Latest / Content Marketing with Fexingo: Blogs, Videos, and Long-Form Content That Converts / How a Newsletter Saved This B2B SaaS Company
Transcript
- Lucas: Alright, so a lot of companies treat their blog like a library. They publish post after post, hoping someone wanders in. But there's a B2B SaaS company called Mention—they do social listening—that figured out the blog alone wasn't driving trials. So they did something counterintuitive: they turned their best blog content into a newsletter, and then basically stopped writing blog posts. Luna: Wait, they stopped blogging altogether? That feels like heresy for content marketers. Lucas: Almost. They shifted their writing effort entirely into a weekly newsletter called 'The Mention Weekly'. And within nine months, that newsletter was driving 40 percent of all new trial signups. Their blog traffic dropped initially, but trial conversions went up because the email audience was more targeted. Luna: So the question is—did they just move the same readers from one channel to another, or did they actually attract new people? Lucas: Both, but the key was segmentation. They didn't just blast the same newsletter to everyone. They used behavior data—pages visited, content downloaded, trial stage—to send different versions. For example, someone who read three pricing pages got a case study email; someone who hadn't visited in weeks got a re-engagement sequence with a 'people also read' type curation. Luna: That sounds like a lot of manual work. How many segments did they start with? Lucas: Just three: active trial users, recent blog subscribers, and dormant contacts. They used a simple email marketing tool—nothing fancy. The big insight was that they stopped trying to be clever with subject lines and focused on relevance. Open rates went from 22 percent to 34 percent within three months. Luna: What was the actual content of the newsletter? Was it all their own posts, or did they curate third-party stuff too? Lucas: It was a mix. About 60 percent original content—short analysis pieces, one or two paragraphs—and 40 percent curated from industry blogs. The original content was written by their product marketers, not their content team. That was another shift: they made the people closest to the customer write the emails. Luna: That's interesting because product marketers usually have a better sense of what questions are actually coming up in sales calls. Did they measure anything besides opens and clicks? Lucas: They focused on one metric: trial conversion rate from email clicks. Not email opens, not list growth. If someone clicked a link in the newsletter and started a trial, that was the win. They actually removed social share buttons from the newsletter because they realized shares didn't lead to trials—they led to noise. Luna: Removing share buttons is bold. Most people are obsessed with virality. But if the goal is conversion, I can see why. Did they A/B test that? Lucas: They did. The version without share buttons had a 12 percent higher click-through rate to the trial page. The theory is that without the distraction, readers actually clicked the content links instead of just sharing and forgetting. It's a lesson in aligning metrics with actual business outcomes. Luna: So the newsletter wasn't just a digest—it was a funnel. What happened to the blog? Did they just let it die? Lucas: They repurposed the best newsletter content into blog posts, but only if the topic had high search volume. So the blog became a secondary channel. They focused all their writing energy on the weekly email. The result: within 12 months, their total trial starts grew 40 percent, and the cost per acquisition dropped because they weren't spending on promoted blog posts anymore. Luna: I want to push back on this a little. This works for Mention because they're B2B SaaS with a high-touch product. Would it work for a consumer brand or a low-ticket e-commerce company? Lucas: That's a fair point. The newsletter-first approach works best when you have a clear conversion action—like a free trial—and a long-ish sales cycle. For e-commerce, you'd probably need a different hook, like exclusive discounts or early access. But the principle of segmentation and focusing on one metric applies anywhere. Luna: I've seen similar results with a client that did a content audit and realized their blog was generating tons of traffic but zero leads. They switched to a weekly newsletter and saw a 3x increase in demo requests within six months. Lucas: That's the pattern. The mistake most companies make is they treat email as a distribution channel for blog content, rather than the primary content vehicle. Mention inverted that: the newsletter was the product, and the blog was just a SEO supplement. Luna: Let's talk about the actual execution. What did a typical 'Mention Weekly' look like? How long was it, what was the structure? Lucas: It was short. Three to four items max. A lead story that was an original insight—like 'How brands are using social listening for crisis management'—then two curated links with one-sentence summaries, and a bottom CTA to start a free trial. Total reading time: under two minutes. They intentionally kept it scannable. Luna: Under two minutes—that's the sweet spot for email. I think a lot of marketers overstuff their newsletters because they want to prove value. But Mention proved that brevity actually increases engagement. Lucas: Exactly. They also timed their sends based on when trial users were most active. For their trial segment, they sent on Tuesday mornings because data showed trial users were most likely to log in then. For dormant contacts, they sent on Thursday afternoons, which had the highest re-engagement rate. Luna: Let me ask about the team. How many people did it take to run this? Lucas: One full-time content marketer and one product marketing manager, who spent maybe five hours a week on the newsletter. That's it. No agency, no freelancers. The product marketing manager wrote the original pieces, and the content marketer curated and handled segmentation. Total cost: maybe $80,000 a year in salary. Luna: And they got a 40 percent increase in trials from that. That ROI is insane. Compare that to running paid ads or hiring a content agency. Lucas: Right. And that's the thing—content marketing gets complicated. You've got blogs, social, video, podcasts, webinars. Mention's approach was to pick one channel, do it really well, and tie it directly to revenue. They didn't try to be everywhere. Luna: Speaking of podcasts—I've heard people say this show has helped them think differently about their own content strategy. And we keep it ad-free because that's how we want to consume content ourselves. If you've gotten value from these conversations, you can support the show at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, just if it's been useful. Lucas: Yeah, it's a small way to keep this independent. Now, back to Mention—one of the most surprising findings was that their highest-converting emails were actually the ones that didn't link to the blog at all. They were standalone tips sent directly in the email body. Luna: That makes sense. If the goal is conversion, you want to keep people in the email, not send them to a blog that might distract them with other content. Did they ever A/B test linking to blog versus no link? Lucas: They did. The version with no link to the blog had a 20 percent higher trial conversion rate. So they shifted to putting all the useful content inline, and only linked to the blog for deeper dives. That's a counterintuitive insight—people think content marketing means driving traffic to your site, but sometimes keeping them in the email converts better. Luna: It's almost like the email itself is the product. And the blog is just a backup for people who want more details. I've seen that work in practice too. Lucas: So the takeaway: if you're doing B2B content and not seeing conversions, consider flipping your funnel. Make your newsletter the primary content, segment by behavior, and measure trial starts—not page views. It worked for Mention to the tune of a couple million in ARR. Luna: I think the broader lesson is that most content marketing is too diffuse. Pick one format, one metric, and one audience segment. Master that before adding more channels. Mention did that with email, and it paid off. Lucas: And they proved that a small team with a focused strategy can outperform a large content team spreading themselves thin. Next week, we'll look at a company that did the opposite—invested heavily in video and saw massive returns. Until then. Luna: See you next time.