How to write a newsletter your audience actually wants to open
If you want to write a newsletter that isn’t part of the 13 percent that go straight to spam—or that isn’t ignored—then you’re in the right place. A good newsletter is both a content format and a promotion mechanism, and it can be a gem of a marketing program. However, a poorly written newsletter can soak up a lot of effort and offer little in return. The difference is how thoughtfully you understand your audience and how you craft your subscribers’ journey—from the moment your audience finds your sign-up to when they learn to savor those weekly sends.
Newsletters are among the last owned audiences and this gives marketers the opportunity to say, do, and be anything. They can use sarcastic GIFs and expletives if that’s what readers like. Yet many newsletters never live up to their full potential.
Before launching our own newsletter, we were curious what went into a great newsletter (and dedicated to making ours exceptional). So we conducted a study. We signed up for 100 B2B newsletters over three months and rated the emails we received on design, writing, and utility in an effort to improve our own. We distilled these learnings down and are holding nothing back. In this article, we’ll share our top 11 tips on how to write a B2B newsletter that your buyers love—including the importance of finding your voice, pros and cons of various newsletter formats, why “first name” personalization does not matter in the slightest, how to write killer subject lines—and much more.
Want to get meta? Join Fenwick’s own newsletter and see how we apply everything.
Clearly define your brand and voice
If marketing is what you say, branding is who you are. You can’t successfully market your business until you have a cohesive brand. Many companies with newsletters haven’t figured out their brand. That means that we, as readers, can’t build a relationship with them.
With some newsletters in our study, the lack of self-awareness was rather obvious. It was clear that different people wrote different parts of Glassdoor’s Employer Solutions newsletter, for example. The tone of the post-click message felt cold: “You will need to confirm your email before you can receive updates.” Then, the confirmation message bubbled with joy. The tone of the welcome email was somewhere between the two. But even then, the welcome email header read, “Get hired: Love your job!” Someone had clearly copied a template intended for consumers.
Other newsletters brimmed with the personality that matched the tone of their marketing. Contently’s newsletter, for instance, featured the same cerulean blue header, sans serif font, and humorously skeptical tone of their website. It was immediately recognizable.
2. PICK YOUR FORMAT
We grouped the newsletters we received into four archetypes:
A. The Forwarder
B. The Summarizer
C. The Hard Seller
D. The Homepage
Each represents a different philosophy on sending emails. Forwarders simply forward content. Summarizers do as the name describes, but still mostly encourage people to click to read more. Hard sellers tend to just pitch their products, and the most unique format—Homepage—treat the inbox as the homepage, dare to be lengthy, and don’t force you to click to visit a website.
Let’s explore each in detail.
A. The Forwarder
5% OF NEWSLETTERS
Some companies sent their latest blog post with zero context. One marketing automation brand did this. It felt like they were just slipping articles under our door. The subject lines were the titles of the articles and the email bodies simply copied and pasted text. There was no mention of the author. We do recognize that some of these companies offer a subscription center with multiple options, but this was the default, so we’ll treat it like any other clueless recipient might.
Not one newsletter that scored in the top 10 percent for quality used the Forwarder format. Unless subscribers know they have signed up for a no-frills blog syndication service, you’re probably better off being a Summarizer and offering context.
B. The Summarizer
69% OF NEWSLETTERS
The majority of companies in our study sent emails with links to articles full of thumbnails and snippets. The key to doing this well is curation—the best ones were thoughtful, the authors had clearly spent time writing insightful titles, and they linked to multiple content formats such as video.
But plenty of others simply posted links to their latest articles. Of all the Summarizers, the design software firm InVision seemed the most engaging. Their emails were just a little longer than average—308 words compared to 273 words—but they were snappy, fun, beautiful to look at, and felt much shorter.
C. The Hard Seller
18% OF NEWSLETTERS
Some newsletters used our inbox as a soapbox on which to sell. After an initial email with a roundup of the month’s posts, none of which we recall clicking on, Wistia, unable to help itself, fell into simply pitching its product. Every subsequent email peddled a different feature and the CTA implored us to begin a trial. Wistia got points for its well-designed emails, but there was no added value and we stopped opening them.
None of the companies in the top 10 percent used this format. Perhaps it’s antithetical to building an audience—some readers may buy, but most will eventually tire and unsubscribe.
D. The Homepage
8% OF NEWSLETTERS
Some say the newsletter is the new homepage. We believe it. Newsletters are on the rise and big media companies like The New York Times, Hearst, The Wall Street Journal, and Condé Nast rely on them as a substantial source of revenue.
What makes a newsletter a Homepage? It’s a source of links to different types of content, curated in a way that adds value beyond what a web visitor could find. Where a Summarizer simply shares articles, a Homepage wraps them in commentary, context, and analysis.
