Mastering B2B Newsletters: Strategies for B2B Marketers and GTM Leaders

00:00:00 The Importance of B2B Newsletters in Email Marketing

[00:00:00] Taylor Wells: What's up, GTM News listeners? Thanks for tuning to this week's, episode. So this week, I'm highlighting a conversation I had with Casey Hill. He came to my event last week, and he talked about b to b newsletters and really just newsletters in general, email marketing in general. Email marketing has been something that's been around for, obviously, for a while, and I think it's gone through kind of waves of popularity. 
[00:00:22] Taylor Wells: But as we've seen, you know, rented channels or paid channels have become so saturated, it's been really hard to grow organically or the cost of paid advertising has has increased so much. People are now looking to more owned media channels, right, like email, newsletters, email marketing. Casey Hill works for ActiveCampaign. He I've actually had him on the show before where we talked about thought leadership ads. He always brings, some great insights.

00:00:49 Insights on B2B Newsletters and Email Marketing

[00:00:49] Taylor Wells: So let's tune in to, Casey's insights on b to b newsletters and b to b email marketing. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. So Casey works with, ActiveCampaign, and I wanted to bring him on to talk about, ultimately, b to b newsletter. So we've seen this resurgence of, my own media in general. 
[00:01:11] Taylor Wells: And Balaji's gonna talk a little bit, like I mentioned that later about owned media. One of the ways you can have owned media is a newsletter or some sort of email, cadence with folks. So, I know email newsletters were, like, I think HubSpot really popularized it, you know, 5, maybe even 10 years ago. They kinda got went away a little bit. Email seemed super saturated. 
[00:01:30] Taylor Wells: So I wanna bring Casey on to talk about, newsletters and, kinda high level. What what are you seeing working from a b two b newsletter standpoint? So, Casey, lay it out for us.

