Many B2B newsletters are incredibly dull and they get moved to the trash before you even open them. If your open rates are low, let’s face it—your newsletter might fall into this category.
The good news: It doesn’t have to be this way.
In this guide, you’ll find some valuable tips on how to create an engaging B2B newsletter that’s highly appealing to your target audience. We’ll also take you through the benefits of doing so, and give you some examples of B2B companies that are nailing their newsletters.
B2B Newsletter Benefits
Your email newsletter should be a key part of your B2B email marketing strategy. Here are some reasons why:
Builds brand awareness
Building brand awareness is one of the main goals of all digital marketing strategies.
You can use your B2B email newsletter to keep customers informed about your business and the products or services you offer. With each newsletter, readers become more aware of your brand identity, your values, and how you can help them solve the problems that are common within their niche.
With your newsletter, you can demonstrate your expertise, which helps to build trust with your audience. (Simply put, when it’s obvious you know what you’re talking about, your audience is more likely to trust you.)
This helps you stay top of mind with prospects and ensures you’re seen as an authority that can help them resolve their issues.
Increases your ROI
Email marketing, in general, is one of the most efficient and cost-effective ways to market your business. By including compelling CTAs in your newsletters, you encourage users to convert. Whether that means downloading your software, buying the latest upgrade, or booking tickets for upcoming events, it can lead to a boost in revenue.
As a result, you get a high return on the money you invest in your newsletter campaign.
Increases site traffic
Your newsletter should include a link (or more) to your site. This could be a link to your homepage, product pages, or a recent blog post.
With solid content built behind these links and calls to action, readers are likely to click on these links and drive traffic to your product or service pages. As a result, you could see an increase in conversions and revenue.
Helps nurture relationships & establish expertise
These newsletters provide a great opportunity for you to demonstrate your expertise by sharing industry news, fresh insights, and useful analysis.
This helps you nurture your relationships with your prospects and customers as they come to view you as a trusted source of information within your niche.
By demonstrating authority you can attract new prospects. Plus, you can make your existing customers more loyal and ensure you retain them.
Allows you to repurpose content effectively
We’ve all been there. You’ve written a piece of informative, relevant content, posted it on your blog, and shared it across your social media platforms. Yet, the engagement levels are low and it’s clearly not reaching your target audience.
With your newsletter, you can repurpose existing content and send it out to your prospects and customers. This means those pieces of valuable content you worked so hard on can be put to good use after all!
B2B Newsletter Examples
Now you know why they are important and how they can benefit your business. To further demonstrate this, let’s look at some examples of companies that are getting it just right.
1. Zoho Buzz
Zoho is a SaaS company that specializes in web-based business tools. Its newsletter, “Zoho Buzz”, is a great example of how to educate and engage an audience while naturally highlighting your products.
The newsletter provides information about updates to its products and tells customers how these updates will help them solve various pain points.
Zoho also includes an “Analyst Speak” section where company experts deliver insights related to the business software niche and describe how Zoho’s tools can be used to solve business challenges.
2. Sage Advice
Sage is an enterprise software company. Its products deal with business tasks like HR processes, accounting, and supply chain management.
Sage produces one of my favorite B2B newsletters called “Sage Advice” and is a perfect example of audience segmentation in action (dividing your audience by shared characteristics).
When you sign up, you receive a welcome email asking you to choose from three different categories:
- Small business
- Medium business
- Accountant
Depending on which one you choose, you’ll receive a regular newsletter specifically tailored to that category. So, you know the information in the newsletter will be relevant and valuable to you.
3. Cisco Secure
Cisco’s monthly newsletter, “Cisco Secure”, provides expert analysis and innovative insights relevant to the tech niche in which they operate.
Cisco offers software, networking hardware, and consulting services. Clearly, Cisco understands the pain points of their audience really well, as the newsletter typically features cybersecurity updates. It also includes:
- Free offers and trials
- Info on the latest updates to Cisco products
- Industry news
- Invites to upcoming events like workshops and webinars
4. JP Morgan’s In Context
JP Morgan’s “In Context” is one of the best B2B newsletters in the finance niche. Twice a month, their experts deliver market-leading insights into the financial service industry and in-depth analysis of trends within the sector.
The newsletter is highly readable and engaging. It condenses technical data and complex info into content that’s easy to understand. The newsletter also provides inspiring stories from within the industry that can serve as motivation.
5. FedEx Updates
“FedEx Updates”, the monthly newsletter from FedEx, provides strategies and advice to businesses about using its shipping services.
Its newsletter features things like tips on how to plan your business shipping needs for the holiday season. It also gives businesses information about service disruptions. This allows businesses to put contingency plans in place so they can continue shipping when certain services are down.
B2B Newsletter Best Practices
Whether you’re writing a daily or weekly newsletter, there are a number of things you can do to make sure you engage your readers.
