By otakuyassine3@gmail.com 
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.
However, if the purpose of the email is to provide an exclusive resource or generate X amount of dollars from a product promotion, then we proceed with development. But our goal is really to deliver value, not clutter, to our customers’ inboxes. It really is a huge responsibility that they’ve entrusted to us. We always start with the purpose and the goal, and we go from there.
Related Article: The 5 Biggest Challenges From a Decade of Email Marketing Change
Understanding Vanity Metrics and Their Limits
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, yeah, because they can open it all day if they want, but what do they do with it? Maybe they’re opening it because they’re mad and they’re looking for the unsubscribe button.
Brianna Langley Henderson: I hope not.
Dom Nicastro: Right? That could be. So if you’re just looking at hard open rates, it’s misleading because they might be opening it just to get it out of their inbox.
Brianna Langley Henderson: Exactly. It’s what I call vanity metrics. Similar to social media—opens and click-throughs are great, but if you don’t have real data on the back end to back that up, like revenue or downloads of a resource, it’s just vanity.
Personalizing Emails Beyond First Names
Dom Nicastro: Everyone talks about the P word—personalization. Are there certain tactics you’re using to personalize emails? I mean, we can all do the “Hi Dom,” “Hi Brianna,” personalization. But what levels of personalization are you getting into, and how do you achieve those?
Brianna Langley Henderson: Yeah. This ties back to my earlier point about A/B testing because you’re right—personalization should go way beyond just inserting the customer’s first name in the greeting line. Maybe that’s great, maybe it works, but I usually just skip right past an email that has my name in it, because I think, “How did you even get my name?”
Instead, my team conducts very extensive A/B tests, as I mentioned earlier, on specific audience segments, using various email types and focusing on how customers interact with that email—their experience from start to end. For example, we’ll begin by testing whether customers respond better to product-focused language or customer-centric language in the subject line. Once we’ve gathered sufficient results, we apply the same test to the preview text, email header, body copy, and finally, the CTA (Call to Action).
AB Testing Customer vs. Product-Focused Language
Brianna Langley Henderson: We want to be really meticulous and thorough so that we can tailor future emails to the preferences of each segment. One test we did recently was exactly that—testing whether customers responded better to customer-centric language, like “you” language, or product-focused language in the subject line. We found that for promotions or discounts, product-focused language garnered higher results. But for value propositions or valuable resources, their preferences switched to customer-centric language. It was really interesting, and I don’t think we would have naturally guessed that.
So having that data and being able to refer back to it is key. For example, when a specific product is on sale, customers want to know about the product upfront. If it’s something more beneficial to them as a company or individual, we should focus on customer-centric language. That’s why we do the same test throughout the email—from subject line to copy. Once we’ve finished testing customer versus product-focused language, we move on to testing active versus passive voice or formal versus conversational tone. Doing these tests throughout the entire email journey is really important to get those honed results.
Creating Content and Collaborating Across Teams
Dom Nicastro: Yeah, and creating content is a huge part of it, right? Testing those strategies and themes—what’s that effort like? Who’s involved in that? Is it just the marketing team putting together the content?
Brianna Langley Henderson: We get a lot of support. Like I said, our whole company is very supportive of what we’re trying to do because it’s revolutionary, especially in the heavy equipment industry. Maybe not in every industry, but for us, it is. So, for example, we did a hydraulic formulas cheat sheet, and we worked with engineers and technical support to ensure the formulas were correct. They’re very supportive. I hate that this conversation is going in this direction, but we do utilize AI a lot for the initial content generation, and then we refine it from there. It’s a small team, but with AI and support from other departments, we manage it.
AI as an Intern: Using AI to Boost Productivity
Dom Nicastro: AI is like—I’ve said it before—AI is an intern, right? Proceed with caution. It’s an intern.
Brianna Langley Henderson: Yes, but we’ve never had this level of content production productivity before. So we’re definitely utilizing it and taking advantage of it, but it’s followed by a lot of editing before it goes out.
Email as a Gateway to Other Channels
Dom Nicastro: At the end of the day, Brianna, what would you say is the central focus of your emails? For us, it’s about getting them back to the website. We want them to live there, explore, and use the email as a gateway to get there. We don’t want them just playing around with the email. We want them out of the email and onto the website. Is there a similar approach for you—getting them from email to another property—or do you want them to consume the information within the email itself?
Mixing Content Marketing and Email Strategy
Brianna Langley Henderson: It’s a mixture. And I think for us, it really has to be a mixture. You know, whether or not you use HubSpot, for example, chances are you know exactly who they are, because you’ve likely encountered several of their thought leadership articles online, right? The same applies to Indeed in the HR sector. Our objective is to adopt that same type of content marketing strategy that keeps the brand top of mind, even if people aren’t ready to purchase or aren’t in a position to purchase immediately.
We want to take that same content strategy and apply it to our email marketing strategy. That transforms these valuable pieces of content, like I mentioned earlier, from being just lead magnets because they’re likely existing customers, not leads or prospects opening the emails. They should be offered the same quality content, right? And it’s companies like that, especially in the industrial sector where I work, that are going to endure long term because they offer more than just a product—they deliver industry insights, market research. That’s the distinction between offering a product and providing genuine value, in my opinion.
