A practical breakdown of why expert organization newsletters — think tanks, research centers, NGOs, and foundations — fail to deliver value. What goes wrong, what good intention looks like, and how to build a newsletter that serves your audience and your goals.
Most of B2B newsletters are boring as hell. And for most of them you never subscribe, you just start receiving them if you somehow get in touch with the company. Often even without that. I call it spam.
PostHog has a good one, they publish on Substack, by the way.
I think the problem is that for so long, everyone in communications has been talking about automation and content repurposing, that behind all the functional simplification, both the goal-setting and the focus on a specific channel get lost.
I have no broad experience with this but what I feel is that many of these B2B emails aim at keeping you informed.
It is more “look at me! I have this and that”, rather than telling people why they should care. It is assumed the readers can connect the dots, but in practice they don’t care.
Well written newsletter should not only inform but also address a problem or entertain, or engage in some other way.
My company’s newsletter is boring as hell too. Maybe I should offer my mad Substack skills to our CMO :)
Most of B2B newsletters are boring as hell. And for most of them you never subscribe, you just start receiving them if you somehow get in touch with the company. Often even without that. I call it spam.
PostHog has a good one, they publish on Substack, by the way.
I think the problem is that for so long, everyone in communications has been talking about automation and content repurposing, that behind all the functional simplification, both the goal-setting and the focus on a specific channel get lost.
I have no broad experience with this but what I feel is that many of these B2B emails aim at keeping you informed.
It is more “look at me! I have this and that”, rather than telling people why they should care. It is assumed the readers can connect the dots, but in practice they don’t care.
Well written newsletter should not only inform but also address a problem or entertain, or engage in some other way.