By following the best practices below, you can improve your newsletter’s click-through rates (CTR) and open rates.
Include visuals
Besides engaging text, another way to grab the attention of your readers is to use eye-catching visuals in your newsletter. This will make your newsletter even more engaging.
You can use GIFs and memes to provide more context to your text and draw attention to the latest trends in your niche. You can also use infographics to condense industry insights into quick, accessible visuals.
Business people are, naturally, very busy. So, communicating complex information in a simple way is a good approach to winning them over.
If you haven’t got the time to create your own visuals, make the most of email design services like the one we offer at Inbox Army. Our templates are highly customizable and reusable, which saves you plenty of time and resources.
Embrace personalization
Most businesses have a B2B email marketing campaign. As such, most business owners receive a ton of emails every day that try to sell them a product or service. Often, this means business owners simply read the subject line and move the generic marketing emails straight to the trash.
To break through the clutter, you need to personalize emails as much as possible. It could be as simple as including the recipient’s name in the subject line and at the start of the email. There are other ways to take personalization further with content and audiences, which we’ll discuss next.
Segment your audience
Segmentation means dividing your audience into different groups with shared characteristics. For example, one group might be CEOs while another group might be marketing managers.
You can then create targeted messages tailored specifically to the needs and interests of each separate group.
So, the newsletter you send to the CEOs could discuss leadership strategies. On the other hand, the one you send to the marketing managers might cover social media trends.
This ensures your newsletters are highly relevant to your readers and helps you nurture your relationships with them.
Provide value
Do you want to know one of the biggest mistakes we see businesses make with their newsletters?
They send out newsletters just for the sake of it and don’t consider what value they’re providing to their audience. Before you send any newsletter, ask yourself if it truly provides value to the audience it’s aimed at. It should educate users and convince them that it’s worth continuing to read your newsletters.
A couple of example ideas: Offer information they’d struggle to find elsewhere. Or, interpret complicated data for them that’d usually take a long time to understand. Remember, it’s about education and establishing yourself as a go-to authority on the subject.
Use automation
As you gain more and more new subscribers, it will quickly become impossible to manage certain processes. For instance, earlier we mentioned personalizing subject lines. Well, that becomes a bit tricky when you have 1,000 subscribers.
This means you need to start automating aspects of your newsletter and your overall email marketing campaign. To do this, you could invest in an email marketing tool or take advantage of the email campaign management services offered by b2b agencies like Inbox Army.
That way, you can focus on creating high-quality newsletter content without worrying about any of the annoying admin.
Highlight products and services but don’t be too pushy
Of course, the main point of email marketing, content marketing, or any other type of marketing is to sell your products or services. Still, a newsletter isn’t meant to be a hard sales pitch.
Primarily, it should educate your readers about topics in your niche and provide information about your brand. While doing so, you can naturally highlight your products or services. Draw attention to the benefits of using them and how they can help customers overcome specific pain points.
The important word here is “naturally”. Don’t try to crowbar specific products into newsletters when they’re not relevant to the topic of the email.
Monitor your results
What worked last month might not necessarily work today. That’s why you need to keep a close eye on the performance of your newsletter and make adjustments when needed.
The most important metrics to monitor are click-through rate (CTR) and open rate. CTR measures how many recipients click on the links in your newsletter. Open rate tracks the percentage of recipients that open your newsletter email in the first place.
If your CTR is low, you might want to try using better CTAs. If your open rate is low, you need to think about making your subject lines more compelling and personalized.
Note: Do not make open rate your primary metric. It should treated as a directional metric.
Final Thoughts
A B2B email newsletter is one of the best ways to build brand awareness, nurture relationships, and establish yourself as a voice of authority within your niche. Your newsletter should always provide value and be tailored to different segments of your audience.
If you do this, and follow the other tips in this guide, you’ll have a winning newsletter that your customers can’t wait to read.
FAQs
How often should I send my B2B newsletter?
You should send out your B2B newsletter at least once a month, and likely bi-weekly or weekly (or more). Your performance metrics and the amount of relevant content you can deliver will dictate your cadence. The important thing is to recognize that you must deliver value each time you send.
What’s the best length for a B2B newsletter?
As with everything, test. That said, recognize that your audience is short on time, so shorter, more scannable emails are likely to perform better. If you’re mailing once a month, you can be longer (think 500 words). If you’re mailing twice a week, you can be shorter (think 200 words).
It boils down to your content creating a positive user experience to keep your readers engaged.
How do I stop my B2B newsletters from ending up in spam folders?
This is a complicated question to answer with many factors that come into play. That said, some quick ideas here:
- Send your emails from your own domain rather than @gmail.com, @outlook.com, etc.
- Choose an Email Service Provider (ESP) that prioritizes deliverability
- Don’t purchase lists of email addresses. Get the opt-in