Organic Content Success Stories
Dom Nicastro: You hear—we’ve had on the CMO Circle a CMO named Tom Wentworth. They got acquired by MasterCard, but they were a cybersecurity firm. He started a blog that ended up being this massive news site where he hired journalists and everything to actually get stories, like CMSWire would, and not even talk about their products whatsoever. It’s got great SEO, and they land on all the top news networks when cybersecurity news breaks. It’s a brilliant sort of organic thing. Organic success can be so nice when it works, right? We put all that effort into content, and it actually resonates. That’s pretty cool.
Brianna Langley Henderson: Well, and it’s all about—I tell my team this all the time—it’s not so much about how you view the customer, but how you view yourself. You really have to see yourself as more than a transactional partner for your customers—less of a transactional partner and more of a thought leader in the industry. Once you start shifting that mindset internally, you’re naturally going to start producing really valuable content for your customers and clients in the same industry.
The Importance of Subject Lines in Emails
Dom Nicastro: Yeah? Do marketers overstress over subject lines? Or is that a good place to be stressed out about? How about you guys? Do you stress that much over the subject line? How much time and thought do you put into it? We certainly put a heck of a lot of thought into it.
Brianna Langley Henderson: We do. I wouldn’t say it’s more or less than any other part of the email, though, to be honest. We have that very structured A/B testing process in place where we know exactly what we’re testing and which component of the email we’re focusing on. So yeah, we give the subject lines the same amount of consideration as the rest of the email throughout that testing process.
Email Technology and Analytics Challenges
Dom Nicastro: Awesome. And how about technology? We haven’t gotten into that yet in terms of the tools to get the emails out. Are those tools serving you well these days? Are you looking for more out of these tools? Are they complicated to navigate? Do they have a good section that shows you analytics? Am I complaining about our email platform right now? I think I am. Is it slow?
Brianna Langley Henderson: Yeah, no, it’s definitely clunkier than I would like. And I don’t understand why people expect it to be clunky because email is a totally free, direct line to your customers. We should be taking more advantage of that. But we have to use UTM tracking and Google Analytics to tie everything back to our ecommerce store, for example. I can pull all the metrics I want out of our emailing software, but then I have to go to Google Analytics, open it up, download a spreadsheet, and do a pivot table just to see the revenue generated. There’s got to be a better way to connect the dots and streamline the process so we don’t have to go through 500 different platforms just to pull the metrics we need.
Related Article: From Friendly Faces to AI: The True Power of Marketing Personalization
The Growing Ecosystem of Martech Providers
Dom Nicastro: Agreed. Scott Brinker mentioned this too in his marketing technology landscape report for 2024. He said the ecosystem of martech providers is growing in the sense that these apps are around the central platform. In other words, marketing automation software is integrating with these startups who are so much better than the marketing automation provider. The fact that we need those integrations is proof that the marketing automation providers aren’t doing great in terms of innovation.
I went to a vendor conference, and one of the integrators was showing how easy it was. Like, look at this—it’s drag-and-drop. A nice little chunk of text into the email body. That’s not what I see in my marketing automation platform. This is crazy.
Brianna Langley Henderson: There’s definitely a lot of APIs and integrations, and it’s fine, but it could be so much more streamlined. It could be so much better.
What’s Next for Email Marketing in 2025?
Dom Nicastro: Let’s wrap this up. Give me the 2025 thing you want to happen with email or something you’re constantly working on to improve, or something you hope to have done if we’re talking a year from now.
Brianna Langley Henderson: With email specifically, it’s difficult to say because, in my view, it’s all so interconnected. To me, email is the content marketing platform for existing customers, and I don’t think it’s been treated that way in years past. That’s what my team is focused on now—generating quality content like market research, industry reports, hydraulic formula cheat sheets, things that our customers are genuinely going to find valuable and use.
Then, when we do have a product to promote or a sale, we already know that our customers are looking for our name in their inbox and are more likely to open it. They’re trained that we offer really valuable stuff. That’s the overall goal, and I’d love to see a lot more engagement on that front.
The Future of Email Marketing
Dom Nicastro: You think in 2034, when we’re back on the CMSWire Digital Experience Show, we’ll still be talking about this email thing?
Brianna Langley Henderson: Yeah, I do. People keep saying it’s going to die, but I don’t see any other way for marketing teams to directly communicate with their customers. So I don’t see it going away.
Dom Nicastro: What do they do with all their web analytics when someone’s on their page looking at something? How do you get to them after that? Give them a call?
Brianna Langley Henderson: Exactly.
Dom Nicastro: I’m with you 100%. Email’s never going to die. It’s the best platform ever invented for marketing, and everyone is going to stick with it.
Brianna Langley Henderson: If I changed my email address right now, there’s a big chunk of my life that would just be gone forever.
Dom Nicastro: Exactly. No one wants to leave it. People are obsessed and need to be in that inbox. So yeah, email marketing—it up. Meet them where they are. Brianna Langley Henderson, Marketing Manager at Bailey International, you’ve been a great guest. I encourage folks to find her on CMSWire.com and follow her thought leadership. It’s been tremendous having you in the family, and I thank you for coming on the show.
Brianna Langley Henderson: Thank you! So happy to be here and happy to come back anytime.
Dom Nicastro: All right, say hi to the dog for me. Oh yeah, the little baby too! The cutie, the cutest one in the house. All right, thanks for joining us, Bri. Have a good one!
Brianna Langley Henderson: Thank you!
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