Need some help writing your SaaS newsletter?
You’re in the right place to learn from the pros. We have now been publishing GoSquared Weekly for 300+ weeks. That’s more than five years of us committing to writing and publishing a weekly newsletter.
Writing our newsletter has changed a lot over the years. But with the experience we’ve gained valuable insights into how to get the most out of each edition, along with what our audience is most receptive too. All things which we want to pass on so you can also create amazing SaaS newsletters too.
In today’s post, we want to delve into what makes a SaaS newsletter a valuable marketing tool for your business. Specifically, how to write a newsletter and keep your audience engaged. Let’s go.
Your Audience Is The Most Important Factor
The main reason we decided to overhaul our weekly newsletter is that both our audience and our business’ focus has changed in the past five years. These two aspects changing together is not a coincidence, in fact, far from it. We spend a lot of time getting to know our customers and learning which company’s get the most value out of our product, and we lean into that. Making more features that suit those customers and working to help them uncover even more value in the GoSquared Suite.
Understanding your audience is really important for whatever your aims are, but it’s especially important when you are writing content or starting a SaaS newsletter.
Prioritising In-Email Content
For years we have used our newsletter to share our own blog posts and company updates as well as to share the articles and posts that inspire us from other businesses and publications. This is something we don’t want to lose. However, we felt that by offering more exclusive in-email content, we could give more value to those who read GoSquared Weekly week after week.
This in-email content almost reads like a mini blog post in itself, and each week will focus on a different topic that is high-value to our SaaS customers. It has the added benefit of being exclusive to the newsletter, meaning that our readers have to open it to be able to access it.
This is a great technique to increase your open rate, gain loyal readers who come back week after week and to provide genuine added value that your readers can’t get anywhere else.
The Importance Of Design
When we spoke about redesigning the look of our newsletter, one phrase kept coming up: ‘undesigning’.
We had all shared references of clean, uncluttered emails that are easy to read and not at all fussy. Your SaaS newsletter reaches a particular audience whoa re familiar with the clean lines and pops of colour of technology branding. You could lean into this, or go in the total opposite direction to stand out.
Some key factors to consider:
- Remember that design is never about ‘making it pretty’ and always about how to get across your content and message best.
- Know the limitations of your team and the process of creating your SaaS newsletter. If your content team aren’t designers, make sure they can still autonomously create and send the issue.
Choosing Sections For Your SaaS Newsletter
We want our newsletter to feel like an all-in-one stop for SaaS updates, guidance, and tips. Because of this, it’s important that we don’t only have our original in-email content, but also other sections that add interest and allow us to share other’s work and advice.
Even if your main focus is on in-email original content, it’s important to add in other interesting sections that your readers can look forward to each time.
Some options that we considered are:
Introduction
Some newsletters don’t include an introduction at all; they just dive straight into the main content — if this works for the style of SaaS newsletter you are producing that’s great! It can help get your reader directly into the juicy stuff and not get lost in extra text. For others, anything from a couple of sentences to a paragraph is appropriate for an introductory section.
News round-up
We chose to condense the way we link out to blog posts and articles we’ve been reading by using the title of the piece as the link text, instead of adding our own introductory blurb.
Ask the Expert
A short section for a guest-expert to take over each week, offering a different perspective and experience to your readers.
‘X’ of the week
For years we have had a quote of the week to finish up our newsletter, it adds a bit of extra lightness and personality into your newsletter. Other great examples are gif of the week, tweet of the week, or fact of the week. We particularly like The Hustle’s ‘Shower Thoughts’ section.
Tracked statistic
Exponential View does this for climate change statistics which creates a powerful weekly reminder of what’s important to them. You could make this a metric that’s based on your newsletter, like SaaS Weekly’s open rate tracker, or you could base it on something entirely different.
Product feature
It’s important to get the balance right between using your SaaS newsletter to promote your own products and to share advice and guidance. Ideally, you find a way that these outcomes aren’t mutually exclusive.
Reaching out to experts and customers
A great element to include in your SaaS newsletter is to hold space for experts and your customers to share their work and get some well-deserved exposure. In particular, celebrating the wins of your customers is a brilliant way to give back into the customer community and has a bonus of demonstrating how your product helped them achieve their goals.
You could do this by featuring a customer of the week, writing micro-case studies, or creating a regular customer interview section.
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To the thousands of people who already subscribe – thank you, and see you next week!
