Making Your B2B Marketing Newsletters Even Better
A how-to for B2B newsletters: Context Collapse #324
Email newsletters are one of the most effective tools B2B companies and brands have for reaching customers.
According to stats from G2, 81% of B2B marketers say their most used content marketing tool are email newsletters with an average open rate across industries of 35.63%.
For B2B companies, every bit of marketing spending matters. Newsletters are one of the most low-cost and high-impact tools in any marketer’s arsenal.
The good news is that there are ways of making your newsletter even more effective. The five most useful ways to increase B2B newsletter effectiveness are:
Defining your newsletter’s purpose
Effectively integrating existing content
Building a schedule that works
Finding hidden metrics
List quality management
Now let’s talk about how to make great newsletters even better.
Define Your B2B Marketing Newsletter’s Purpose
If you want a B2B newsletter to succeed, it needs a clear purpose. A clear purpose for your newsletter is something that makes your audience want to read your newsletter.
Many companies create newsletters because they think they should. Without a defined goal, these newsletters often fail to deliver publishers and readers meaningful results.
One good way of figuring out your newsletter’s purpose is to ask yourself this:
What specific business outcome do you want your newsletter to achieve?
Most newsletters should have one primary goal and two-to-three secondary goals.
Some common goals for B2B newsletters I have encountered working with clients include:
Building Brand Awareness
If brand awareness is your goal, focus on metrics like:
Forward rates and social shares
Organic (non-paid) subscription growth
Mentions of your newsletter content in quantifiable industry discussion venues such as Reddit, Hacker News, Fishbowl, etc.
Increased website traffic from newsletter links
Strengthening Client and Customer Relationships
For relationship building, track:
Newsletter reply rates
Reader engagement with interactive elements such as embedded video
Direct feedback from account managers, founders and other key figures
Attendance at events such as webinars and meetups promoted in newsletters
Driving Business Referrals / Business Development
The key metrics for newsletter-based business development and referrals are:
Case study click-through rates
Case study feedback
Conversion rates for free consultation or demo offers
Tracking codes for referral sources
Choosing Your Newsletter’s Goal
When you’re figuring out the goals for your organization’s newsletters, start with your current overall marketing priorities. Your newsletter should fit into your marketing priorities. Choose priorities that align with the newsletter format of automatically arriving in inboxes and automatically getting placed in front of your audience.
Consider your team capacity and/or your own personal capacity. Committing to a weekly newsletter when your team is already overallocated may not be realistic. If your team does not have the internal knowledge or bandwidth, hire an external freelancer or consultant to build out the newsletter for you.
Finally, look at what is working (and not working) in your team’s current marketing communications strategy. If sales and promotions are working in other formats such as paid social, carry them into the newsletter as well. If your audience on YouTube is responding positively to how-to videos and customer stories, make sure you’re telling similar stories in your newsletter.
By defining a clear purpose for your newsletter, you’re giving your team a foundation for all other decisions about content, frequency, and metrics. This helps you produce the best newsletter content possible and gives readers a best-of-market experience which serves their needs while meeting business objectives.
Integrate Existing Content Into Newsletters
If your organization has a newsletter or is starting one, odds are good that you already have blog posts, social media posts, other marketing communications collateral like white papers or webinar transcripts, and even videos or podcasts.
Smart newsletter teams repurpose and reformat existing content that works in the newsletter format.
Repurposing content saves time and gets positive reader results. Videos can be embedded in newsletters and the contents of social media posts adapted into newsletter text blocks. Here are a few examples:
Taking the text from a Facebook post with a biography of a team member with an interesting life story and adapting it into the anchor feature of a newsletter.
Adapting the contents of a recent webinar on a SaaS software feature into an infographic (Example: Five ways of automating workflows with our dashboard).
Expanding a company opinion leader’s LinkedIn thought leadership post into the core of a Substack-style industry newsletter branded with the company name.
Content Repurposing Tips
Use your company’s content calendar and content matrix as a ready source of material to repurpose into newsletter content.
Don’t be afraid to repurpose older content. The social media posts and company blog posts of six months ago can easily be transformed into fresh newsletter content.
You don’t need to stick with your original formats. Video transcripts can be turned into mini-articles and infographics can be turned into pullquotes.
Keep reading about finding your newsletter’s hidden metrics, improving publishing schedules, how to actually manage your subscriber list, and more:
If you know someone who works on B2B newsletters, please share this issue with them: