✍️ okay, okay. we’ll write your newsletter.

Yes, everyone and their mother has a newsletter. 

And everyone and their mother is right. At least, they are if you’re a B2B marketer. 

(Side note: Mother’s Day is just four days away. You’re welcome.) 

Newsletters are one of the few channels where you get to think, write, have a point of view, and build something that compounds over time. They’re fun. They’re hard. And when they work, they really freakin’ work.

So today, we’re making it official.

We’re launching Essentials — our newsletter-first tier, where we build and run your editorial newsletter alongside the social motion that makes it discoverable.

Lately, more and more folks have been asking us, “Can you help us launch/revive/fix/monetize our newsletter?”

Our short answer is: Sure! 

Our longer answer: We maybe, possibly, definitely like newsletters too much and would like to show you our dissertation levels of research on this topic. 

Let’s get into it. 

At any given time, only 5% of your market is ready to buy. The other 95% is watching, learning, and forming opinions about who they’ll trust when the time comes.

A newsletter wins over that 95%.

Because a good editorial newsletter shouldn’t ask for anything. It should just show up, add value, and let the reader do the selling for you.

Over time, genuine interest — and some forwards — turns into real pipeline.

💡 Take Compound, a digital family office managing $5B in assets. Their newsletter landed in a recurring reader's inbox. That reader forwarded it to 3 referrals — collectively worth $5M+ in net new business — in under 24 hours. Not too shabby.

WHERE A NEWSLETTER FITS IN YOUR PIPELINE

Social is where people first notice you.
Long-form is where they learn from you.
And a newsletter is where they invite you back.

It’s the most intentional, distraction-free environment in your reader’s entire digital day.

B2B research puts the number of touchpoints needed to move a buyer somewhere between 7 and 68. If you’re consistent — and actually showing up with content worth reading — your newsletter is where you stack those touchpoints. 

To make the most of that touchpoint-stacking, it’s crucial NOT to:

1. Abandon your newsletter too early because “it’s not generating leads” 

2. Make it selfish or salesly (because ain’t nobody reading that)

Avoid those pitfalls, and every edition becomes a pitch in disguise. No wonder all the hype.

💡Female Quotient had a massive social reach, to the tune of 6.5M followers. Their newsletter helped turn that rented audience into an owned audience of devoted readers, driving up sponsors and event attendance. Their social content casts a wide net and lands where the algorithm tells it to. Their newsletter gets seen every. single. send.  

HOW TO MAKE IT WORK

If we’re gonna sell editorial newsletters, we should obviously be running one ourselves. The Standard helped us refine the model before we sold it.

1) Start with a niche audience.

We built The Standard for a very specific reader: a B2B marketer inside a $10M+ company, trying to lead marketing well under real constraints.

2) Give them something they need.

This newsletter is where we do the work we care about most: helping you love your job. Giving you the playbooks and templates to win the promotion, secure the budget, and clean up the competition, based on what’s worked from others in your shoes. 

Because marketing should be fun as hell.

3) Build brick-by-brick.

A few more decisions that guided our approach: 

• We treated it like a product, not a channel

• We committed to having a real point of view (and interviewed some fab SMEs to make sure that happened) 

• And we focused on making it good before making it big

4) Keep it human.

Finally, we know the content that gets forwarded and replied to is always the stuff where you can feel the humanity behind it. 

So if our newsletter ever sounded like it came from a committee, it went back for a rewrite. Still does. 

💡Take ByteSize, a newsletter for IT professionals — a famously skeptical community. They won’t read just anything. By taking a curation-forward approach and finding the right voice (and using a whole lotta memes), ByteSize became the Tony Stark of nerd newsletters: irreverent, irresistible, iconic. With a 47% open rate and 200K+ subscribers to boot. 

HOW WE KNEW OUR NEWSLETTER WAS WORKING

The clearest signal? People forwarded it.

When a reader pulls an edition out of their inbox and sends it to their CMO, their founder, or their team — that's when we know we've done something right. 

Those forwards are when a newsletter stops being content, and starts becoming infrastructure. For our clients, that means: 

• A prospect started a demo by saying, “I saw in your newsletter…” 

• A newsletter became a revenue driver through sponsorships, based on its high performance metrics 

• A content lead got promoted for their work growing the brand and driving content-influenced pipeline 

• A marketer turned a LinkedIn connection into a real-life conversation, based on a post that repackaged newsletter content

• Annnd occasionally our writers build weirdly parasocial relationships with their dedicated readers

So yeah. 

Mama loves a newsletter. 

Campaigns that got us talking: Duolingo is stepping away from butt jokes. But what happens when you train an audience to expect one thing, and then give them another?

AI spotlight: AI is getting smarter, but it’s not getting better at writing. Early models were weird and unpredictable. Now they’re polished, and painfully safe.

Even the builders say the ceiling isn’t great writing. More like … “a real poet’s okay poem.”

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: The Los Angeles Rams turned draft day into a sequel. They didn’t just reference “Friday” — they recreated it. Familiar enough to recognize. Just off enough to make you watch it twice.

We're heading to Cannes Lions!

Our marketing team will be there soaking up ideas, spotting the work everyone will be referencing for the next year, supporting our clients’ events, and getting a front-row seat to what’s breaking through.

If you’ll be there too, let’s connect over spritzes — oui, oui.

Stealing someone’s copy… to sell an AI writing course…

This is why we can't have nice content.

Ads and events rent attention. A newsletter owns it.

(Pair it with a social program that amplifies the same POV — and the flywheel starts turning on its own.)

A great newsletter: 

• Goes out consistently. (If you’ve ever sent a regular newsletter, you know this is very, very hard! Did you know weeks happen every week?) 

• Sounds like a human wrote it. (Preferably because one did.) 

• Makes your readers better at their job. (Because they have a new tactic to try, a new framework to test, or a new conversation to start.)

And all those things drive recognition → trust → pipeline. 

That’s the engine we’re building with Essentials.

So if you’ve been thinking about launching your own, we’d love to help.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... We’re clearly in our Cannes era this week, so: The Cannes Film Festival has a tradition where people shout “Ra-oul!” during screenings.

What started out as someone calling out to a friend is now a full-blown inside joke.

We respect the commitment. b’arb swears she knows him.