If your company page has over 150 LinkedIn followers, you can use LinkedIn company newsletters. You can also start a personal LinkedIn newsletter at any time.
LinkedIn newsletters are a great way of winning business, offering some powerful advantages over posting updates to your company or personal page. With a better reach, objective-focused approach, and more control over your visual storytelling, we love them.
By gaining your ideal prospects as newsletter subscribers, you can adopt a content-led nurture approach that helps you raise visibility and credibility with your marketplace.
But some of the more astute growth hackers among you may have noticed that your newsletter subscriber data is locked inside LinkedIn. Well, not for Dux-Soup users!!
Dux-Soup allows you to download your LinkedIn newsletter subscriber list so you can target these prospects via other channels, like email. We'll come onto how to do this right here in this blog.
We'll also share our LinkedIn newsletter strategy and show you how to combine newsletters with LinkedIn automation to help you increase both your company’s and personal LinkedIn newsletter subscribers and generate leads. For some of the elements, you'll need Dux-Soup, and the good news is you can try it for free if it's your first time.
Why newsletters?
Newsletters stand apart from LinkedIn posts when it comes to both credibility and visibility. Let's explain:
Credibility
Each newsletter can contain up to 100,000 characters (more than the 3,000 characters of a post), allowing you to go into greater depth on the subject you're writing about. By delivering deeper insights, highlighting expertise, and demonstrating thought leadership, all while offering valuable content to your readers, your have a great opportunity to establish credibility with newsletters. Write great content on your area of expertise and people will follow. We'll share some nice examples of this later.
Visibility
Newsletters gain a lot more visibility than company posts. We did some stats on this and found that posts on company pages typically reached just 6% of company followers. This is partly due to our LinkedIn feeds being full of ads, and partly due to LinkedIn's algorithms that choose who they show our content to. Newsletters, however, notify 100% of your subscribers via both LinkedIn notifications and email every time you publish a new edition. So as long your subscribers are checking one of these channels, they'll see that you've created some content. The fact that every newsletter that you release notifies your subscribers via 2 different channels means that they will naturally get more visibility than standard posts.
Here's another great benefit of newsletters. When you publish your first newsletter, all of your company followers (with a company newsletter) and connections (with a personal newsletter) are notified, letting them know you've launched this new content. This wider visibility is what makes newsletters so appealing. So we recommend growing your company followers or your connections before you launch your first newsletter.
Let's look at this in practice. When Dux-Soup launched its first newsletter, 30% of its followers subscribed right away. Imagine you've run a campaign that boosts your company followers from 1,000 to 4,000. When you publish your first newsletter, all 4,000 followers will be notified and you may get 1200 subscribers. This significantly enhances your visibility, increasing brand awareness to a larger audience.
Added benefit - audience insights
With a LinkedIn newsletter, unlike a regular post, you gain access to valuable subscriber demographic data. LinkedIn provides insights into your audience by revealing details like job titles, locations, industries, and company sizes, helping you better understand and target your ideal audience.
Clicks and opens can also be measured with newsletters, giving insight into the intent of the audience to read your articles.
Visual storytelling
Newsletters allow you to tell a visual story more effectively than company posts. On a company page post, you can add a description and photos, but the images are grouped at the bottom, often disconnected from the content. In a newsletter, however, you can strategically place images within the text, creating a more engaging narrative. This enhances the user experience and leads to a stronger call to action at the end, making your message far more impactful.
The opening two or three lines need to contain enough keywords to hook the reader in, and try to keep it to under 1,000 words to maintain the reader's attention.
How to create a company LinkedIn newsletter
If you already have 150 company followers you can get started straight away.
Step 1. Go to your company page (you must be a page admin).
Step 2. Click the ‘+Post’ button
Step 3. Click ‘Create a newsletter’
Step 4. Brand your newsletter
Step 5. Post your first article.
Tip: Make sure you have grown your company followers FIRST!
How to create a personal LinkedIn newsletter
Go to your profile home page, and click on 'write article'. On the dropdown menu under 'Manage,' you'll see an option to 'Create newsletter.'
