It’s common knowledge that email marketing has an ROI of 36X.
There isn’t a single marketing channel that even comes close to that.
And for B2B organizations, it can be even higher.
If your average client, customer, or deal is worth more than $10,000, you have the capacity to invest heavily into a niche, owned audience. Just a handful of deals each year can justify a sizable investment with a mind-boggling multiple.
But how do you turn your niche B2B audience into closed deals?
Across 60+ B2B newsletters I work with, I’ve seen which strategies win and which strategies win even harder.
In this article, I’ll cover everything you need to know about B2B newsletter sales, including:
- How to project revenue
- How to (and not to) craft newsletter content for B2B
- Advanced sales enablement strategies
- How to build the right audience
Ready to win even harder?
How to project B2B newsletter revenue
Back into your numbers
Just like any other digital marketing channel, newsletters can be viewed as a numbers game.
Let’s say you have 10,000 newsletter subscribers, 43% of them open your newsletter, and 1% of your openers click on your key call to action (hopefully, your aggregate click-to-open rate is higher than 1%, I’m just talking about your sales/offer call-to-action).
That means 43 people made it to the next stage of your funnel — which is probably a calendar page or landing page.
Then, take your landing page conversion rate, show rate, and close rate and… BOOM you now have your first revenue projection for your newsletter.
And that revenue projection is based on a single newsletter. As the audience grows and you send more newsletters, it just gets better (more below).
If you want to play with the numbers to see how much you might be able to make with a newsletter, we’ve created this simple B2B newsletter revenue calculator.
Reach + frequency = ROI time horizon
Reach is the number of prospects in your ideal customer profile (ICP) you’re able to reach.
Frequency is how often you get in front of them.
There is, of course, nuance in how many contacts you reach, how often you message them, and the content you share, but this is a good rule of thumb:
More touchpoints in a shorter period of time will shorten your ROI time horizon.
The math is easy.
Let’s assume, for example, that it takes anywhere from 7-21 touchpoints before a prospect will take some kind of action on your offers.
If you send a weekly newsletter, that means a contact that subscribes today has an ROI time horizon of 2-6 months— assuming your newsletter is the only channel you’re using.
But if you send a daily newsletter Monday-Friday, your ROI time horizon is just 2-4 weeks.
That’s the simple part. The next part is more challenging.
Crafting content that converts
Value over volume
You might have read the last section and thought, “Sweet, I’ll send daily!”
But not so fast—
The last thing you want to do is generate an obscene number of unsubscribes (and believe me, we’ve seen it happen).
Some unsubscribes are healthy. If you put your best foot forward and a prospect just isn’t interested, those unsubscribes are actually helping you by cleaning your list.
But if your unsubscribe rate is above 0.10% (calculated as total send volume divided by total unsubscribes), then you should probably take a closer look at your content, segments, and growth strategies (i.e., are you even getting subscribers in your ICP to begin with?).
The first priority should always be the quality of your content.
Things like net new subscribers and send frequency are easy to track.
But your content is the real X-factor for building the trust, familiarity, and brand equity you need to drive high-ticket B2B sales within your audience.
Unless you’ve already got a killer content team on lock, I recommend starting with 1-2 newsletters per week. That tends to be the sweet spot where prospects aren’t forgetting about you and you have enough time to create something that actually improves their life.
Here’s a question we ask every time we draft a newsletter: “Based on what I know about my audience, does this content clearly make their life better in some way?”
Ask that question before you hit “Send” and watch your prospects line up to work with you.
Don’t be shy
While some of our clients make the mistake of being too aggressive with lower-quality content, other clients make the mistake of practically never self-promoting.
Balance is key here.
If you’re delivering incredible content to your ICP, you want to make sure:
- Your content connects the dots between the wants/needs of your ICP and the products/services you provide. This can be done with case studies, problem/solution content, changes in your industry (news/trends), interviews, and more.
- You clearly present your brand, introductory offers, and calls to action to your audience
Without those elements, your prospects may never even realize that your business can solve their problems or help them realize opportunities.
There are a variety of ways to do this within your core newsletter content, including:
- Branding your newsletter the same as your business (the most direct option)
- Presenting your newsletter as a media brand that’s “sponsored by” your business
- Including small logo placements for your business at the top of your newsletter
- Including larger offers with calls-to-action in the middle and/or bottom of your newsletter
But we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible.
Newsletter sales strategies that crush in B2B
I’m known in some corners of the internet for saying “Powerful personalization follows intent.”
