? Click to open—those tried and true metrics. Are you looking at those mainly, or are there any others?

Brianna Langley Henderson: Yeah. So that really depends on the original goal of the email itself. And I’m always reiterating this—the purpose of an email dictates its creation or its lack of creation. So our team has this process in place where every single email is evaluated before being developed, and our first question is: what is the goal of this email? I’m going to tell you right now, if the goal is something like ‘more opens,’ then it’s not compelling enough to send to our customers. We really want to avoid being a source of pollution in their inboxes.



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