CASE STUDY

Growing a B2B newsletter for creatives

Project Date: 2023

Company: Adobe, a software company offering a suite of creative tools and apps

Challenge

Adobe’s B2B Creative Cloud newsletter, Creative Connections, had been a successful avenue for awareness and engagement for several years.

But in June 2023, we noticed a trend of gradually decreasing open rates — about 46K less opens per email deployment compared to peak open rates.

In addition to open rates, we also wanted to increase engagement. As the only multi-category program that featured core apps on a set cadence, this newsletter served as a unique opportunity to cross-promote product messaging and stories to drive activation and active use across the Creative Cloud ecosystem.

Solution

I took over managing the newsletter in early 2023. During my time leading this project, I:

Created a new strategy for newsletter content that prioritized customer stories and gen AI (the top-performing content based on previous data)
Wrote and/or edited all newsletter copy
Created and managed a content calendar with views for stakeholders and contributors
Created and streamlined a process for newsletter content creation, including workback plans and review loops
Conducted an A/B subject line test to help increase open rates and made changes based on results
Worked with PMMs, campaign leads and other stakeholders to identify timing of product content for inclusion
Worked with email leads to deploy to the right audience at the right time
Tracked newsletter performance to report to stakeholders and leadership

Results

As my time on this project concluded, the twice-monthly Creative Connections newsletter reached an average of 1.9M users from 17K accounts, and averaged 132K clicks and 52K engaged visits per quarter.

During this time, the newsletter drove customers to a single landing page experience that featured dynamic content. This increased engagement, as users were able to more easily find relevant content based on the topics and products that they clicked on. This also allowed up to serve up the best next action for the user and keep the user consuming content for longer.

Since driving to this single landing page, there were increases in: