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.

1. 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.

2. Smart Branded Content Integration 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.

3. Find the Perfect Sending Schedule

There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution to newsletter publication calendars.

Industry news newsletters typically thrive on a daily or weekly basis. Company update-themed newsletters usually do best when delivered biweekly or monthly. Product announcement emails should be monthly or quarterly depending on the product/service involved.

Other kinds of newsletters thrive everywhere in-between. I have one client with an executive note-style email that does great on a weekly basis and another who provides product tips and tricks on a monthly basis.

Testing different publication schedules is one of the easiest ways of determining your unique need. Try a sample month of weekly emails or a week of daily emails and closely examine your open rates, subscribe rates, and unsubscribe rates.

Remember: Frequent isn’t always better. Depending on your brand, daily or weekly emails may overwhelm subscribers, increase unsubscribe rates, and decrease open rates. Publishing better content less often may be better for your brand. Or… it might be that more frequent newsletters are what works! Experiment and see what generates the best results.

Finally, newsletter teams should look at when in the day newsletters are sent out. Some newsletter platforms will options for automatically sending out a newsletter at an algorithmically set time for each recipient, which I enthusiastically like for my clients. Other times, it may make more sense to set send times depending on industry and/or geography.

I typically urge my daily industry newsletter clients to send their newsletters out for 8am-9am Eastern time, and regional companies (for instant those with customers primarily on the US west coast) should use a time that makes sense for their time zone and customer base.

4. Beyond Open Rates: Hidden Metrics Matter

When you’re gauging newsletter performance, there’s a lot more to keep in mind besides open rates, churn rates, and conversion rates.

There are hidden newsletter metrics which can make tracking newsletter performance and maximizing success significantly easier.

Strategic Link Placement

I’m a big fan of strategic link placement in the middle and end of newsletters as a proxy for gauging reader interest in email body.

I will reserve the most interesting links in a newsletter for the end and midpoint of the body in order to see how readers actually engage with newsletter contents.

Clicks on the midpoint and end links are a powerful hidden metric.

Newsletter Reply Quality Tracking

I recommend that my clients set up a separate spreadsheet (or automate tracking in their CRM) for tracking email replies to each issue of the newsletter.

My primary metric for reply quality tracking is the seniority or noteworthiness level of people who reply. Are replies consistently coming from readers who are decisionmakers on purchases? Are they key opinion leaders such as journalists or prominent social media creators?

I particularly like to see which topics generate responses from executives, journalists and industry podcasters/YouTubers. One primary area of interest for this hidden metric is how many responses lead to primary or secondary conversions.

Newsletter Secondary Action Tracking

One of my favorite things to track for clients is how many people visit my organization’s website within 48 hours of newsletter publishing. Especially for biweekly and monthly newsletters, I’ve seen noteworthy jumps in web traffic in the 48 hour post-newsletter publishing window.

5. Newsletter List Quality Management

Successful B2B marketing newsletters are all run by editors and managers who relentlessly manage newsletter list quality.

Your main priorities in managing your newsletter list quality should be:

• Removing inactive respondents

• Segmentation for analyzing your subscriber audience

• Making strategic use of subscriber data

Removing Inactive Newsletter Respondents

Sometimes subscribers change employers and their email addresses become inactive. Sometimes subscribers have life changes such as a new child or health concerns which mean they no longer have time to read any newsletters. Sometimes subscribers simply don’t read a newsletter anymore.

I am a massive fan of editing newsletter subscriber lists every quarter and removing subscribers who haven’t opened an issue within a year or otherwise interacted with the newsletter.

A large subscriber count does not benefit your organization if it’s driving all your other metrics down and giving you a distorted idea of your actual open rates and engagement rates.

Remove, remove, remove.

Smart Newsletter Subscriber Segmentation

A newsletter subscriber database is useful, but it’s only as useful as the data is easy to browse. After all, 5000 loose email addresses don’t benefit anyone.

I recommend segmenting subscriber databases around the following lines:

• Geography (Country or state, depending on the organization)

• Institutional Role (Buyer, influencer, vendor, future buyer, etc.)

• Device (Do they primarily read your newsletter on desktop or mobile?)

• Domain (Do they subscribe with their work address or personal email?)

• Highly Engaged Readers (Do they read 60% of your emails? Are they in your top 50% of readers who click on links? Have they responded to previous in-newsletter promotions?)

Targeted List Marketing Growth Strategy

For B2B newsletters, all subscribers aren’t the same. You want subscribers who will either:

• Convert into customers or brand promoters

• Influence their organization into becoming customers or spending more with your brand

This is why I am such a big fan of having a deliberate strategy for targeted newsletter mailing list growth. You want to attract the most useful readers, rather than having more subscribers for the sake of having more subscribers.

Depending on your organization, the most efficient tools for this can be cross-promotion (for instance, your newsletter featuring an interview with an influencer in your field who will promote the newsletter appearance in exchange), paid search or social ads, organic social posts or changing newsletter wording to promote sharing and forwarding.

Experiment, Experiment, Experiment

Remember: There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for B2B newsletters. Every organization, every industry vertical, and every marketing team has unique needs.

The important thing is to try different things, conduct lots of small bets, and relentlessly track issue-to-issue metrics to identify trends, wins, and room for improvement. And, of course, to keep writing and sending your newsletter.

Now, you’ve read a lot in this article and learned a lot… If it was helpful and you want to start a newsletter or take your newsletter to the next level, contact Neal Ungerleider to learn more about his services. He has worked on newsletters for Fortune 500 companies, fast-growing startups, global education giants, and everyone in-between.