Gallup, for example, provided links to lots of different types of content such as articles, white papers, research, webinars, and events. The text was minimal, but explained why each item was important and offered a sense that we were getting a summation of everything we’d have to trawl through Gallup’s website to find.
For a glimpse at the epitome of what a Homepage newsletter can and should be, you can look to consumer media companies. The Atlantic and The New York Times, for instance, excel at short, pithy newsletters that provide commentary on the day’s news and serve as a guide to the world. Any marketer could do a lot worse than provide a similar guide to their industry. Only eight percent of newsletters used the Homepage format, but 60 percent of high performers used it.
3. PICK how many emails to send per month
For a newsletter to remain enjoyable, one email per week is probably fine. Companies sent an average of 5.8 emails per month, with a median of five. Others, however, dropped our team into a perplexing batch-and-blast cannon that we never would have stood for had we not been conducting a study.
Jeff Bullas, for instance, sent a never-ending stream of impersonal-sounding “Hi friend!” emails. He was only topped by CUToday, a credit union publication that sent an astonishing 28 emails in May—sometimes twice per day.
4. Decide who will be the name and face of the emails
We received emails from four types of email sender. Which is best? It may be a matter of preference, but if companies are trying to build a relationship with subscribers, consistency is important and context helps.
Getting a random name in our inbox set off our spam alert senses. For instance, we signed up for Oktopost and were surprised to get emails from Nina Zoukelman (at Oktopost, but you have to open the email to figure that out). If you want to use just a name, know there will be a comprehension gap and people may unsubscribe simply because they don’t recognize they’re getting what they asked for.
Companies that sent emails from the company name, such as Litmus or YouTube, were at least immediately recognizable. But you can have the best of both worlds: Send your emails from someone’s first name “at” the company, like “Ash at Buffer” or “Team @ SaaStr.”
Now, another point on consistency. If readers are already rattled by one random name, why send the newsletter from a rotating cast of characters? About one-third of companies switched the names they used, which only deepened our confusion. If you’re going to do that, at least make sure their profile pictures are all of the company logo.
5. CHOOSE BETWEEN HTML, TEXT, OR IMAGE-ONLY EMAILS
Only one company used text-only emails while all others used HTML. Either format performed just fine. Text emails came across as more personal, whereas HTML emails had some obvious versatility in that senders could include images and GIFs. Neither was more likely than the other to be flagged as spam.
A few of those using HTML embedded the text within images, such as Pantone and Think with Google. This makes for a very clean desktop appearance, but a difficult mobile one, because the text is quite small. In a few instances, we wanted to copy and paste parts of the text, but couldn’t.
6. Establish an approximate length
Emails, on the whole, were quite short, which was heartening. The average length was 273 words and the average length for newsletters in the top 10 percent was 241 words. Shorter emails appear to be strongly correlated with better email design. The best-designed emails were all under 300 words, neutral designs were around 500 or less, and though the worst-designed emails varied, they tended to be longer.
7. FORGET ABOUT PERSONALIZATION
Only eight percent of companies personalized their subject lines or email bodies. None of the top 10 percent did. It’s possible that some emails were personalized by persona, and that we received a different email from other subscribers, but we were unable to verify.
This lack of personalization seems to fly in the face of conventional wisdom, and there isn’t an email provider out there that doesn’t provide this feature—some of them were even included in the study. It’s either the case that marketers have the tools but lack the time, or that personalization doesn’t make much difference in newsletters because they are already personal. Individuals who find your company and want to hear from you weekly are a fairly self-selecting group. If you write for your audience, the content is, in a sense, already targeted.
The personalization we saw from a few companies in the study was not very advanced, and probably wasn’t to their advantage. A few inserted our first name into otherwise droll subject lines and some inserted our first name into the introduction. One newsletter used the same introduction in every single email: “Hi Chris”—and while we tallied it up as personalization, it did not feel personal at all.
8. CREATE GUIDELINES FOR USE OF GIFS, EMOJIS, AND VIDEO
Only one-fifth of companies (20 percent) used emojis in their emails. Some of these added value. For example, Campaign Monitor ended every subject line with a relevant emoji and we came to expect it. It gave them greater inbox presence. Others peppered their poorly designed and mostly text-based emails with emojis in random places and it detracted from our comprehension.
Just one in ten companies (11 percent) used GIFs or videos. This seems like a big missed opportunity, given that GIFs as hero images disproportionately attracted our attention, and that videos in emails, or even just the word “video” in a subject line, boosts open rates 40 percent, according to the video marketing software company Vidyard.
9. DEDICATE TIME TO YOUR SUBJECT LINES
Effective subject lines fall on a spectrum. On the positive end, the best ones meet their only real goal: Get readers to open. That’s it. Wit is helpful, but not necessary—they just need to be intriguing, and emotion-laden words seem to help. On the other end of the spectrum, subject lines fail because they beg for attention, are clichéd, or offer no value.
