A major hurdle when building your SaaS company's brand awareness is keeping up with the constant demand for new content, new insights and new product information.
Let’s say your SaaS marketing department is already writing valuable, relevant blogs and articles for your ideal customer profile (ICP). You’re putting out stellar content, but you’re not receiving a significant increase in traffic or engagement.
The problem isn’t necessarily your content itself, but how you're promoting your content. A SaaS newsletter can be a curated hub for your most engaging, relevant content, and you're doing yourself a disservice by passing up on this opportunity.
How to make SaaS newsletters the right way
There’s a lot of uncertainty when crafting your SaaS newsletters. There are three essential elements to a high-performing newsletter:
- A visual layout that’s clean and professional, while still engaging to your audience.
- High-quality, interesting content that's worth promoting.
- A list of contacts interested in your offerings to make your messaging feel like a genuine connection, an extension of your company’s voice.
All in all, crafting an impactful SaaS newsletter isn't easy. So let’s start with the basics: what are the main elements you should include within your B2B SaaS newsletter?
Three elements of a successful SaaS newsletter
A newsletter is a success if it offers a unique lens into your company and its value. If you demonstrate an answer to a prospective question, highlight your clients’ pain points with the accompanying solution or show your authority in your respective space within the industry, then you’ve communicated value.
A successful newsletter will communicate this value by showcasing relevant and important content. It will include links and call to actions (CTAs) that drive your contacts to perform a desired action, such as visiting your website. These links or gated forms will bring readers to the following:
With these resources on deck, you’re ready to start making your newsletter. However, when creating a newsletter, it's important to keep logistical and stylistic choices in mind:
- What platform to choose
- Tracking analytics (engagement, CTR)
- Relevant content
- Consistency and alignment with your brand
1. Newsletter platform
When choosing the right platform to host your newsletter, consider what you’re trying to gain. Are you trying to get your audience to engage with your content and become advocates for you, or are you trying to promote general awareness of your brand?
If you’re looking to do the latter, marketing services like Constant Contact or MailChimp may be the perfect platform for you. These are entirely serviceable solutions to help SaaS companies get their company name in the minds of their users.
However, if you’re looking to get fully-integrated insight into your newsletter's performance and user engagement to optimize your newsletter, using an integrated marketing platform like Hubspot is your best bet. By integrating your website to Hubspot, you can track click-through rates (CTR) and the engagement on all your linked pages and content. You can even track your current leads and see if any of them became Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) after engaging with your content!
2. Relevant, valuable content
If you’re creating an outfacing newsletter, the majority of your contacts will be interested in how you can help them. Because of this, make the subject line and preview text of your email pop! Grab your contact’s attention and make them interested in your newsletter.
Thoughtfully organize your content with a strategic use of headings, and break up long paragraphs of text to be easily readable on both mobile and desktop devices. Once your newsletter has a clean look, use your brand messaging to communicate that you’re offering a solution to solve your audiences’ pains and fears.
Still, don’t just talk about how grand you are. Give your audience an incentive to interact with your content and your website, and build a relationship with your audience. If you’re offering a service that your audience needs, they may not understand or know why they need you. Lean into this, and emphasize the gains your SaaS solution provides.
Pro tip: If you need ideas to keep your monthly newsletter fresh and relevant, consider a monthly theme to help you:
- Boost the creativity up amongst your team. By creating a monthly theme for your newsletter, you can source older content that fits the topic or even challenge your team to write new material. Generating more content will deepen the pool you have to source from.
- Directly addresses the concerns of your audience. The newsletter should be focused on furthering your own brand and narrative, but you can also use it as an opportunity to strengthen and validate the concerns of your audience. With monthly themes, you can cover their pains in a grander sense and then explain granular solutions to these problems with relevant blogs and articles. This demonstrates your authority in the field and establishes trust with your contacts.
3. Stay consistent with your brand and voice
Brand, company voice and values are essential to your positioning strategy and show the difference between you and your competition. Make sure to utilize these aspects of your software venture in your newsletter to nurture your contacts.
Messaging and iconography in the newsletter should be a natural extension of your website and other marketing materials. Avoid using unapproved images, fonts and writing style to make the transition from newsletter to content on your website as seamless as possible.
Still, this doesn’t mean you can't experiment with your newsletter with different CTA formatting and content! Always be testing, and try new ways to make your newsletter pop -- just make sure it aligns within the framework of your company’s brand.
Wrapping up things up
Newsletters require many overlapping strategies at once. To simplify your SaaS newsletter creation process for your company, remember these key takeaways to build and deploy an engaging, effective newsletter:
- Choose the platform best for you to organize and promote your content in a meaningful way (tracking analytics, funnel conversions, and engagement). We recommend Hubspot for an integrated marketing platform that ties together your contacts, content and metrics in one system.
- Curate your best content and push it forward in an organized manner that feels genuine and offers value to your contact.
- Center each newsletter around a monthly theme.
- Circulate ideas around your company to generate new content.
- Align closely with brand voice and imagery, or you'll risk confusing or alienating your contacts
Thanks for reading!
Would you like to know more about marketing your content measuring your success? Check out our blog on the Five Best Content Marketing Metrics to Track, which includes a free dashboard template.
