Newsletter is the B2B marketer’s proven secret weapon.
The next time you’re in line at a coffee shop, or waiting for your appointment, take a look around: everyone is looking at their phones. It’s almost impossible to leave your house and not see people constantly scrolling through emails (many of them being a newsletter) on their phones. In fact, according to Smart Insights, email has an average click-through rate of 3.57%, compared to 0.59% for Twitter — which means people are more than 6 times more likely to open emails vs. tweets from brands!
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg:
- Email marketing drives more conversions than any other marketing channel, including search and social.
- Email has an ROI of $44 for every dollar spent (Source: McKinsey).
- 91% of consumers check their emails daily (Source: BlueHornet).
Newsletter is one of the most basic forms of email marketing, and yet… so many businesses don’t take advantage of it!
Why Newsletter?
Educate your Audience
In our experience, a newsletter is the best way to educate and inform your audience. You can use it to share new ideas, industry news, opinion pieces, educational content, as well as deliver information about your products/services that they might be interested in buying.
81% of B2B marketers say their most used form of content marketing is email newsletters (Source: Content Marketing Institute). With 40% saying that email newsletters are the most critical source to the success of their content marketing plan. Beating out all other survey options (Source: Content Marketing Institute).
Grow your Audience
Newsletter is a great way to build your audience because you’re offering value before getting anything in return. If you’ve never done this before, it may feel strange at first — but if you keep adding more value up front, the payoff will come later on when people are ready to buy whatever you’re selling.
A newsletter puts you in control of the buyers’ journey.
The main reason why newsletters are so powerful: They put you in control of the buyers’ journey.
When someone subscribes to your newsletter, they’ve invited you into their inbox. This means that instead of waiting for them to come find out about what you do on social media or through Google search results (which is like playing roulette), now it’s up to YOU to deliver something valuable every time they open an email from you!
If you do things right, and your content is good enough, they get instant gratification every time they see one of your messages pop up in their inbox — and when someone feels good about something they just received from a brand they trust (like yours!), guess what happens next? They’ll be more likely to engage with your future emails too. And the more they engage, the more likely they are to buy from you.
A newsletter will nurture your leads.
A newsletter will also nurture your leads. Your marketing department is probably already pursuing a variety of different strategies to try to attract new customers and drive sales.
Between pay-per-click ads, webinars, social media, events, and more; you’ve probably got a lot of irons in the fire. But if you’re still not seeing the results you want, it might be time to start sending out a newsletter on a regular basis.
Unlike other types of promotions, newsletters don’t act as hard selling tactics; instead, they help keep your brand top of mind while building trusting relationships with your customers over time via helpful and relevant content.
Your marketing department has two main goals:
- Attract more prospects and convert them into leads
- Stay in touch with existing customers so they remember who you are and why they love doing business with you.
A newsletter can support both of those efforts at once by providing easy access to useful information that will help nurture those leads until they’re ready to buy — and provide loyal clients with even more reasons to continue choosing your company over your competitors.
A newsletter enables you to generate more leads.
Word of mouth (WOM) is the most powerful type of marketing there is. Marketers covet it, chase it, live for it.
Newsletter is a low barrier to entry way of boosting your WOM marketing efforts. When people read something that educates, entertains, or inspires them, their first instinct is to want to share it with others they think might enjoy the piece too.
When you sit down to write a newsletter, the most important question you can ask yourself is, “Why will someone want to read this?”
If you have a clear answer to this question, it will allow you to write a compelling piece of content. And compelling content is what gets shared.
A newsletter can help transform your business into a flywheel… and keep the flywheel moving
If you’re not familiar with the concept of the marketing flywheel, it’s a business metaphor that illustrates how a company can build momentum by acquiring new customers. Then engage with existing customers so they purchase more. And finally, encourage them to spread the word.
The flywheel demonstrates that, in order for your business to gain traction, you need three components: attract, engage, and delight.
One of the best ways we know to get this triple threat going is through email marketing — specifically a newsletter.
We love newsletters. They’re one of the best tactics a marketer can ask for:
- Always hit your targets inbox. No changing algorithms or platform migrations to worry about.
- Flexible — can be simple or complex.
- Predictable cost — you pay the same price for your email sending platform each month. Much better than tactics like PPC where costs can fluctuate greatly in short periods of time.
- Highly scalable — it’s the same amount of work to create the newsletter regardless of how many people you send it to.
- It’s a cross-promotion machine — You can use your newsletter to fuel your other marketing efforts. Just published a new blog? Shout it out in the newsletter. Want to recruit for an upcoming webinar? Write a blurb in the newsletter.
And in turn, use your other marketing tactics to help grow your newsletter. Add a subscription box at the bottom of all blog posts. Ask viewers to subscribe at the end of the webinar. Etc.
A newsletter will help you build trust with your audience.
Trust is essential to building a successful business. And trust is crucial to getting people to buy from you when they don’t know who you are.
Newsletter marketing can help you build trust with your audience by providing consistent engagement, value, and education. Your newsletter can also help you establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry and share your brand’s personality with your prospects.
By using email newsletters to educate customers about their problems and how to solve them, you’ll be able to become their go-to resource for answers. And that’s how you’ll earn their trust—and watch your bottom line grow as a result!
A newsletter can give you immediate feedback on what’s working, and what needs improvement, in real time.
You can also use your newsletter as a feedback loop. You’ll be able to share new products/services with your readers and ask for immediate feedback (and gauging reactions!).
This can be one of the most valuable tools for a technology business: you get to see what is working with your audience and where you can improve.
Plus, you can actually ask people what they want to learn about next, then write it right into your next edition. Quickly delivering them the type of content they want to see and bringing your audience back for more.
In Conclusion
If you don’t already have a newsletter, you’re missing a big opportunity to engage your prospects/customers, close more deals and make more money. Newsletter is a low cost and scalable way to start your marketing flywheel and keep it spinning for years to come.
Need help creating your newsletter?
Whether you need to start a newsletter or already have one, but know it’s not the best it can be, we can help. Get in touch to learn more about how we can help you grow your revenue by sending a newsletter.