The 3 decisions behind every open, scroll, and click

⇒ Most companies don't think about why readers need to care about their newsletters

⇒ The 3 decisions you need to help your readers make

⇒ How we built a high-performing newsletter for a “boring” B2B niche

You probably have a pile of unread ones sitting in a tab somewhere. Or a folder you keep meaning to clean up. You didn’t open those. You opened this one because the subject line answered a question you already had.

That’s it. That’s the whole mechanism.

But most B2B companies sending newsletters never figure it out.

They want to show up in the inbox every week or month, hoping their subscribers remember who they are.

But why would a reader open their newsletter? 

"Reminding people you exist" is your goal. It's not a reason for anyone to spend four minutes of their Thursday.

Every time someone sees your email, they make these micro-decisions:

Most B2B newsletters optimize for the first one - getting the open.

They focus on hooks in subject lines to increase open rates… then drop readers into a wall of product updates and CTAs. They hope attention follows. But it doesn't.

Because each decision is different and needs its own reason to say yes.

What about you?

Still reading? We earned the scroll 💪 

You obviously want people to open your newsletter. But open rate is also a consequence of reputation. Readers decide whether your emails are worth opening after they receive the first few issues. 

After that, they either open it automatically… or they stop opening at all.

That reputation comes from how you write it. Does this sound like someone inside my world? Or like a company talking at me? If the answer to the second question is yes, the read is over.

Let's say you managed to get people to open your newsletter. How do you keep them moving through it?

Good writing? We'd say, good structure. But not in the meaning of headings and bullets, not formatting. Structure is about intent. What do you want the reader to think here? What do you want them to feel next? What makes them keep going instead of switching tabs?

Each section of your newsletter needs a specific reason to continue (more on this in the full piece).

Everybody wants clicks, because clicks feel like getting a reward for your effort. But wanting a click doesn't mean achieving it, right? 

Most newsletters spend 600 words building trust and lose it in the last paragraph with a "Book a demo" button that has nothing to do with anything that came before it.

The product needs to enter the way a good recommendation enters a conversation – after the problem is already in the room.

"But our industry is too formal for this."

That's what everyone says.

1LIMS is a Swiss laboratory information management software company. They work in a highly regulated industry, targeting a technical (even scientific) audience, mostly across German-speaking Europe. 

They have a niche market, a demanding audience, and a competitive landscape where every vendor sounds exactly the same: compliance-heavy, formal, and currently very excited about AI.

Before writing the first issue, we went looking for where lab professionals talk online. We browsed Reddit threads and checked out LinkedIn comment sections. 

What we found had nothing in common with their inboxes.

Lab professionals were:

→ Joking about spreadsheets that hadn't been updated since 2015

→ Sharing memes about audit season

→ Ranting about software that promised automation and delivered more manual steps

Here is the gap between how the audience talks and how vendors write.

That gap was our opportunity.

Instead of following the “vibes” of LIMS industry content, we built a newsletter that sounded like someone who worked in a lab. 

One early issue opened with a question about potato chips, led into how a Swiss manufacturer processes 25,000 tons of potatoes annually, and asked readers to estimate how many samples get lost in paperwork at that scale. The product wasn't mentioned until the third section.

That issue opened at 66%.

The thing is, a newsletter isn't a distribution channel. Well, it is. But it's also a habit. Habits form only when each issue earns the same answer: yes, that was worth my time.

So now you’re at a point where a decision needs to be made. To click or not to click?

If you choose to click…