The same is true for B2B sales.
One of the truly unique aspects of having a newsletter is that you have layers and layers of intent data about whether your audience is interested and when they’re interested. You can’t always get that data with traditional marketing channels or organic digital channels.
Here are just a few ways you can start using that data in more powerful ways for your B2B business:
Identify warm leads in your list
This may seem obvious, but most B2B businesses don’t bother with this step. It makes a massive difference in how many leads you can close from your newsletter.
Let’s assume you send a weekly newsletter to contacts in your ICP. Try building the segments below and see how many contacts are in each.
Segment 1: Avid Readers
- Is subscribed to your newsletter audience; AND
- Has opened 5+ times in 60 days (assuming you send weekly; if you send more frequently, reduce the time window)
This segment will tell you who is particularly engaged with your content. If they’re in your ICP, there’s a good chance this is high-impact for sales outreach.
Segment 2: Low Intent Clickers
- Is subscribed to your newsletter audience; AND
- Has clicked on one of your general information links (website, blog, social media profiles, etc)
These can be clicks on your logo, to your home page, social media links, and more. (If you want to include multiple links, just make sure you nest them into an “OR” condition group to capture all of those clickers.)
These contacts should be treated like “window shoppers” — They’re interested enough to check you out, but they haven’t made it much further.
Segment 3: High Intent Clickers
- Is subscribed to your newsletter audience; AND
- Has clicked on one of your sales links
This segment is red-hot.
Examples of high-intent CTA links are:
- Calendar links to book demos or discovery calls
- Links to landing pages with introductory offers
- Links to promotions or limited-time offers
Reach out!
Craft your sales outreach messaging based on the contact’s level of intent.
If they’re low intent in your ICP, you might want to ask exploratory questions or paint a picture of what working together might look like.
If they’re high intent in your ICP, you can be more aggressive with your outreach messages and frequency. (For example: “Hey Melissa, I saw that you’re interested in booking a demo with [company], still interested in finding a time to chat?”)
Executing on this can be as simple as exporting that beehiiv segment weekly and handing it to your SDRs or BDRs.
Or you could push these contacts into your CRM (with an integration tool like Zapier) for automated outreach and to manage these contacts in your pipeline separately.
Recency matters
If you’ve been running a newsletter for several months or years, you may want to gate those segments by how recently they took action.
If someone clicked a high-intent CTA 6 months ago, treat them more like a low-intent prospect.
If they clicked that link yesterday, jump on it. They might have a problem in their business right now that you can solve.
Building the right audience
Even if you’re doing everything perfectly, you won’t convert anyone if you have the wrong subscribers on your list.
Once again, this sounds obvious but it’s another mistake I see time and time again.
Whether you’re growing with organic social promotions, paid lead generation, co-registration networks, you want to do everything in your power to get the right subscribers on the list.
The first step in this process is to have a very specific ICP. The narrower the better.
“E-commerce brands” is not an ICP. That’s an industry.
“CMOs who work at E-commerce brands doing $2-10M in revenue that are struggling with profitable digital advertising” is a great ICP.
The more specific the ICP, the easier it is to scope your audience, create content, and craft offers.
And, yes, you can have multiple ICPs. But you might want to consider a newsletter for each ICP or have a lock-tight plan to appeal to each ICP with the content you create.
The more types of businesses you appeal to, the less likely you are to convert them into your specific offers.
If your product is truly a broad solution, then plan on acquiring a large subscriber base before seeing a tipping point in your revenue. Similar to reach and frequency, the specificity of your audience should change your expectations on how much volume you need to convert.
That’s why the team at Breaker serves B2B newsletters with an exact audience match for $1.50 per engaged subscriber (yep… it’s possible). But the newsletter ICP is always one of the first questions I ask for this exact reason.
Final words
Ultimately, a great newsletter strategy isn’t a replacement for a well-defined ICP, product-market fit, and good margins.
But I hope you took away at least 1 concept or idea from this article that can give your business an edge.
Your newsletter can simultaneously be an incredible nurturing tool for your ICP and a data backbone for sales enablement.
A well-managed newsletter with good content is borderline unbeatable when it comes to ROI. When you own your audience in B2B, you have maximum control over your pipeline.
Oh, and not to mention: it makes everything else easier. When you’re consistently sending great content directly to your ICP, you’ll see a lift in performance from both inbound and outbound.
It’s hard to lose — and extra hard to lose on Breaker.