Do simple mistakes tank your engagement?
Because no matter how big—or small—your company is, it’s easy to make marketing mistakes, Pierce Ujjainwalla warned at B2B Forum 2024.
First, see Pierce’s examples in this video excerpt from B2B Forum 2024, or read the transcript below.
Second, check your own marketing for these same mistakes. Because you don’t want to be one of Pierce’s next examples!
And third, discover additional ways to drive engagement at B2B Forum, this November in Boston. With networking, keynotes, sessions, and shenanigans, B2B Forum is the place where marketers like you go for inspiration.
The action-packed program is out. The top-secret shenanigans are under tight wraps. And tickets to the world’s most actionable B2B marketing conference are available now. Join your peers, Nov 17-19 in Boston. Get details and tickets here.
We’ve got the email opened. We’ve got someone to reply. We’re in the primary inbox. The design looks awesome. You’re building out your brand.
Now what? You want to get people to click on the email, right?
Drive engagement.
So make it easy.
Don’t make people be a detective on what you want ’em to do.
Put it right in their face and really give them something valuable.
That’s my biggest tip, maybe out of everything.
It’s not about you. It’s about your audience and what they care about.
Vimeo, I think, does a great job here. It’s just like, “try it free.” I know exactly what I should do.
We talked about button hierarchy. Same thing with visual.
You can do this with your copy based on, “how big is the font? Is it bold?”
I bet you probably read it in that order, so use that to your advantage.
Okay, I got to give Ann [Handley] a shout out at this conference.
This is something I call the X Factor. So I mean, if I look at this campaign, which was one of our best events that we ever did.
We had Ann. So right away, having a well-known speaker is going to help you drive engagement.
We had a good topic that was relevant.
We told everybody what they’re going to learn at that event.
And then we had what I call the X Factor.
Everyone can use this, but it’s like, “okay, Ann’s there. I like the topic. Oh, I’m going to learn cool things…”
But if they’re still on the edge of, “should I register or not,” the X Factor—which is in the P.S.—is, “Hey, if you register, you can win a free book that’s signed by Ann.”
And so doing something like that, it really helps push your audience across the line.
Dark mode.
35% of all opens are happening in dark mode right now.
If you aren’t testing your emails to see what they look like in dark mode, you might be having some of the issues that I’m about to show.
But I just really encourage everyone, check to see how your emails look, because it’s a huge part of your audience. Or you end up like this, where you can barely even read the copy.
And yeah, this company is a big company.
And it can happen to anybody.
So make sure that you look into that.
Or this [example]. It hurts my eyes to look at that. It should look like this.
But just make sure you’re testing to make sure dark mode is looking good.
Uber does an amazing job at this.
I’ve had our email developer try to explain to me what they did about 10 times, and I still don’t know what exactly is happening there. But yes, either work with an email developer or use a platform that helps you do this easily.
Okay, we’re going to go through a full teardown now of an email. Someone sent this in and wanted it to be torn down, so just keep that in mind.
So yeah, this is the email. It’s about a trade show that they’re trying to drive attendance to. And yeah, let’s get into it.
The first thing is, that banner looks like it was built with the PowerPoint template, 1997 defaults theme.
It’s one of those magic eye books where if you stare at it long enough, you might see something.
And then there’s some kind of theme about music or something that, I’ve had this for weeks, I can’t figure it out.
And then I think people go to conferences to do three things, I think. They go to learn. They go to meet people. And they go to have fun.
And I don’t think this email tells you about any of those things.
The hotel is there and it’s got a lot of concrete in the front, but that’s about it. And then, “oh, by the way, there’s hotel room reservations.” Make sure you do that, or… who cares.
Published June 4, 2025
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