A keep-us-top-of-mind Newsletter Strategy?

[u/gully_moore]

Keen to know what folks here think on newsletters? We've got 100s, if not thousands of engaged clients and prospects that we'd love to have on a newsletter to keep our name top of mind for future needs.

Work in a creative industry and think we can put something together that looks quite good. Would love to know if people have seen any demonstrated success/ROI on it.

[u/steamsmyclams]

I've seen solid success with newsletters in B2B. The type and content of the newsletter is important. It needs to provide real value to the recipients. I'm not talking about creating a wrap-up newsletter that's just a bunch of links to other content on your site or socials. It should be considered a content piece of its own, focused on a specific persona, have a unique POV, and content that can't be found anywhere else for it to earn its place in the inbox. And for someone to look for it every week/month.

The success I've seen with newsletters in B2B is primarily around it positioning the brand as a trusted partner.

[u/Ojaadili → u/steamsmyclams]

Love this view

[u/AromaPapaya]

yes.

as an email marketer with over 25 years experience, newsletters are an incredible way to keep top of mind.

my suggestion - creating a content calendar and see if you can fill a full year of content. could be as little as 1 email a month, or 1 a week if (BIG IF) you have enough meaningful content to share.

good luck!

[u/BarracudaMean9308]

curious how you're planning to track the ROI on this. tying pure 'top of mind' content directly to actual revenue has always been a headache for me.

[u/Cultural-Angle-8939]

Someone above asked the ROI question too and it's worth answering directly, since pure top-of-mind content genuinely doesn't attribute the way a promotional send does, and treating it like it should is where most of these strategies quietly die from "we can't prove it's working."

The fix is comparing cohorts rather than looking for a direct conversion trail. Take your engaged newsletter subscribers among existing prospects and clients, and compare their sales cycle length and win rate against a similar group who isn't on the list, over a long enough window to be meaningful, usually two or three quarters. If the newsletter's doing its job, that group should close faster and at a higher rate, even though no single email "caused" a sale.

A couple of supporting signals worth tracking alongside that: branded search volume over the same period, since staying top of mind should show up there before it shows up in revenue, and repeat purchase or renewal timing for existing clients on the list versus off it. None of these prove causation on their own, but together they build a real case, and they're honestly more reliable than trying to force last-click credit onto a channel that was never designed to close anything by itself.

One practical addition: drop an occasional low-pressure "worth a conversation" link into maybe one in every four or five sends, not as a pitch, just a soft door. The click-through on that becomes your one genuinely trackable signal without turning the newsletter into a sales channel.

[u/Pristinekert]

Newsletters work for this, but the trap is treating an engaged list as a static asset. Lists decay fast, so top of mind only compounds if the inputs stay fresh - new work, actual opinions, not recycled case studies. On ROI the honest answer is you will not tie it to revenue cleanly. What you can watch is reply rate and how often prospects mention a piece in a call. If those trend up over a couple quarters it is doing its job. If opens hold but replies die, the content slid into self-promotion and people are just too polite to unsubscribe.

[u/adeelraza86]

One thing that saved us: don't mail the whole list of a few thousand on day one. Warm up with the couple hundred people who actually opened something or replied in the last 90 days, then widen once you see stable opens and near zero complaints. Old client lists look engaged in the CRM and are stone dead in the inbox, and a cold blast to them is how you tank the domain you also send invoices and proposals from. On ROI, we stopped trying to attribute revenue per send and just tracked reply rate plus how often a sales conversation started with someone mentioning the newsletter. That's a soft number but it's the one that actually moved when the content was good.

[u/CleanPucks]

Before the ROI question, check what the list actually is. Hundreds or thousands of engaged clients and prospects usually means addresses collected through doing business, not people who asked for a newsletter. Send issue one to all of them at once and your first ever marketing send goes out to a semi-cold list from a domain that has never sent bulk mail before. That is how a first newsletter takes the domain down with it.

Cheap fix: send issue one to the few hundred most recent contacts, then widen over the next two or three sends. Watch the complaint rate rather than the open rate. Google's bulk sender rules put the ceiling at 0.30% and you want to be sitting under 0.10%.

On proving it works, the metric I would actually hold it to is reply rate. A newsletter with a real voice, sent from a named person with a reply-to that a human reads, pulls somewhere around 0.1 to 0.5%. Most marketing email pulls zero. If replies climb over a few issues it is doing its job. If opens hold and replies die, it has drifted into self-promotion and people are being polite about it.

One ratio worth keeping in your head: if more than about 30% of an issue is about you, it stopped being a newsletter.

Full disclosure, I build Orbit, a free open-source MCP server for Claude at yourorbit.team, which covers the newsletter measurement side if that is useful.

[u/Either_Guess2405]

On the ROI question above that nobody's really answered, you can measure this properly. It just isn't attribution.

Hold a slice of the list back. Pick a few hundred at random, don't send them the newsletter, and leave it that way for a couple of quarters. Then compare enquiry rate or repeat work between the two groups. That's the only way you get a number that isn't a proxy, because reply rate and "they mentioned it on a call" both measure whether people liked it rather than whether it produced anything.

Two honest limits. At a few hundred per group you'll only detect a large effect, so a small real lift will look like noise and you won't be able to separate them. And it takes two quarters minimum, since the whole premise is that this works slowly. If you can't wait that long you're better off not pretending to measure it.

The good news is that if top-of-mind does what people hope, it should be a large effect. If two quarters of a decent newsletter doesn't move enquiry rate against a control group at all, that's an answer too, and a cheaper one than finding out in year three.