Email newsletters are a tried-and-true way to capture your B2B audience’s attention. But to really stand out, your newsletter needs to do so much more than that. ASBPE caught up with 2024 Email Newsletter of the Year winner Trade Show Executive (TSE) to hear from Managing Editor Madison Ryley about what makes the brand’s “Editor’s Picks” newsletter resonate with readers.
ASBPE: Tell me why TSE launched its weekly “Editor’s Picks” newsletter.
Ryley: The purpose of the weekly “Editor’s Picks” newsletter is to deliver the news that matters most to our audience right to their inboxes, which we know they are more frequently checking than our website itself. The newsletter serves as a touchpoint between the TSE brand and our readers, and a way to quickly and clearly communicate the news of the week that could impact readers’ businesses and the trade show industry.
We know our readers are busy in their day-to-day lives, so our goal for the newsletter is rooted in our mission of giving them the news, views and tools that give them a competitive edge in a format that is accessible and quick to read and understand.
ASBPE: How has the newsletter evolved since its launch — in content, presentation and subscribers? What best practices have you picked up along the way to make it appeal to more readers in new and different ways?
Ryley: There has been an evolution, and there have been different newsletters and formats over the years we have used. What we have now is a weekly email newsletter, which sends on Friday afternoons — to cap off the week and keep people caught up heading into the weekend. The newsletter also serves as a breaking news source, but we use that sparingly, mostly for major acquisition news or big award announcements.
When it comes to content, we’ve always shared what the editor believes is the most relevant or impactful news of the day or week, so in that sense we haven’t changed much. We definitely use more imagery now than in the past though, with an image alongside each story, including more advertisements. The newsletter blurbs themselves have also changed, with us leaning more into quick-hitting, concise overviews now than the lengthier descriptions seen in the 2010s. On the subscriber front, we’ve remained consistent in our numbers, always hovering in that 4,000-5,000 range. While that number may seem small, they’re a highly engaged audience, and most of them are at a director level or above. Our open rates consistently exceed 25% with click rates around 4-5%, which is a pretty significant increase from just a couple years ago when we weren’t breaking 18% and 3% respectively.
I love that you asked about best practices because this year our Digital Associate Editor, Andrew Warrick, and I have been experimenting with some changes to the “Editor’s Picks” newsletter to see what’s resonating best with people and to help drive engagement. We’ve been taking insights from our social media analytics and have been applying them to the newsletter, and we’ve seen some great engagement from those kinds of decisions. For example, Andrew saw that our People in the News social media posts get the most amount of engagement, so we’ve added in a People in the News section to the newsletter and are seeing stronger engagement with the entirety of the newsletter overall.
In a more general sense, we try to change the style of writing, seeing if more concise blurbs are drawing people in or if giving a few key highlights and name-dropping increases engagement. We lean away from using stock images or more generic images, and use headshots where it works. And I can say name-dropping and headshots have both led to higher engagement and clicks for our audience.
ASBPE: Trade Show Executive has a stable of products, from a print magazine to podcasts, events and more. How does this weekly newsletter expand on the brand? What niche does it fill for your audience?
Ryley: A great thing about the newsletter that our other products don’t feature is that it’s very skimmable. Our readers can choose to take a quick look and get the overall gist of what’s going on and what’s new in the industry that week without having to commit to reading a whole piece while they’re working or on the go.
The majority of our content in the magazine, at our events and in other products is more in-depth, so skimming isn’t the best option for consuming those, but with the newsletter, they have the option of where, when and how to consume that week’s news.
As a brand with a monthly magazine, we also let the newsletter serve as an online bridge between TSE and our subscribers in the weeks between the monthly editions dropping. We want to stay in touch with them and build up a reputation of reliability, that we’re here to serve them with the information they want and need, and that we’ll do it consistently; and so, part of it is about establishing a sense of trust in TSE as a news source.
ASBPE: Talk about your editorial process behind the newsletter.
Ryley: Our newsletter goes out on Friday afternoons, with one also going out on the first of the month to share the digital edition of our monthly magazine. When it comes to what goes into the weekly newsletter, we have created a hierarchy of sorts based on feedback from subscribers and industry trends and reports, so we prioritize merger-and-acquisition stories, show launches, and event recaps/previews, and after we hit on those subjects we like to include either a destination-, international- or sustainability-focused piece to help round it out with some evergreen-type stories.
We do also look at what’s doing well online, by checking our social media to see what’s really generating engagement and discussion, so we do consider what’s more “trending.”
ASBPE: Do you have plans to expand into additional newsletters on other topics, or introduce a daily? Why or why not?
Ryley: At the beginning of September, TSE launched the Young Professionals Corner, which is a dedicated section on our website with curated content for young professionals in the industry. As part of that launch, I’ve been designing a whole new newsletter, which will instead deploy monthly. It has a whole new layout and vibe based on the newsletters and websites that young people and professionals frequent, and what’s trending within that age group when it comes to style.
The reasoning behind this is that TSE has traditionally served an executive-level audience of trade show professionals, and while we still have them in the center of our mission and content creation, I realized we were missing out on a very important segment of the industry — those trade show executives of the future. With this new section and newsletter, we’re hoping to provide more introductory level guides, fun “hot-topic” stories and human-interest stories that our surveys have said this group wants, with the ultimate goal of creating loyal TSE readers and building up that reputation with these young leaders who may be on our covers in the future.
ASBPE: Any tips for other ASBPE members who are considering entering this category?
Ryley: I think the ASBPE criteria is pretty straightforward for this category, but something to think about when writing up the submission is to really focus on how the decisions you’ve made about the content, layout, etc., are being received by your audience. At the end of the day, the value of a newsletter is in how your readers engage with it and what they get out of it. When working on our submission, I focused on those engagement levels and how the way we were presenting and deciding on things for the newsletter came back to what will best serve our audience.
ASBPE: Anything else you’d like to add?
Ryley: Always, always, have someone else read it over and check the links! I’ve had my share of blunders over links going to the wrong place or a typo, so take it from me.