By Erik Frantzen, President, Nurture Marketing

Despite B2B marketing’s rapid embrace of complex digital marketing, social media, and podcasts, the humble email Newsletter remains a valuable and highly effective tool to nurture a personal and productive relationship with your prospects and clients.

In fact, the B2B newsletter is an ideal vehicle for realizing a successful Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy by engaging your targets in frequent, meaningful conversations. An audience that opts in to your mailing has given you permission for multiple contact touches that can showcase your expertise in solving their problems.

Email marketing has tremendous impact on your bottom line, too, according to the DMA (Data & Marketing Association). Email is one of the most effective content marketing tools, averaging an ROI of $38 for each $1 spent.

Why You Really Need to Do a Newsletter

Your primary B2B marketing goals should be to educate your target audience and position yourself as a helpful, trusted authority in your field.

Besides their impressive ROI, email newsletters help your company establish that position by connecting you with prospects consistently, no matter where they are in the sales funnel. A newsletter effectively nurtures your prospects through this long-term, personalized approach.

A newsletter’s informative, one-on-one style allows you to present more in-depth topics that your audience is more likely to take the time to review and peruse.

Additionally, email newsletters enable you to slice your topics into smaller bits with hyperlinks to pages of your website, driving traffic to the site and inducing readers to further navigate it after they’ve read the article.

What Should Be in Your Newsletter?

When creating your newsletter, the #1 goal should be to humanize it. B2B purchase decisions are closer to B2C than you think. In general, people like doing business with people they like.

Appeal to both clients and prospects emotionally and psychologically. You should also encourage a two-way dialogue by talking with them, not at them. Think educational, not transactional.

Deliver real value by sharing content that addresses their challenges as directly as possible. For example, stories are enormously powerful in conveying your insights. Tap into your previous experiences to help shed new light on their business problems.

Some specific newsletter elements can include:

• Congratulating a customer who won an award or spotlighting an employee. News about your company – new products, a new division, or business wins. These all help project a positive image of your company and its culture.
• Advice or expertise on a particular hot-button business issue that positions you as a thought leader.
• A recent success in solving a client problem helps educate your readers while building your credibility.
• Something free, such as a white paper that goes deeper into a topic, an e-book, or research data.
• Other ideas: curated content/”ICYMI” stories, quizzes or polls, a blog post, or the best tweet or social post of the week.

Newsletters Multiply Outreach Opportunities for Sales

A newsletter is an efficient and impactful spoke in the ABM “wheel,” generating many opportunties to get closer to a prospect. For example, a sales team can:

• Forward the newsletter, whether to ensure that the prospect saw the newsletter or to point to an article of interest.
• Leave a voicemail and mention the newsletter while checking if there’s any current situation with which you can help them.
• Re-send as an “ICYMI” if you haven’t heard back from them or if they haven’t opened it.
• Add a survey link to the newsletter that asks for their opinion on a new product, service, or feature.

Newsletters can do even more than connect you with prospects and clients. They can also add to the valuation of your company by consistently showing the breadth of your organization and all of its services, and the thought leadership of your team. By building and sharing content about your products, expertise, and culture, you’re demonstrating not only how your company fits into the industry but also how it leads.

This is the latest in a series of articles by Nurture Marketing to help you identify, create, and grow winning one-to-one connections with customers.

Please contact us to learn more about our solutions for developing compelling marketing and sales content for the Partner Channel, including case studies and more. You may reach us by calling (732) 636-1001, Extension 27, or by visiting the CONTACT PAGE of our website.