What our peers are doing across email, social and community — and the directions that are actually working. With a closer look at email, and where Cloudflare can go next.
Who is buying — and how they buy — looks nothing like it did five years ago.
The playbook that worked in 2020 is already dated — buyers, channels and expectations all moved at once.
Millennials and Gen Z are now the majority of B2B buyers; a typical purchase runs through 6–10 stakeholders. (Gartner)
Buyers do most research alone and arrive shortlisted — via peers, communities and reviews, not sales.
Engineers, developers and security analysts increasingly trigger and shape purchases from the bottom up.
G2, Reddit, Slack and Discord communities, and creators now outweigh traditional brand advertising.
The emotional register of security marketing is being rewritten.
Snyk, Okta / Auth0 and HashiCorp win builders with docs, code and DevRel — not fear.
1Password and KnowBe4 use humor and a human voice to make security approachable and memorable.
Leaders build personal brands on LinkedIn; “building in public” earns trust at scale.
Cloudflare’s public incident postmortems are the category benchmark for trust through openness.
How the content itself is changing shape.
The channel did not die — the rules changed underneath it.
Apple Mail Privacy Protection (2021) pre-loads images on Apple’s dominant Mail app, auto-firing “opens.” Open rate is no longer trustworthy — optimize clicks, replies and conversions. (Litmus)
Since Feb 2024, Google & Yahoo require bulk senders to authenticate (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), offer one-click unsubscribe, and keep spam complaints under 0.3%.
Batch-and-blast is fading. 78% of marketers say segmentation is their most effective tactic; 72% personalize and 71% automate. (DemandSage 2026)
open rate on welcome emails — onboarding is peak attention. Use it.
up to this much lift in clicks when video is added to an email. (DemandSage)
ideal subject length; iPhone shows ~48. Write mobile-first.
Security and tech practitioners increasingly trust independent, human-voice newsletters over brand blasts.
tl;dr sec, Return on Security, Risky Business, Last Week in AWS and Pragmatic Engineer command loyal practitioner audiences.
High-signal, personal and algorithm-proof — a direct relationship no platform can throttle.
Cloudflare has the raw material — the blog, research and Radar data — to build a best-in-class owned audience.
Email is one node in a connected system.
97% of B2B marketers use it; video earns 5× engagement. Thought leadership and employee advocacy beat link-dumps.
Owned Slack / Discord, GitHub and docs-as-marketing build durable, high-trust audiences — home turf for infra and security brands.
~98% open rates, but intrusive. In B2B it fits opt-in event and webinar reminders, not nurture.
Live events are the single most-used tactic; the win is converting them into on-demand libraries.
Concrete moves, grounded in the research and our own strengths.
Retire open rate as a KPI. Report click-to-open, clicks, replies, conversions and pipeline. Aim at the tech benchmark: 7.4% CTR, 16.5% CTOR.
Enforce SPF / DKIM / DMARC, one-click unsubscribe and spam complaints under 0.3%. Move to engagement-based sending and sunset dead contacts — we sell email security, let’s dogfood it.
Speak differently to developers, security / IT leaders and executives — distinct cadence, content and voice. Segmentation is marketers’ #1 lever (78%).
One clear call-to-action, image-led, concise. Put depth one click away, not behind a gate.
Turn the blog, research and Radar data into a tl;dr-sec-quality security / developer digest. Build an audience no algorithm can throttle.
Bring the voice of our incident postmortems to marketing. Teach, don’t fearmonger — it is our unfair advantage.
Short-form video, clear diagrams and product walkthroughs, repurposed across email, LinkedIn and YouTube.
Run one nurture across channels and meet developers where they already are: Discord, GitHub, docs.
Synthesis of 2025–26 industry reports plus public marketing from peer security and tech brands (CrowdStrike, Palo Alto, Zscaler, Okta / Auth0, Snyk, 1Password, Datadog, KnowBe4, Cloudflare).
HubSpot State of Marketing 2026; Wyzowl 2026; Backlinko Email Stats 2026; GetResponse Benchmarks 2026; DemandSage 2026; Mailchimp Benchmarks; Exploding Topics B2B 2026; FirstPageSage 2025.
Gartner (buying groups); Forrester (buyer demographics); Google / Yahoo 2024 sender requirements; Litmus (Apple MPP); SMS ~98% open (industry-cited).
Confirm the latest figures before external use; benchmarks vary by provider and sample.