Two of our clients have said the same thing to me recently, in almost the same words.
“We know when the newsletter has gone out, because the phone starts ringing.”
Newsletters are not a vanity exercise. They’re not a thing you do because someone said you should be ‘engaging your audience’ (blegh). When they’re done well, they are one of the highest-performing pieces of marketing in your entire business — and you can measure them by something far better than open rates. You can measure them by inbound calls.
Two clients, two industries, same story
We write the monthly newsletter for an Auckland electrician. They’ve been a client for a while now, and what they tell us is that on the day the newsletter goes out — and for the rest of that week — the phone rings. It rings with people saying “hey, I just read your newsletter, can we get a quote on XYZ?” The thing they read about, the thing we’d written about that month, is what they’re calling about. Not always, but reliably enough that it’s now a pattern they can plan around.
Different client, different industry. We started writing a quarterly newsletter for an insurance broker. The first one we sent out had an article about cyber insurance. The hook we used was that in New Zealand, you’re now more likely to be a victim of a cyber attack than a burglary. In 2024, fraud and cybercrime hit 14 incidents per 100 adults. Most people have a lock on their front door. Most people don’t have cyber insurance.
That single article, in that single newsletter, generated at least six enquiries. Enough sign-ups followed that the new policies more than covered the cost of us writing the newsletter for the entire year.
That’s what a good newsletter looks like. Not a bigger list. Not a higher open rate. A phone that rings.
So why do most newsletters fail?
Because most of them sell. That’s it. That’s the whole problem.
Most business newsletters land in your inbox shouting about a special offer, the newest product, the upcoming sale, the thing they want you to buy this week. And the second time it happens, you stop opening them. The third time, you unsubscribe. Because nobody (unless you’re waiting for a sale) signs up to a newsletter to be sold to.
People sign up to newsletters for one reason: value. They want to learn something, understand something, be entertained, or be reassured that the person sending the newsletter knows what they’re doing. The sale comes later, almost as a by-product. You give people something useful for free, often enough, and eventually some of them put their hand up and say “actually, can you help me with this?”
That’s why our clients’ phones ring. Not because we wrote a thinly-disguised advert. Because we wrote something useful, and the reader thought “oh, these people clearly know their stuff. I should call them.”
The seven touchpoints rule is dead
There’s an old marketing rule you’ve probably heard. It says it takes seven touchpoints — seven exposures to your brand — before a person will buy from you. A touchpoint is any moment a potential customer comes into contact with you: an ad, a social post, a Google search result, a recommendation from a friend, a billboard they drive past, an article they read.
The seven figure dates back to 1930s Hollywood. It came from movie studios working out how many times they needed to show audiences a poster or a trailer before they’d buy a cinema ticket. That was a world of radio, print and billboards. Three channels, basically.
Now think about how many channels exist today. Google. Email. LinkedIn. Instagram. Facebook. TikTok. YouTube. Podcasts. Reviews on third-party sites. Newsletters. AI search results. Word of mouth. Your website. Someone else’s website mentioning you. The list is enormous, and your potential customer is bouncing between all of it.
The current research is messy — different studies suggest anywhere from eight touchpoints for a simple consumer purchase up to 20, 30, even 50-plus for a more considered B2B decision. One study put the average at over 60 interactions before a B2B deal closes. Nobody agrees on a number, but everyone agrees on the direction: it’s gone up, and it keeps going up.
Which means every newsletter you send is a touchpoint. Every article in it is a touchpoint. Every time someone reads it, sees your name, recognises your face in the photo, remembers a useful thing you said three months ago — that’s another little nudge along the path to picking up the phone. The newsletter doesn’t have to do all the work in one go. It just has to keep showing up, and be useful, until the day the reader actually needs you.
Sounding like a human (specifically, like you)
The other thing most newsletters get wrong is voice. They sound like nobody. They sound like a committee wrote them. They sound like the website’s About page on a particularly tired day.
When a reader can hear you in the writing — your turns of phrase, your dry sense of humour, the way you’d explain something if they were sitting across from you with a coffee — trust goes up. Significantly. People do business with people, and a newsletter that sounds like a person feels like a relationship.
It also has to sound like a person your audience knows how to talk to. There’s no point being technically accurate if your reader has no idea what half the words mean. We spend a lot of time working out the right level — not dumbed down, not condescending, just the way a knowledgeable friend would explain it to you. That’s the sweet spot. Talk up to your reader, never down.
And then there’s the nerdy stuff
Behind every good newsletter is an embarrassing amount of fiddly detail that the reader will never notice — and that’s the point.
Subject lines that get opened versus subject lines that get deleted. Which side of the page the call-to-action button works best on (and yes, it matters). Which colours people’s eyes are drawn to, and which colours make them switch off. How long the email should be before people lose interest. What time of day to send. What day of the week. How often is too often. How rarely is too rarely. Whether to include images. Whether the preview text says anything useful. Whether the unsubscribe link is easy to find (it should be — making it hard breeds resentment, not retention).
All this changes constantly, because the digital world changes constantly. What worked in 2020 doesn’t work in 2026. What works for one industry doesn’t work for another. It’s why we keep learning, testing, and adjusting — and it’s why our clients’ open rates sit where they do.
About those open rates
The current industry average open rate sits at around 39%. Across our clients, our average is 55%. Some sit higher than that. One of our newsletters — a weekly tax update, of all things — has a 0% unsubscribe rate. Weekly. Tax. Zero unsubscribes.
That’s not because we’ve cracked some secret algorithm. It’s because the content is useful to the people who signed up for it, written in a voice they recognise, sent at a frequency that respects their inbox. The boring fundamentals, applied consistently, every month, for years.
If your newsletter isn’t making the phone ring
This is the time of year when a lot of business owners are looking at their new financial year budget and deciding where the marketing money goes. If you’ve got a newsletter that you suspect isn’t doing much, or you’ve been meaning to start one and never got around to it, this is the moment.
We offer a newsletter audit — we’ll have a proper look at what you’re sending (or not sending), how it’s landing, and where the opportunities are. No commitment, no jargon, no ‘engagement strategy frameworks.’ Just a conversation about whether your newsletter is pulling its weight, and what we’d do differently.
Get in touch. We’d love to be the reason your phone starts ringing too.