In the same way as with a company page, you can brand your personal newsletter.
Now you're ready to start writing!
Choosing whether to post to your company or personal LinkedIn newsletter
If you have both a company and a personal LinkedIn newsletter, you can choose where to publish your article when you post it. Simply select from the drop down by your name. By clicking on the company name you can choose to post to the company page or to the newsletter.
Company or personal newsletters?
When it comes to deciding whether to focus on your company or personal newsletter, consider the following:
- Company newsletters can be posted by anyone who is a page admin, allowing input, ideas and content from more people within the business.
- Company newsletters are to promote the company brand. This means that the content should be managed in line with the ethos of the brand. In contrast, personal posts should be your own ideas and thoughts, which can often be quite different to that of the company brand.
- A company newsletter content and its subscribers will always stay with the company. If one of your employees is creating great newsletter content under their own profile and attracting a great following under the work they are doing in the business, those followers will stay with the person should they leave the business.
Whether you decide to create a company or personal newsletter depends largely on what you are trying to promote - yourself or your business.
Create a winning newsletter strategy
To drive business through your newsletter, keep the following in mind:
- Commit only to what you can deliver. When setting up your newsletter, LinkedIn will ask how often you plan to publish, and this frequency will be displayed at the top. If you commit to weekly updates but only post monthly, it could discourage subscribers. Be realistic to maintain engagement.
- Make sure your first newsletter is top-notch. With a company newsletter, your first one will automatically notify all of your company followers. With a personal newsletter, it will notify all of your connections when you publish your first edition. Their decision to subscribe will largely depend on the quality of this initial issue.
- The newsletter should offer value to readers, not be a sales pitch. Think about offering market insights, trends, evaluation, and the launch of new products.
- Encourage action, engagement, and shares to boost your newsletter's visibility and reach audiences beyond your network. This is how you'll attract more subscribers and increase awareness. The goal is to generate as many impressions as possible.
- For Search Engine Optimization (SEO) add backlinks into your website to help your website content rank better on Google.
- Know your objective! What do you aim to achieve with your newsletter—gaining more followers or increasing webinar attendance? Once your purpose is defined, you can tailor your content to support it and measure your success accordingly.
Newsletters can effectively nurture your sales funnel by building credibility and visibility. Credibility grows through in-depth thought leadership pieces, while visibility increases with more impressions, helping you gain momentum over time.
Great newsletter examples
When you’re getting started it’s worth having a look to see how other companies in your industry structure their newsletters.
Here are a few examples:
Future Tech Trends has an impressive 86,000 subscribers, with 428 editions, all about technology trends and innovation. The content is the epitome of thought leadership and the objective is simple - to build awareness and increase his following which he asks people to do at the top of his newsletters. This has turned him into somewhat of a market influencer with a huge reach.
Punk Rock HR Podcast is in the recruitment sector with 37,000 subscribers, with 148 editions all of which are podcasts. In the newsletter, they outline what you will hear in each podcast, allowing them to highlight their expertise with the option to delve deeper into their content. Their main call to action is to drive subscribers not only to their LinkedIn newsletters but also to their Apple podcast, allowing them to expand their reach onto a different platform. It's done really nicely, and is clearly popular.
In this last example, a presentation skills coach has a main objective of promoting free webinars to her subscribers. A webinar allows her to take the relationship to the next level, giving her another chance to establish credibility. The newsletter starts by sharing valuable free content, offering insights on how principles like lightness, speed, and accuracy in writing translate to effective public speaking. She concludes each newsletter with a free webinar invitation and signup details. Each webinar attracts over 100 attendees per month.
Use a combination of text and images to tell the story and look to write around 1000 words on the topic.
If you're unsure of what to write about, why not check out some newsletters in your industry that are doing well and take some inspiration?
Grow your newsletter subscribers
Growing your newsletter subscribers is a great way to feed your sales funnel, build your awareness and generate leads. If you have a list of prospects that you'd like to win business with, newsletters are a great, gentle way of engaging with them to build your credibility.
