LinkedIn unveils sponsored newsletters to boost engagement

LinkedIn has recently announced the launch of sponsored newsletters aimed at helping marketers attract more readers and subscribers while driving meaningful engagement with their brands. The move comes in response to a substantial rise in newsletter engagement and readership on the platform over the past year.

According to LinkedIn, sponsored newsletters are designed to amplify the reach of long-form content. Marketers can now sponsor any member’s newsletter content, pending approval, or any newsletter published on their company page. This can be facilitated through a single image ad via LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager.

LinkedIn has observed a significant increase in newsletter activities on its platform. "There are now over 184,000 newsletters on LinkedIn, and in the past year, we've seen a 59% increase in people publishing newsletter articles," the company stated. Engagement with these newsletters has risen by 47%, illustrating the value members find in this type of content.

The effectiveness of the new feature is highlighted by the experiences of brands already using it. Kevin Vlk, Brand Activation & Social Lead at Zoom, noted, "Making LinkedIn newsletters part of our social strategy has been an invaluable tool for us to reach our Zoom audience, especially during our Zoom Workplace and Zoom AI Companion launches. Just in the past year, our subscriber count has grown 36% and article views are up 45% with a 550%+ increase in impressions and engagements."

Sponsored newsletters are available globally, providing brands with an opportunity to significantly extend the reach of their native content. Marketers can log into Campaign Manager to promote a newsletter article from their content library or boost articles from their organisation’s page.

Additionally, LinkedIn provides the option to sponsor articles shared by any member on the platform as part of their Thought Leader Ads. For this, marketers need to request approval from the members to share their articles as sponsored content, thus enabling further promotional opportunities.

In another development, LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, in collaboration with WARC Advisory and strategy expert Roger Martin, has released a new report. The report, titled “Making a Promise to the Business Customer: Why Customer Promise Campaigns are even more effective in B2B than B2C,” examines the impact of customer promise campaigns in B2B marketing.

The report is based on an analysis of 700 global B2B campaigns, including those from brands such as Workday, Amazon India, Procell, and Sage. Among the key findings are that B2B campaigns with a clear customer promise are three times more likely to increase market share and 2.5 times more likely to improve brand health compared to those that do not make such a promise.

The data further indicates that only 18% of B2B campaigns make a customer promise, compared to 40% of B2C campaigns. Interestingly, lower-budget B2B customer promise campaigns are 1.7 times more likely to enhance brand health and 2.7 times more likely to boost market share than higher-budget campaigns.