The majority of the B2B brands use an email marketing strategy to attract high-quality leads and maintain a good relationship with the existing clients. Brainstorming ideas before creating B2B newsletter content can help you shoot successful email campaigns.
How do you measure the success rate of your B2B email campaigns?
Many B2B companies measure success by considering the number of people who open the mail (email open rate) and the number of people who click on a link you sent in the mail (click-through rates).
It’s no surprise that people will be able to visit your link only if they open your mail.
Now, what is the decent email open rate?
Until 2019, the average B2B newsletter open rate was between 23-24% globally.
What kind of content ideas can you apply to make your B2B newsletters more clickable?
If your open rates are above 20% then you’re doing very well. If not, let’s know why.
Reasons Why Emails Have Low Open Rates?
Your Email Didn’t Reach the Inbox
People will open your mail only when they receive it. Obvious, right? But according to the survey, more than one out of five emails you send never make it to the inbox of your customer. Your email gets stuck in the spam folder for many reasons.
Check the score of your email with Mail Tester. The tool will help you check the spamminess of your email. A higher score will land your email in the spam folder.
Your Emails are Not Optimized for Mobiles and Tablets
Digital marketing experts shouldn’t avoid optimizing their emails for mobiles and tablets. About 85% of users check their email through mobile phones.
Create email templates that are easy to be viewed from mobiles. It has been proven that B2B newsletter click-through rates have increased after the optimization of emails for mobile devices.
The best way to check is to view the email from your smartphone.
Poor B2B Newsletter Content Ideas
And above all, let’s admit that outbound marketing is a mess if your customer doesn’t find your newsletter interesting.
Your click-through rates and lead generation will be a total flop if you fail to deliver content strategies that resonate with your audience.
However, I understand how frustrating it is to run out of B2B newsletter content ideas. We have included a list of 10 killer Content ideas and tips for the B2B newsletter in the article below.
Before talking about the content alternatives for your B2B newsletter campaigns, let’s look at one of the most underrated activities in B2B outbound marketing.
Why is Brainstorming a B2B Newsletter Necessary?
An idea is all that matters.
Delivering an idea that covers stories to resonate with your customers and link with their pain points is the key to running a successful B2B email campaign.
If you are one of those who think brainstorming isn’t necessary for newsletter preparation, let me prove you wrong.
- Saves Time: Email marketing doesn’t just involve creating content. It requires a decent amount of time and budget to build email lists, automation tools, and design. Brainstorming helps the team produce a large number of ideas faster to create an ideal solution.
- Team Building: You are not going to be able to produce great content if you think only from your view. Ideas from your writers, designers, marketers will add essence to the whole content making it more promising and reliable to the customers. By brainstorming you are not only running a successful email campaign but also building a strong team.
- Quantity Wins: You might have heard that quality is better than quantity. But B2B newsletter trends prove that the quantity of ideas matters. Brainstorming welcomes even the craziest ideas you might have which can be developed into one solid idea that can change the game of your email campaign.
Now that you understand how important brainstorming is, let me list out 10 solid Content ideas for your next B2B newsletter.
10 Content Ideas for Your Next B2B Newsletter
Include a Quote from the CEO/COO
Nothing makes your customer feel more special and secure than sending them a note from the CEO or owner of the company itself.
Simply ask your boss or CEO to talk about something very exciting about the company or include a thank you note to your loyal customers or an invitation to join an upcoming event.
It implies that you care about them more than anything else. Building that kind of trust is very important if you want to run a successful B2B email campaign.
Add a Snippet of Your Next Event
Educate your customer with updates about your next event or launch. The updates can range from new product/service launches to employee status updates.
Get everyone excited by letting them know your upcoming events, short-term goals, or anything that comes to mind.
Be transparent with your customers. Instead of only focusing on your wins, try showing them behind the scenes of your company’s success. This is a great way of having a backup when you run out of content ideas for your newspaper. Their effort in signing up for your newsletter shouldn’t go in vain.
Share a Recent Achievement or Award
People will believe your company is reliable if other customers recommend it. Testimonials or case studies act as social proof for your B2B business showing that you can provide a real solution to your customers.
Never forget to get reviews and testimonials from your previous or existing customers.
You can embed testimonials in a photo or a GIF format to persuade your readers.
Sharing client wins with your targeted prospects will guarantee high conversion and B2B newsletter click-through rates. When you write a newsletter next time, include case studies and testimonials.
Share the Recent Upgrade of Your Product
Let’s consider that you have been selling your services for two years. In the journey, you might have figured out what is the demand in the market and what are the gaps people find in your services?
Every time you upgrade your services with new features or offers, share them with your email customers. Be honest with what you share.
At times, people find it difficult to track the updates of B2B services unless they are notified about it.
Share video tutorials, infographics, or guides to convey to the readers about the new offerings and their benefits.
Ask Your Subscribers for Hiring Referrals
B2B marketing is more about getting referrals and bringing your prospects down the sales funnel.
Asking for referrals will keep the conversation going without an end, leading to more B2B sales. Through referral programs, your subscribers will forward your content to their contacts if they had a great experience with your product.
According to Forbes, 78% of B2B marketers feel that referral programs act as a magnet for high-quality leads.
According to Mike Stafiej, 82% of Employees rated Employee Referrals above all other sourcing options to yield the best ROI.
Referral program announcement emails can be sent to share the open positions in your company.
Ask your employees to refer to deserving candidates. This will also speed up your hiring process.
Embed a Downloadable Ebook, Tutorials, or Whitepaper
Your subscribers are not likely going to purchase your services until they know what you provide.
Sending them free resources in the newsletter once in a while will make your customers aware of the services you offer.
Resources include free Ebooks, how-to guides, tutorials, free trials, and whitepapers.
To ensure high download rates, include infographics to give your readers the taste of what you are going to provide.
These resources act the same way as a movie trailer that is released before the big picture. It makes people want more from your company.
Embed a Video in B2B Newsletter Content
Once you decide to start email marketing, you expect the emails you send to be opened, right?
When you embed a video, you can easily increase the open rates. According to the super office, embedding a video in the mail increases the open rate by 6%
Having high open rates doesn’t bring much difference in your ROI. That’s when click-through rates come into action. Over two-thirds of the readers prefer video formats over text.
However major email clients don’t support embedded videos in the mail.
You can include GIFs of your video with a strong CTA like “Click here to watch the full video“ or a photo where readers can touch the play button to be redirected to the video.
Embedding a video through this method is also proven to reduce the percentage of unsubscribers.
Include Data and Statistics
Share interesting statistics and case studies, performance metrics, and marketing trends of your company in your newsletter.
Industry trends and marketing performance metrics can be obtained by reading reports from industry experts and consulting firms like Forrester, BCG, Gallup, and Gartner.
Use demographics, charts, visuals, animation to make it more engaging. The more people are interested in your content, the more referrals you get.
Share a Survey or Poll
A survey consists of a row of questions asked to your target audience to gather data on their opinions about a specific issue.
Whereas a poll consists of one or two questions to quickly collect data on public opinions.
The results you get from both ways will help you improve and make adjustments to your products and services. The analytical results are easy and quick to obtain.
There are several tools like Google Forms, Easypolls, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram that help you create straightforward and custom surveys and polls.
Add your surveys to your marketing emails. As you cannot embed the entire survey in your mail, display at least one question from the survey to give your audience an insight into what your survey is about.
To increase the chances of your customers answering the survey, you can provide incentives in exchange. It can range from discounts, free materials, or perks.
Ask for Feedback and Suggestions
Asking for people’s opinions and suggestions to improve your newsletter is as important as conducting a survey or a poll.
Quality feedback will help you understand what your customers’ interests are. You can ask for feedback by including a question or a survey.
Based on the feedback and suggestions you receive, you will be able to find which part of your B2B email campaign needs a change.
Make sure you perform the necessary changes that the majority of your subscribers suggest. Or else you will notice a bunch of unsubscribers rolling in.
What Content Idea You’re Using For the Next Newsletter
“Even when you’re marketing to your entire audience or customer base, you are still speaking to a single human at any given time “
– ANN HANDLEY
Make your customer the hero of your story. Every content idea you produce for your B2B newsletter must empathize and resonate with your customer’s pain points. Now that you have the 10 best content ideas for your next B2B newsletter, feel free to pick one and produce content to outrage your competitors.
FAQs
Your B2B newsletter should contain a strong and intriguing subject line. Your email should be easy to scan. So try including visuals, images with appropriate headings and subheadings.
The basic elements of a newsletter are a strong subject line, Direct CTA, contact information, and a visual hierarchy of the whole Content.
Keep your content crisp and short. Space out between lines and paragraphs. Add many visuals and text hyperlinks. Share industry trends and conduct surveys and polls frequently.
Weekdays are the best days to send your B2B newsletters. However, studies show that Tuesdays and Wednesdays are more likely to have more open rates than the other days.
The average open rate from 2015-2018 was about 24%. However, there was a decrease in the open rate by 3% in 2020.
The average email marketing conversion rate as of 2018 was 18%. Again, there was a decrease in the conversion by 3% in 2020.
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