B2B Newsletter Marketing: How It Differs From Email Promotions & What Brands Can Learn from Independent Producers

By lbrowning@hubspot.com (Laura M. Browning)

If you’re like me, you only open a small fraction of the (dozens? hundreds?) email newsletters you’ve subscribed to. So I set out to find what those really good newsletters, the ones you open on the regular, have in common.

Email newsletters have been floating around in the zeitgeist for some time now, especially as more writers have left online publishers to make it on their own.

I talked to a half dozen experts in the field, including both technical and content specialists, to tease out the difference between B2B newsletter marketing and other types of emails, guide you through best practices, and uncover some takeaways from indie newsletters that you can apply to your own brand.

Table of Contents

What is B2B Newsletter Marketing
Why Start a B2B Newsletter
How to Create a B2B Newsletter People Want to Read
B2B Newsletter Marketing Best Practices
B2B Newsletter Statistics
B2B Newsletter Trends

What is B2B Newsletter Marketing

B2B newsletters can be broadly defined.

One business might send bi-weekly how-to guides and best practices in its industry; another might send weekly interviews with master marketers (that was a shameless plug for a newsletter I sometimes write for).

What’s most important to understand is how B2B newsletters differ from traditional email marketing. If your inbox is even half as full as mine is, you’ve got a steady stream of emails about sales, new product alerts, and reminders to purchase that new gadget you put in an online shopping cart and promptly abandoned.

Those traditional marketing emails are important to your overall marketing strategy, but today we’re talking about an entirely different beast.

I spoke to Lia Haberman, who founded and writes the successful ICYMI newsletter and teaches social media marketing and influencer marketing at UCLA. She says that “the difference between email marketing and [B2B] newsletters is really a difference between performance marketing and content marketing.”

She explains that the primary goal of performance marketing, like email marketing, is to drive conversions. “You’re trying to generate leads, to increase sales. There’s a point to the email that extends beyond the email itself.” These emails might be tied to a particular campaign or initiative.

Newsletters, like content marketing, “focus on providing value within the email itself. The subscriber doesn’t need to click out to get the value of whatever the newsletter is promising.”

This may sound counterintuitive, but a regular newsletter cadence establishes your brand as an authority in its field.

And if you’re giving your potential customers real value that serves their purposes instead of yours, congrats, you’re well on your way to building trust.