Inside May's roundtable: Getting email to work with the rest of your marketing

Folks, if the first five months of 2026 have been anything like mine - and from what I'm hearing around me - it's been a full-on year. The “when is my summer break starting and why hasn’t that date been yesterday?” kind.

Not that any of that is slowing anyone down on H2 planning, though. 

Which is exactly what May's email marketing roundtable was about: emails that go out but don’t achieve their purpose.

ICYMI, here's what came up:

1. One participant shared that they collaborated on a campaign with B Lab US & Canada earlier this year, and it was so successful that all 400 offers were claimed within 25 minutes of sending. 

B2B partnerships, when the fit is right, are one of the most effective ways to get in front of new, aligned audiences. People are more likely to trust what you do and how you do it when you “borrow” someone’s authority.

What made that campaign land wasn't just B Lab's reach, or the fact that it was a great offer, though. It was the relationship context behind the send - years of consistent presence (across different channels) that had already done the trust-building work before the email arrived.

That's email's greatest strength, and it's usually a missed one. When email is a consistent, strategic part of your marketing, it builds relationships over time, so by the time you're asking for something, the groundwork is already there. When it isn't, each email has to do both jobs at once: sell AND build trust. With sporadic sending, that's borderline impossible.

2. The same participant had also sent a multi-email campaign to a carefully curated list - people they knew personally, had worked with, or had recently crossed paths with. 

Engagement was in the high double digits, the kind most companies would drool over, and rare enough that this kind of engagement is usually mistaken for bot activity. This one was tracked and attributed correctly, though.

But folks who had meaningful engagement with the automated emails never got a follow-up. The campaign ended where a real conversation could have started.

Following up is one of the most underused levers in B2B email. Not every touchpoint calls for it, but knowing which ones do, and having a system around those moments, is the difference between seeing ROI from this channel or not. 

Part of what I help companies do is identify where follow-up makes sense, and how. And more often than not, it can be automated and personalized - so the manual work stays manageable, but the email still feels 1:1 and intentional, not like something that went out to a faceless list.

3. Frequency came up across almost every part of this session - and in very different forms. One participant's cadence had been on and off for months. Another sends a handful of campaigns a year. The situations and rhythms are different, but the underlying challenge was similar: the difficulty of connecting what goes into each email, and how frequently emails go out, to how this channel is supposed to support the greater business goals.

For good-doing companies, giving generously in email makes sense. It's aligned with who you are and what you stand for. The value goes in… and the ask gets buried (or doesn't make it in at all). Emails that only ever give, without ever moving toward a conversation or a next step, are a lot of effort for very little return, if at all.

Consistency matters a whole lot, of course. But sending frequency ≠ email strategy - and confusing the two is one of the most common ways good-doing companies end up frustrated with email. 

They send regular emails, see decent open rates (that mean almost nothing nowadays), but can't connect ROI to those efforts. If you treat email as "one more channel with a content calendar," it'll perform like one.

If you're now planning for H2 and want your email marketing to do what it's supposed to, let's have a chat about how I can support you in doing that.

Anywhos, June's roundtable is coming up, and you'll want to be in the room for this one.

Your summer email strategy: Staying strategically consistent while taking time off

Summer is coming, and decisions need to happen now, while your team is still around. Do you keep your usual email cadence through July and August, or scale back? What will your audience engage with during these months? And what does email even look like when your whole team is in vacation mode?

That's what we're getting into on June 18th, before everyone checks out, so you can keep the momentum without exhausting your team or your subscribers.

Free, as always, but we only have 10 seats available. Join my newsletter here to get an invite link directly to your inbox.