Stop treating your newsletter as a distribution channel. Instead, use newsletters to put a face on your brand, gain people’s trust, build reliability, become relatable, and connect (for real) with your audiences.
Usually, companies send corporate-infused newsletters, including product updates, new blog posts, and company news. In most cases, these newsletters are very little human-centered. Very few will consistently read corporate-centered emails. Maybe that’s why the overall open rate across all industries is 27.91%, while the click-through rate is 3,75%. You might say these aren’t bad numbers, but we can do better.
So instead of copying other SaaS companies and then complaining that email marketing is dying, reinvent the way you craft newsletters altogether. Move from corporate-centered to human-centered communication. Or, in other words, make your newsletters damn interesting. How can you do that? Although there’s a great variety of SaaS newsletter ideas, you can focus on sending personality-infused emails from your company’s executives, including elements such as:
These personality-infused newsletters will put a face on your brand, making it relatable to your email subscribers.
► Quick note: If you think email marketing is dying, look at Substack, the publishing platform supporting subscription newsletters. In November 2021, Substack announced over 1 million paid subscriptions to publications.
📓 Newsletters: (corporation to email subscriber) A written report issued periodically by a business, organization, or institution to present and distribute information or news to people with similar interests to the email sender.
📓 Personality-infused newsletters: (human to human) Emails that contain the sender’s personal opinion, thoughts, experiments, preferences, and hand-curated materials.
By sending personality-infused newsletters, you’ll create multiple growth opportunities, such as:
How eager do you feel to open an email when the subject line contains the word [Newsletter]?
► Quick note: Yes, that’s a HubSpot email. Yes, the company uses [Newsletter] in the subject line. If you’re not an email marketing geek, you’ll probably ignore the email.
No wonder why email subscribers seem to be growing “tired of newsletters.”
Here’s the deal, most SaaS companies build mailing lists without capitalizing on newsletters. They’re oversaturating people with useless, faceless emails, leading to low open/click-through rates and high unsubscription indicators.
Some say email marketing is dead. And it may be the case if we’re talking about boring corporate newsletters. But people are far from tired of receiving and reading emails.
Countless creators are making a 6-figure income by sending emails to paying subscribers.
That’s why it’s crucial to reinvent your email marketing strategy, moving away from corporate to personality-infused newsletters.
These personality-infused newsletters will make your brand feel:
And all these elements are crucial to establishing, building, and nurturing your connection with the company’s audience.
Apart from its regular blog newsletter, the company provides two personality-infused newsletters:
➡ The One Thing by Drift’s CEO, David Cancel:
➡ The American Dream by Drift’s CTO, Elias Torres:
Drift is a clear outlier as the company leaders use newsletters to connect personally with their audiences and promote diversity—this practice goes beyond pure marketing and sales interests.
► Quick note: It’s also worth mentioning that a while ago, Drift’s ex-CMO, Tricia Gellman, also had a newsletter called “The Path to CMO 3.0.”
Bannerbear is an open startup. The founder focuses less on industry insights and more on building Bannerbear in public. As the newsletter copy indicates, “Hello, I’m Jon, the founder of Bannerbear — every 2 weeks, I send a newsletter with updates from the Product, Marketing, and Business sides of my startup, subscribe below to receive it!”
Here’s an example:
The Funnel newsletter subscribers receive a short video created by Alexander Ross Billington, the Community Growth Manager, twice a month. These videos teach people how to use and leverage marketing data. The newsletter’s creator is not afraid of using humor to educate and entertain the Funnel Tips subscribers.
► Quick note: Differentiate between personality-infused newsletters and newsletters containing company or blog updates sent from the CEO’s email address. The latest is nothing more than a corporate-centered newsletter.
✅ Decide who’ll be sending the personality-infused newsletters.
💡 To consider: It can be the CEO, the CMO, or the VP of marketing. Obviously, the list isn’t limited to these three executives, as it can include the CTO, the VP of People, the VP of Customer Education, and more.
✅ Discuss the frequency of the newsletter. It can be daily, bi-weekly, weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly.
✅ Agree upon the elements each newsletter will include. It’s always easier to have a newsletter template. Having a list of categories or concepts to fill in will make things faster.
Here’s an example:
✅ Create a newsletter landing page where people can subscribe.
✅ Make available the past editions of the newsletter.
💡 To consider: You may want to ask people to subscribe before accessing the past editions. Meanwhile, you can ungate one newsletter edition as an example.
► Quick note: Each newsletter should contain and reflect your executive’s personality. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that executives should write the newsletter. They can simply put together a list of answers, fill in the pre-existent template categories, and then send it to a marketing team member, who can write the email and program it for delivery.
💥 To remember: You should rarely treat newsletters as distribution channels. These exceptions are justified when you want to invite people to your virtual event or when something BIG happens, such as:
Otherwise, use newsletters to put a face on your brand, gain people’s trust, build reliability, become relatable, and connect (for real) with your audiences.