Did you know that you can save loads of time growing your LinkedIn newsletter subscriber list by using Dux-Soup to automate LinkedIn campaigns to your first, second, and even third-degree connections that invite them to subscribe?
Here's how to automate newsletter subscriber growth with Dux-Soup:
Step 1: Create your Dux-Soup campaign
Create a new campaign in the drip campaigns section of the Dux-Dash. I'm going to use Sales Navigator to target them, but you can use LinkedIn too.
Decide on whether to add a connection message or leave this blank. It's the follow-up message we want to focus on here. We'll be asking people to subscribe by highlighting the newsletter contents and the potential benefits to them of reading it. Only the prospects that have an interest in your area of specialism are likely to become your customers, so don't be afraid to put people off by being too specific. Remember, your message should give them a good reason to subscribe. It needs thought and careful planning to ensure that it resonates with your prospects.
And, of course, you'll need to include a link to your newsletter in the message to make it easy for them to hit the 'sibscribe' button.
Step 2: Find your list of prospects
From LinkedIn or Sales Navigator pull up a list of the prospects you want to invite to subscribe. e.g. 1st degree connections, or 2nd degree connections in targeted industries. Whatever your list looks like, it should be who you want to win business with.
Step 3: Enroll the list into your campaign
From the Dux-Soup extension, click on 'Enroll' and then select the campaign of choice.
And voila. It really is that easy. Dux-Soup will send your messages and you'll start to notice your newsletter subscribers increase. Follow this process on a continual basis to different lists, and congratulations! You're now feeding your ongoing newsletter subscriber pipeline.
Automating LinkedIn campaigns to newsletter subscribers
The really cool thing is, with Dux-Soup you can run automated LinkedIn outreach campaigns to both your company and your personal newsletter subscribers:
With a company newsletter, head to the company page analytics, and at the bottom, click 'See all' in the new subscribers section. This is your newsletter subscriber list that you're going to run a campaign to. Once you've got your subscriber list, the Dux-Soup icon will turn green you can enroll the whole list into your Dux-Soup campaign. Or you can visit the list, and download the data, tidy it up before uploading it back into Dux-Soup to enroll into a campaign. Check out how to create a campaign if you need some help setting this up.
In a similar way, you can run Dux-Soup actions to your personal newsletter subscribers. Simply pull up your list of subscribers and select the action from your Dux-Soup extension.
Consider running a campaign to automatically visit this list of profiles and collect data on who is engaging with you. If you have Turbo or Cloud, the data can be exported straight to your CRM. With Dux-Soup Pro, you can visit profiles and download their details directly.
Dux-Soup includes a built-in tagging feature that allows you to label LinkedIn profiles, helping to track who you've contacted and the reason for reaching out. If someone has already subscribed to your newsletter, tag them to avoid sending repeat invitations. To learn more about tagging read: Tagging & untagging profiles.
Similar campaigns can be run to your list of company page followers.
You can use this to send special promotions, invite them to events, or contribute to a survey for example. The opportunities are endless.
In Summary
- If you already have a substantial following (150 followers), you’re all set to launch your first newsletter. You can create a personal newsletter at any time.
- Newsletters drive awareness and business growth, and as we've demonstrated, getting started is straightforward. If your content is valuable, people will like and share it, increasing its visibility in feeds and search results.
- Combining a LinkedIn notification with an email notification is highly effective and will draw attention to your content. Test out different approaches for the content and format, measure and analyze to see what works.
- Research the market by examining your competitors' newsletters to see which have the most followers, what content they focus on and their calls to action. Use this insight to help define your tone of voice, identify your business's core passions, and determine what you want to promote. Consider which content strategies — blogs, podcasts, videos, or webinars — align with your goals. Explore other newsletters to discover what resonates with you and could inspire your own approach.
Watch the webinar on how to increase company followers and win business with newsletters.
If you have any questions or comments, you can get in touch with our customer support team via the live chat, or send us an email: info@dux-soup.com.
