Someone told me last week that their email subject lines should be under 50 characters. When I asked why, they said, “It’s a best practice.”
I pressed. Where did that best practice come from? What industry was the study about? What audience? What product? What was the sample size? They didn’t know. It was just something they’d read somewhere, repeated enough times that it had calcified into doctrine.
This is how most best practices work. Someone runs a test, gets a result, writes about it, and a million marketers adopt it as gospel — regardless of whether the conditions that produced that result have anything to do with their own situation.
Best practices are, at best, average practices. They’re what works in the middle of the bell curve, for the median company, in the median industry, with the median audience. If your company, industry, and audience happen to be median, congratulations — best practices might serve you well. For everyone else, they’re a ceiling disguised as a floor.
The Conformity Machine
The marketing industry is powered by best practices. Blog posts, webinars, courses, conferences — they all promise to reveal “what works.” And the answers are always the same. Send emails on Tuesday mornings. Keep landing pages above the fold. Use odd numbers in headlines. Include a CTA every 300 words.
These recommendations aren’t fabricated. They usually come from real data. The problem is that data, removed from context, becomes noise. A study showing that Tuesday emails perform best was conducted on a specific set of email lists, in a specific industry, during a specific time period. Generalizing that finding to all emails, all industries, all time periods is not science. It’s superstition with a better data set.
The deeper problem is what these best practices do to the creative process. When you start a project with a list of conventions to follow, you’ve already bounded the solution space. You’re not asking, “What’s the best approach for this specific situation?” You’re asking, “How do I implement the standard playbook?” Those are very different questions, and they produce very different outcomes.
What Context Demands
The best marketing I’ve seen — the campaigns that actually moved numbers, the content that actually built brands — almost always broke at least one best practice.
A company we worked with in the fintech space had a target buyer who was a senior operations executive at mid-market firms. Every piece of conventional wisdom said the content should be professional, polished, and formal. The best practice was corporate tone, white papers, gated content behind a form.
We went the other direction. We wrote content that was conversational, opinionated, and deliberately informal. We used first person. We told stories. We published everything ungated. The reasoning was simple: we’d talked to the actual buyers, and they were exhausted by corporate content. They wanted something that sounded human. They wanted to feel like they were reading a person, not a brand.
It worked. Engagement tripled. The content got shared in LinkedIn DMs and Slack channels — the dark social channels that best practices don’t know how to measure. The company built a genuine audience, not just a leads database.
None of that would have happened if we’d followed the playbook.
The Danger of Proxy Metrics
Best practices often optimize for proxy metrics rather than outcomes. “Keep your subject line under 50 characters” optimizes for open rate. But open rate is a proxy for engagement, which is a proxy for conversion, which is a proxy for revenue. By the time you’ve followed the chain to the thing that actually matters, the relationship between subject line length and business results is vanishingly weak.
This happens everywhere. “Post on social media three times a week” optimizes for consistency, which is a proxy for reach, which is a proxy for brand awareness, which is a proxy for… something. The best practice sounds actionable, but it’s several levels removed from any meaningful business outcome.
The alternative is to start with the outcome and work backward. What are we trying to achieve? Who are we trying to reach? What would be genuinely valuable to that person? How do we deliver it in a way that’s distinctive and memorable?
When you start with those questions, the answer is rarely a best practice. It’s something specific to your situation — something that emerges from understanding your audience at a level that generic advice can’t reach.
When Best Practices Are Useful
I’m not arguing that all conventional wisdom is worthless. Best practices have a place, and that place is the beginning.
When you know nothing about a domain, best practices are a useful starting point. They give you a baseline, a set of defaults to start from. If you’ve never written an email sequence, following a well-regarded template is better than starting from nothing.
But defaults should be temporary. They’re training wheels, not architecture. The goal is to use them long enough to develop your own judgment, then discard them in favor of approaches that are tailored to your specific context.
The marketers I respect most are the ones who can articulate why they’re doing something, not just what they’re doing. They can explain the reasoning behind every decision — and that reasoning is grounded in their audience, their data, and their experience, not in a blog post they read three years ago.
The Meta-Best-Practice
If I had to distill all of this into a single principle, it would be: context beats convention, every time.
The best email subject line is the one that your specific audience opens. The best posting frequency is the one that your specific audience engages with. The best landing page layout is the one that your specific visitors convert on. These answers can only come from understanding your context deeply — from talking to your customers, studying your data, and running your own experiments.
Best practices will tell you what the average company should do. Your job is to figure out what your company should do. Those are rarely the same thing, and the gap between them is where differentiation lives.
Stop following the playbook. Start reading the room.