While marketers love talking about the next hot platform — I’m looking at you, Snapchat — most of us still rely on a less glamorous workhorse to get our messages out. Email is still king.
In fact, 93 percent of marketers say they use email to distribute their content, according to the Content Marketing Institute’s B2B Content Marketing 2017 Benchmarks report, and 91 percent say email is their most important content-distribution channel. And for good reason: QuickSprout found that email subscribers are three times more likely to share your content on social media than other visitors are.
If we’re all spending time and resources on email, we had better make those emails count. Email is one place where sticking to the status quo and following the same old “best practices” could mean your messages get ignored. Our inboxes are crowded, and to stand out you have to get creative.
These three B2B brands create some of the most-loved email newsletters around. Here’s what we can learn from each of them.
The Dash from MeetEdgar
I’ve been following Laura Roeder for a long time, and everything she touches (and works incredibly hard on) turns to gold. Her company’s social media scheduling tool, MeetEdgar, has a cult following. I don’t use MeetEdgar, but I love the company’s weekly newsletter. I open it every time I spot it in my inbox, because I know I’m going to get useful, new ideas.
Since MeetEdgar’s focus is helping companies take better advantage of social media, its emails are full of updates like Facebook’s newest video feature and potential Instagram potholes for small businesses. I never feel like the emails are talking down to me. The MeetEdgar team manages to strike a tone that’s friendly but also incredibly helpful, in a peer-to-peer way.
The emails have personality too. They’re punchy, fun, easy to read and reflect the company’s culture as a fully remote, decentralized team. I often find interesting reads about entrepreneurship, working from home and teamwork in The Dash.
Finally, while this newsletter is clearly selling something — a subscription to MeetEdgar — as a reader I never feel like I’m being sold. So I keep opening, and in the process I always learn more about their product and their perspective on how social media should work.
SaaS Weekly by Hiten Shah at Up Advisors
This is another favorite among my agency team. It’s a must-open and must-click because it’s chock full of interesting stats, research and analysis about the state of SaaS. This newsletter is a good example of content curation done right. The links in the email are from all over the internet — not just from the Up Advisors blog. We count on this newsletter to keep us informed on the key developments in the SaaS space. If you want your audience to take you seriously as a helpful adviser, subscribe to this email and take notes (we do!).
The People Geekly from Culture Amp
Culture Amp has built a trusted brand in the competitive space of HR tech. Its weekly newsletter checks all the boxes: It’s reliable (comes every week like clockwork), interesting, diverse (with a combination of outside research and posts written by Culture Amp leaders), well-branded (with a catchy hashtag — who in HR wouldn’t want to be a #peoplegeek?) and reader-centric. I especially love the reading-time estimates next to each article link.
To me, all of these emails have one important thing in common: They provide maximum value for the reader. If your emails are feeling lackluster (or your engagement is dropping), think about how you could take the emphasis off your brand and what you’re selling, and instead deliver incredible value for your readers.