Only if it is a product with an editor, not a list of your recent blog posts. A newsletter someone would miss if it stopped is a real asset. A weekly digest of things already on your site is a slow way to teach your audience to ignore your emails.
The reason this question keeps coming back is that search traffic feels less reliable than it used to, and an email list looks like a channel nobody can take away. That instinct is right. The conclusion people draw from it is usually wrong.
So here is the case for, the case against, the deliverability work that is now non negotiable, and how we would decide.
Because the borrowed channels got less generous. Pew Research Center analysed the browsing of 900 United States adults across 68,879 Google searches in March 2025 and found that when an AI summary appeared, people clicked a traditional search result in 8 percent of visits, against 15 percent without one. Clicks inside the summary itself happened in 1 percent of visits.
That is a real change in what a search ranking is worth. If half your acquisition depends on people clicking through from a results page, a structural drop in clicking is a structural drop in your pipeline.
An email list does not have that problem. Nobody can put a summary in front of your email. That is the honest strategic argument for a newsletter and it is a good one, as far as it goes.
That most B2B SaaS newsletters are not newsletters. They are distribution for content that already exists, sent because the marketing calendar has a slot on Thursdays. That version costs real time and produces a list that opens less each month.
The second problem is that a newsletter is a recurring commitment. Unlike a blog post, which sits there earning traffic for years, an email is gone the moment it is read. You are signing up for a treadmill, and the treadmill does not stop when the person who ran it leaves.
The third is opportunity cost. The hours that go into a weekly email could go into the six pages on your site that answer the questions your buyers actually search for. Our piece on whether you should still blog for SEO covers that trade in more detail.
Better than most people expect, with a caveat that matters. Mailchimp's benchmarks, drawn from billions of emails delivered through its system where campaign tracking was active and users reported their industry, with a minimum of 1,000 subscribers per campaign, put the all industries average at a 35.63 percent open rate, a 2.62 percent click rate and a 0.22 percent unsubscribe rate.
For the closest listed category to B2B software, Business and Finance, it reports a 31.35 percent open rate and a 2.78 percent click rate. Note that click rate is higher than the all industries average while open rate is lower, which is a fair picture of a professional audience.
The caveat is important and Mailchimp states it. Those figures were last updated in December 2023, and the accuracy of email open rates may be impacted by Apple's privacy changes and its Mail Privacy Protection feature. Open rate is now a soft metric. Click rate is the one to plan against.
More technical work than it used to, and Google publishes the bar. Its requirements state that starting February 1, 2024, email senders who send more than 5,000 messages per day to Gmail accounts must meet a specific set of requirements.
Those include setting up SPF and DKIM email authentication for your domain, setting up DMARC for your sending domain, and ensuring the domain in the sender's From header is aligned with either the SPF domain or the DKIM domain. Every sender, bulk or not, is expected to set up SPF or DKIM and to use a TLS connection for transmitting email.
On complaints, the guidance is to keep spam rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.30 percent, and it recommends keeping them below 0.10 percent. Three complaints in a thousand is a very small number, and a single badly targeted send can breach it.
Make it one click and honour it fast. Google's requirements state that marketing messages and subscribed messages must support one click unsubscribe and include a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the message body, for senders above the 5,000 message threshold.
The practical consequence is that hiding the unsubscribe link is now actively harmful rather than merely rude. A reader who cannot find it will use the spam button instead, and that counts against the rate you are trying to keep under 0.30 percent.
This is one of the cases where the compliant thing and the smart thing line up exactly. An easy unsubscribe protects the deliverability of every future email you send to everyone else on the list.
A point of view someone cannot get elsewhere, on a schedule they can rely on. The test we use is whether a subscriber would notice if two issues went missing. If not, you have a distribution channel, not a publication, and you should treat it as one.
The formats that pass that test in B2B tend to be narrow. A curated read of what changed in a specific niche this week. A recurring teardown of real examples. One strong argument per issue. All of these have an editorial spine that a digest of your own posts does not.
It also needs a named person doing the writing, even at a company that publishes under a company name elsewhere. A newsletter is a voice arriving in someone's inbox, and voices belong to people.
Yes, and this is the underrated part. A newsletter that people quote generates brand mentions, which appear to matter more than links for visibility in AI answers. Ahrefs' study of 75,000 brands found branded web mentions correlated 0.664 with AI Overview visibility, against 0.218 for backlinks.
The authors were explicit that correlation does not equal causation, and we would not oversell it. But the mechanism is plausible and it is consistent with what we see. A distinctive newsletter gets referenced by name in threads, posts and podcasts in a way a blog post rarely does.
There is a second effect that is easier to prove to yourself. Newsletter subscribers are a research panel. Reply rates on a good B2B newsletter are high enough that you learn what your market is worried about, which is worth the effort on its own.
The sign up form is a gate and that is fine, but do not gate the archive. Publishing every issue as a public page gives you the search and citation value of the content while the email gives you the relationship, and there is no reason to choose.
The mistake is treating the newsletter as the only place the thinking exists. Then your best material is invisible to search engines, invisible to models, and unlinkable by anyone who wanted to reference it. That is a lot to give up for a marginally larger list.
We looked at the wider version of this decision in our piece on whether to gate your best content. The short answer is that a form is a filter, and filters cost more than they used to.
One good writer, half a day a week, forever. That is the actual number and it is where most newsletters die. The first ten issues are easy because the ideas were queued up. Issue twenty six is where you find out whether the format is sustainable.
There is a technical cost too, which teams forget. Authentication set up, a sending domain separate from your transactional mail, list hygiene, and someone watching Postmaster Tools. None of that is hard, all of it is somebody's job.
And there is a strategic cost. Every week you spend on the newsletter is a week not spent on the evergreen pages that keep working while you sleep. Our notes on refreshing content versus publishing new posts cover where that time usually pays back better.
Do not start a newsletter to distribute your blog. If you want more people to read your posts, fix the pages and the internal linking, which is cheaper and compounds. Our piece on zero click search strategy covers how to get value even when the click does not happen.
Do start one if you have a person with a genuine point of view who wants to write it, and if you can commit to a year. Publish every issue publicly, keep the technical setup clean from day one, and measure clicks and replies rather than opens.
If you are weighing this up and want a straight answer about whether your team can sustain it, we are happy to talk it through. You can reach us at phoenix.studio, and we will tell you honestly if we think your effort belongs somewhere else.
Tell us where you want to go. We'll tell you how we'd get you there.