The newsletter that quietly out-performs the entire growth stack.
A short essay about the most undervalued channel in B2B SaaS in 2026 — and what the teams who have built it well have figured out that the rest of the industry has not.
The company newsletter is, in 2026, the single most under-appreciated marketing channel in B2B SaaS. The teams that run their newsletter well are getting, in our reading of the data, an outsized fraction of their total marketing value from it. The teams that run it badly — which is most teams — are leaving substantial revenue on the table. The gap between the two camps is, in our experience, larger than the gap on any other marketing surface.
I want, in this short essay, to describe what the teams in the first camp are doing that the teams in the second camp are not. The pattern is, by my count, four specific decisions.
Decision one: the newsletter is written by a person, not by a process
The badly-run newsletter is, in most companies, the product of a process. A marketing operations person assembles the content from various other sources — the product changelog, the recent blog posts, the upcoming webinar — and arranges it according to a template that does not change from week to week. The result is a newsletter that reads like a marketing artefact rather than like a letter from a person.
The well-run newsletter is, almost without exception, written by an actual person whose name appears on it. The person has a recognisable voice. The voice changes, over time, in the way a person's voice changes. The newsletter has, when you read it, the texture of someone's thinking rather than the texture of a template. This is, by far, the most important of the four decisions.
Decision two: the newsletter is short
The badly-run newsletter is, in most companies, long. It contains multiple sections, multiple calls to action, multiple sources of content. The reader, opening it, faces a decision about what to read first, and — for most readers — the decision is to read none of it.
The well-run newsletter is short. The most successful ones I have studied are, on average, around four hundred words. They contain one substantive piece of content, written for the email itself rather than repurposed from elsewhere. They have one call to action, or zero. They can be read in three or four minutes. The reader, opening them, does not face a decision about what to read first.
Decision three: the newsletter is sent on a predictable schedule
The badly-run newsletter is sent when there is content to send, which is to say, irregularly. The reader has no reliable expectation about when it will arrive. The reader who has not heard from the brand in a few weeks will, in most cases, have forgotten that they subscribed by the time the next edition arrives.
The well-run newsletter arrives on the same day, at roughly the same time, every week or every two weeks. The reader knows when to expect it. The reader builds, over time, a routine that includes the newsletter. The predictability is, by itself, a significant fraction of the channel's value. A newsletter that arrives every Friday at 7am builds a relationship with the reader that an irregularly-published newsletter never can.
"The newsletter is the only marketing channel where the reader has affirmatively asked to hear from you on a recurring schedule. Most companies treat that permission as an asset to be exploited. The companies who treat it as a relationship to be earned do far better."
Decision four: the newsletter is useful
The badly-run newsletter is, in most companies, mostly about the company. It contains product announcements, customer stories that double as case studies, upcoming events, and the various other artefacts of a marketing calendar. None of these are, in themselves, bad. They are, however, mostly useful to the company rather than to the reader.
The well-run newsletter is mostly about the reader. It contains information, observations, or perspectives that the reader would find useful even if they had no commercial relationship with the company. The product-related content, when it appears, is woven into the useful content rather than presented as the main event. The reader who finishes the newsletter feels that they got something out of having read it that justified the four minutes it took.
This is, in my view, the second most important of the four decisions, after the "written by a person" one. The newsletter that is useful to the reader is a newsletter that the reader will continue to open. The newsletter that is useful to the company is a newsletter that the reader will, eventually, stop opening.
What the numbers actually look like
The teams that have made these four decisions are, by the open-rate and click-rate figures they have shared with us, achieving sustained open rates of around fifty per cent and click rates of around twelve per cent. These figures are, by the conventional benchmarks for B2B SaaS newsletters, roughly double the industry average for open rates and roughly four times the industry average for click rates. The difference is large enough that it cannot be explained by measurement noise. It is the result of structural decisions that the teams have made about how the newsletter operates.
The downstream effect on the business is, by the accounts of the teams running these newsletters, substantial. The newsletter is, in several of the companies I have spoken to, the single largest source of qualified inbound leads. It is, in most of them, the single most reliable source of trial-to-paid conversions among readers who have engaged with the brand for more than a few weeks. The unit economics of the channel are, on the team's own numbers, several times better than the unit economics of any paid acquisition channel they have tested.
What I would say
The newsletter is, for almost any B2B SaaS company in 2026, worth more careful attention than the average marketing team is giving it. The four decisions I have described above are not, individually, difficult. They do require the team to give up on a few things — the template, the comprehensive coverage, the multiple calls to action, the company-focused content — that the marketing-automation tools tend to encourage by default. The cost of giving up those things is, in our experience, much smaller than the gain from doing so.
The team that builds a genuinely good newsletter has, in 2026, built one of the most valuable marketing assets it is possible to build. It will keep paying off for years. It will continue to work even as the rest of the marketing stack becomes less reliable. It is, in our view, the marketing investment with the highest expected return that most companies are currently failing to make.