The most-clicked link in a recent Blue Seedling newsletter took us by surprise.
As always, the email was packed with links to excellent B2B marketing content – 13 of them, to be exact. The most clicked link in the email – by a significant margin – was to a blog post about generating content ideas: “The best source for content ideas is right in front of you”.
Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s a great post. But I would never have guessed it’d rank even in the top 10 of most clicked links; other links in this newsletter are more timely (seasonal tips for holiday marketing), more contrarian (“a strategic moat many founders underestimate”) and more buzzword-y (plenty of GenAI-related links). So what gives? Here are the takeaways for B2B email & content marketers:
1. More links → more clicks. We linked to this post twice, giving readers more chances to click. It’s a simple, yet effective tactic – we’ve dropped this same link 4 times in this blog post.
2. ‘Clickbait’ works… in moderation. Terms like “Best” and “Always,” the use of CAPITAL LETTERS, and numbers (“3 ideas“) do attract attention and engagement. Clearly, this style can’t be your go-to at all times, or readers will tune out. But use it sparingly, and people take notice. After all, who could ignore “five content ideas that ALWAYS work”?
There’s another factor at work here – the promise of a list. Some of your readers may be hustling, with scarcely a few minutes to skim your newsletter before moving on. They’re naturally going to look for the fastest, most efficient piece of content to read.
3. Long content can win. The second most clicked link in our newsletter? Buried all the way at the bottom, pointing to this (fantastic) work-bench article: “GTM Tactics You Need To Scale”. This link came along with a short recommendation – “…by Work-Bench (they always have 💯 content)” – see it highlighted in the screenshot at the top of this post.
It may sound obvious, but when you’re sharing great external content, positioning yourself as a discerning reader of that content gets your audiences to trust you – and by extension, the link – more. As we’ve said in our post on building your Reader-style newsletter, “become a curator, not just a marketer.”
💡The takeaway? Don’t shy away from long emails (or content). If it’s valuable, informative, and relevant, people will read and engage.
The bottom line
We’ve championed our go-to newsletter format – “The Reader” – as the most effective marketing email you can send. And there are many finishing touches you can add to your email to make the most out of this template. If you’d like to see this effect for yourself, sign up for our (not too frequent, hailed as “consistently the best content in my inbox”) newsletter here.
