5 Best Steps To Create Engaging B2B Email Newsletter Content

Lots of B2B companies recognize the potential of an email newsletter. It is a great way to nurture your leads and stay top-of-mind as their buying temperature increases.

B2B audiences are busy professionals and notoriously picky about the content that they consume. They often know their business backwards and forwards. Presenting them content that they find relevant and informative — especially something they did not actually know — can be a challenge.

The internet is awash with email newsletters that languish in inboxes, never even opened let alone read. You do not want your newsletter to be one of them. In this article, we discuss 5 of the best steps to create engaging B2B email newsletter content:

• Know your audience.
• Define your objectives.
• Offer valuable and informative content.
• Use an engaging and conversational tone.
• Measure and adapt.

Want your newsletter to be a cornerstone of your B2B email marketing strategy? Read below to learn more. Let’s go!

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The Importance of Engaging B2B Newsletters

While it can be hard to thread the needle of engaging B2B newsletter conduct, it is a challenge worth tackling and mastering. If you can become a trusted source of information, inspiration, and insight for the business leaders on your email list, that trust is priceless in terms of buying temperature. 

If your prospects make your newsletter a recurring fixture of their workweek, you can be sure they are going to remember you when their pain points become so unbearable that they are finally ready to buy. Business leaders tend to be so busy that they likely make time for one, maybe two newsletters a week. If yours becomes one of them, that attention is priceless and ripe for monetization. 

So how do you attain that rarified status of being a newsletter that prospects actually read and look forward to? Here are five tips to get you there (or at least get you closer):

1. Know Your Audience

As with all marketing content, matching the message to the audience is the whole ballgame. The only hope you have of your newsletter connecting with your audience is if you are delivering content that they will find relevant. The first step is determining who you are talking to and deducing or determining what might be relevant to them. 

In the case of B2B email marketing, your audience is usually leaders and executives within a business in your target market, preferably a decision-maker who has the authority to make a purchasing decision on behalf of the business. You may have honed in to a specific niche or industry. 

If you know at least that much about your audience, what will they find relevant? Examples include:

• Actionable tips they can use to improve their business, streamline their workday, or multiply their productivity.
• Breaking industry news that they might not yet have heard, preferably something that they can react to strategically.
• A digest of external news articles or industry metrics that the reader can tune in on a daily or weekly business to watch for trends. Doing so makes you become their one-stop shop for relevant data.

Some of these relevancies can be intuited. In other cases, you may be able to survey or interview members of your target demographic to find out what content they would find most useful. Sometimes your audience can easily tell you what they will find valuable, but other times they will only tell you problems. It is up to you to brainstorm solutions to those problems that can be delivered in newsletter form.

2. Define Your Objectives

It is not enough to want to send out a newsletter. You have to be clear on what the newsletter is to accomplish. Why this newsletter, for this audience? What need or niche will it fill?

Consider the genre of your newsletter. What is the elevator pitch? Objectives could include summarizing industry news they can use or give one marketing tip they can implement today to increase conversions and revenue. Another would be to suggest one way that companies in this industry can cut costs starting now.

These are all brief, easy-to-understand objectives. If your objective is nebulous and hard to define, it is not a good newsletter objective. Maybe you want to leave yourself wiggle room to write about whatever you want. However, that is a self-serving newsletter objective. Your recipients are going to be wondering, “What’s in it for me?” If there is not a specific reason for them to care about the newsletter, the next question will be, “Then why would I bother reading it or opting into it in the first place?”

In addition to defining what value, you want your recipients to get from the newsletter, make sure you are clear about what value you want to get from the newsletter. What action do you want readers to take? Call? Book an appointment? Reply to the email? Make a purchase? Whatever the desired action, the newsletter must be crafted around that action.

3. Offer Valuable and Informative Content

It may seem obvious, but this is harder than it looks. It is a mistake to be lazy with B2B newsletter content. If your readers are at the point of buying your offer to improve their business, they are probably past the beginner stage. Many B2B companies make the mistake of underestimating the sophistication of their readers, offering elementary or outdated content. 

Try to offer content that only you can offer them. Consider providing information that is normally behind a paywall — either your own paywall or information that you subscribe to that your readers may not. Strive to be cutting-edge, offering only the latest breaking news and industry insights. If possible, announce forthcoming events and put them on your reader’s radar.

As much as possible, make your information actionable — something they can put on their calendar or add to their browser. Something they can instruct an assistant, tech team, or marketing team to put into practice right away. Remember, the name of the game is results. If you can regularly produce results from your content, yours might be the rare B2B newsletter that your recipients identify as a must-read.

4. Use an Engaging and Conversational Tone

Great content cannot overcome sloppy or off-putting writing. Invest whatever extra effort needed to make sure that the content is well-written, approachable, and fun to read.

There are many different tones that you can adopt in your newsletter, but the best tone is a friendly, conversational one like you would use with a peer. An overly formal tone creates distance, and you do not want to sound like you are talking down to your audience. At the same time, you do not want to be overly ingratiating, like you are begging for attention. Think of it as a relationship between equals.

Avoid trying to sound smart with an avalanche of industry jargon. Do not use a $10 word where a 10-cent word will do. By being clear and concise, you are showing the reader that you respect their time and are here to deliver value, not to show off.

5. Measure and Adapt

Do not just assume that your newsletter is working. Track metrics like open rate, click-through, response, and unsubscribe rates to see what is working and what is not. Keep a database or spreadsheet of your data so that you can see at a glance what content is connecting. Do not be married to your assumptions, either. If certain content fizzles and you thought it would be a hit, do not be afraid to let it go in the face of data. Likewise, if content that you thought did not have a chance ends up making a splash, consider doubling down. Sometimes your audience surprises you.

Summing Up

It is not easy to create a winning B2B email newsletter but if you can thread that needle, your newsletter will be worth its weight in gold. Incorporate the tips outlined in the article, especially learning your audience, and defining your objectives. In addition, offer valuable and informative content that engages in a conversational tone. Lastly, adapt your newsletter’s performance as needed. By doing so, you can turn your newsletter into a productive and profitable arm of your marketing strategy.

Want to start crafting the perfect B2B newsletter strategy? Contact us. Digital Authority Partners (DAP) has masterminded some of the most successful B2B newsletters in a variety of niches. We can help you do the same for your business.