CB Insights is such a clear subject line winner it’s not even funny. (They are also quite funny.) CB Insights rarely uses more than five short, evocative words, and as if that wasn’t enough, they go for a victory lap and customize their email preview text to summarize what’s inside the email with interesting keywords.
Another CB Insights quirk: They don’t capitalize the first letter of the first word of the subject line, which makes the emails feel informal, like someone at the company jotted off their personal thoughts. This stood in high contrast to emails that capitalized every word of the subject line, which smacked of merge fields.
The best subject lines:
✓ Front-loaded key words and phrases
✓ Were short
✓ Related to the email content
✓ Made more sense upon reading the email
✓ Used emotionally evocative words
✓ Used unusual words
✓ Asked questions
✓ Accompanied custom preview text
10. USE A SKILLED WRITER
It is notoriously difficult to measure the quality of writing. We considered using an algorithm like the Flesch-Kincaid score, but while it can approximate reading ease, it has nothing to say about character, substance, humor, or the email’s utility to the reader. So, we used people.
We asked volunteers to rate writing samples from each company on a scale of 1-5, where 3 was neutral. An email with a score of 1 was difficult to comprehend, provided insufficient context for a non-expert, used imprecise language, made unsupportable claims, featured an off-putting tone, and didn’t make them want to read more. Five was all things good: aasy to comprehend, provided sufficient context, used precise language, supported its claims, had an inviting tone, and made them sad when it was over.
The average company received a writing score of 3.14 out of 5; slightly above neutral. Only eight percent of companies received a perfect score of 5. Among them, two companies that offer writing services: Contently, a content marketing software, and Optimist, a content marketing agency. Newsletters in the top 10 percent earned an average of 4.8.
Interestingly, analyst agencies, despite their infamously cluttered writing, scored an average of 2—not good, but not the worst—because buried under all that passive babble, they make valuable points.
So how do you write an exceptional newsletter? We reached out to Tyler Hakes, the writer behind the Optimist newsletter, and he shared his writing process. “When it comes to writing, I think it’s all about style, tone, and layout—how the reader will consume the content,” he says. “Whenever I sit down to write an email to our subscribers, I try to think about the story behind the post that I’m sharing. I want to lead the reader into naturally wanting to click the link and finish the story, almost like a ‘read more’ button.”
“It’s also really important to me to give a lot of thought about how that content is useful or what problems it may help the reader solve,” says Tyler. “It’s easy to summarize what is covered in the post, but I want to go beyond that—really frame the article as a useful resource that will help you if you’ve been in X scenario or you’re trying to solve Y problem.”
11. Spend time on high-quality design
Visuals might be even more important than writing when it comes to being understood. Consider how much more approachable a wall of text becomes when a designer breaks it up with big quotes. Or better yet, when they turn it into an infographic.
The average newsletter scored 1.83 out of 3—just below average—whereas newsletters in the top 10 percent scored 2.6. Only 20 percent of companies received top marks.
The top email newsletters were simple, visually appealing, and guided the reader’s attention through the email. InVision seemed to have planned its newsletter’s optical journey from click to close because whatever topic it mentioned in its subject line wasn’t the first thing that appeared in the newsletter—it was the second or third item. We found ourselves hunting for it, and we believe it caused us to read for longer.
The lowest-scoring email newsletters were cluttered, poorly formatted, and featured several different nested headers, many columns, and a disorienting amount of text. Perhaps unsurprisingly, great writing and great design are correlated. Companies that have good copy also have good design instincts and vice versa.
Bonus insight: How CB Insights Earned 500,000 Subscribers
For this section, we asked CB Insights CEO Anand Sanwal to share an inside look at how he built an exceptional newsletter with a highly engaged fanbase. Here’s an inside look, in Anand’s words.
1. It requires grinding it out and doing the work
“This means being consistent in your voice and the frequency with which you write. The CB Insights newsletter has surpassed 500,000 subscribers, making it the largest in tech, but we launched it with just 489 subscribers eight years ago in July 2010. It took us almost 2.5 years to get to 10k. The growth was slow and there were times when we wondered if the investment of time in the newsletter made sense,” says Anand.
2. Don’t be boring, especially in B2B
“You don't want to be boring ever but in B2B, the bar is so immensely low that if you're not boring, you will stand out,” he says. “The reality is most B2B newsletters are self-promotional, jargon-infested drivel. And that is because people think that in B2B, you need to be boring, serious, and buttoned up. Most B2B newsletters forget that people reading their content want to be educated but also like to be entertained.”
3. Double down on the things that work
“When you find a theme that works, flood the zone and do more of it. People responded favorably when CB Insights shared bad data visualizations or nonsensical pie charts or when we made fun of management consultant frameworks that were gibberish. So we did more of those. Once you find things that work, do more of them,” says Anand.