00:01:39 Tips for Building a Successful B2B Newsletter

[00:01:39] Casey Hill: Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Again, thanks for having me. So I'm gonna go as fast as I can. 
[00:01:44] Casey Hill: There's a lot to cover in in 9 minutes. So I think the first most important thing is to figure out what is your growth lever, what is the purpose of your newsletter. And broadly speaking, I find that b to b newsletters tend to fall into, like, 3 different camps. So the first of those camps is what I would call kind of a bottom of the funnel newsletter. So the focus here is really on your customers, on your trials, and it tends to be content that is really about converting more folks, expanding revenue, reactivations. 
[00:02:15] Casey Hill: When I actually joined ActiveCampaign, which is a larger company, I come from the startup world, I was actually amazed at how much, revenue they drove from that bottom of funnel. I find that this is a lever that as your organization gets larger and larger, it's better to have a higher and higher concentration of bottom of funnel because you have more pipeline to kinda deal with. So that's the first kind of bucket. Is is that my focus? The second major category is a newsletter that's focused on more top of funnel and the idea is to kinda create pipeline. 
[00:02:47] Casey Hill: So whereas that bottom of funnel to give some examples like from ActiveCampaign, the bottom of funnel 1 might be things like comparison articles, use cases. I might link out to a third party deliverability report that puts AC at the top. The second category that's focused on building pipeline, I wanna go more system agnostic. So an idea here might be a newsletter that I do every week highlighting the best email that we and breaking it down and talking about the structure of it and what's really working. That's applicable to pretty much anyone, but it also is still directly topically tied to my product. 
[00:03:21] Casey Hill: Right? We do marketing automation. So there's that nice clear kinda connection. A really good blueprint of a company that I think does top of funnel style newsletters very well is SaaStr. So SaaStr runs something called scaling SMS. 
[00:03:34] Casey Hill: And every week on Friday, they drop a thing that says, here's 5 ways that this company went from, you know, let's say, a 100 to 300,000,000 or how they scaled to their first 50,000,000. And they're constantly having kind of in-depth data rich content with that very clear expectation. So we have bottom of funnel. We have top of funnel, and there's actually a third category that's becoming more and more popular, and it kinda fits a little bit into that owned media conversation, which is you're building content that is relevant to your ICP, but might not be topically related at all. So let me give you an example. 
[00:04:11] Casey Hill: ActiveCampaign, let's say that we started a newsletter where we're talking about hybrid work. We're talking about hiring. We're talking about when should you use an agency. That actually has nothing directly to do with our product. But the play is, if we can grow that to 50,000 subscribers substantially faster than, say, type 1 or type 2, we have an owned asset that we can now advertise with them. 
[00:04:34] Casey Hill: So we we own it. So if we wanna put an ad, if we wanna put whatever promos in it so the idea there is you're building an asset and it this is a really important nuance. It has to be your audience has to be the right relevant people. So in my case, I would have to build an audience of marketers, of SMB founders. The the readers have to have relevance to the product, but it can be in a tangential category when it comes to own media. 
[00:04:59] Casey Hill: And more and more companies are doing that because they see the value in building something that's very broadly applicable to bring folks in. So those are the 3 kind of main categories that I see folks monetizing or or kind of driving growth from a newsletter off the bat. And I think one of the biggest things that I encourage folks who are trying to get more revenue from their newsletters is to have that concise goal. What you don't wanna do, and I would say 50 maybe more percent of companies that I sit down with have this problem, their newsletter is just all over the place. It's like company updates. 
[00:05:34] Casey Hill: It's it's like new product developments. It's interesting snippets, and there's so many different places it goes. The problem with that is one of the things you really want is clear expectation matching. That's vitally critical if you wanna drive high high engagement. And the problem is if you're all over the place, people don't know what they're gonna get from you, and therefore, your engagement is gonna drop down in a big way. 
[00:05:58] Casey Hill: So I strongly encourage folks to become much more focused in, reduce the number of CTAs, and it's also completely fine to have multiple newsletters. A while back, I worked with John Hopkins who was struggling with engagement. And right now, if you go look at their website, they have like 8 different newsletters now. So one of them might be about women's health and one of them might be about accolades at the hospital and on and on and on. They drive way more engagement from being focused. 
[00:06:25] Casey Hill: So that's another option is right on intake. You can give people this ability to opt in to things that are more relevant off of that. So you have a goal. You kind of are bringing folks in. You're keeping that tight and you're keeping that tailored. 
[00:06:39] Casey Hill: The last kinda part of that is really important, and this is part of the expectation thing. Tell folks I am gonna message you every Friday at 9 AM PST about x y z. This one blows my mind. I would say less than 5% of people do that with the specificity of day and time and topic. Those three things. 
[00:07:00] Casey Hill: And if you do those three things, I will guarantee you, you're gonna get much stronger engagement, higher open rates, and higher activity because people know not only what they're gonna get contacted about, but they know exactly when they're gonna get contacted. And you, as a person building this asset, should refill at least 4 to 5 weeks when you're launching to make sure that you can consistently have that contact content lined up. A lot of the times, the reason that folks are kinda doing it ad hoc because they haven't written it yet. And so then they haven't written it. So always skip 2 weeks here, skip 3 weeks here. 
[00:07:35] Casey Hill: It's gonna be a lot harder for you to consistently build a footprint than if folks know exactly when they're gonna hear from you, and you do that on a repeated basis. After that so you've kind of set all this expectation. You have a clear goal. You're bringing people in. The next thing that's super important is you want to ask specific questions during those first couple newsletters. 
[00:07:56] Casey Hill: So I only have 9 minutes. I can't go down the whole deliverability rabbit hole with everyone, but I can tell you that one of the major ways you hit primary inboxes is based on reply rate. The people that wrote the algorithms are smart. They know one of the major easy flags for bulk mail is just looking at reply rate. Personal email that you send to your family or colleagues has, like, an 80% reply rate, whereas bulk email that comes out has, you know, again, depends on industry, but let's say, like, 2, 3% reply rate. 
[00:08:24] Casey Hill: So if you ask very specific targeted questions off the bat and you launch that up, maybe get a 15, 20% reply rate, that is gonna dramatically help you with your inboxing as you're kind of going through it. So I think that's important. Next, underneath that is also don't be afraid to ask questions. This is kind of a controversial. We'll call it a hot take. 
[00:08:46] Casey Hill: I fought this battle for many, many years. But don't be afraid to ask those questions that you can personalize around. If you look at top go everyone who isn't opted in to Morning Brew, I want you to go to Morning Brew and opt in, and they ask you, like, 12 questions. They're one of the most successful newsletters out there. And people say, oh, you can't do it. 
[00:09:05] Casey Hill: It's not gonna work. Look at a lot of the top newsletters who are actively doing it right now. So I'm not saying you have to ask 12 questions. I actually think that's a little bit overkill, but don't be afraid to ask 1 to 2 questions that would allow you to specialize so much better. Imagine you just ask someone company size, and if someone said that they were a start up, you sent them an article talking about a use case going 0 to 1,000,000. 
[00:09:28] Casey Hill: And if they said they were a company of scale, you talk about a use case going a 100 to 250,000,000. So much more relevant with that one small question that you can tweak as you go in. So coming up a little bit on time, but I guess last 2 bits. Last thing I would say is include as much data and context as you can. There is so much generalized content on podcasts, on newsletters, on social. 
[00:09:52] Casey Hill: There's so many frameworks. There's so many, here's how you think about it. One of the ways you cut through the noise, and if you look at top newsletters, Growth Unhinged, SaaS, or Mutiny, these are top newsletters in the b two d space. One of the common threads you're gonna find throughout all of those is they're bringing in very specific data. And therefore, they contextualize, they build trust around that use case and around that application. 
[00:10:16] Casey Hill: So hopefully, that gives people a few takeaways that they can kind of use, to write more effective b to b newsletters. 
[00:10:23] Taylor Wells: Casey's, thank you so much. Great great insights, and right on time. I love it. And, great takeaways. I love that final thought of, like, contextualizing it and even, getting specific, insights from from your data, and really tie it in and providing some sort of proof, right, behind your thought leadership and your your theory. 
[00:10:41] Taylor Wells: So super cool stuff. Casey, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate you taking the time. 
[00:10:46] Casey Hill: Thank you.