Since starting The Science Marketer nearly a year ago, I've been experimenting with two ways of delivering my newsletter: the traditional email route and LinkedIn's newsletter feature.
Although LinkedIn's newsletter feature has been around since 2022, it has really gained momentum in the community over the past year. These days, it's rare for a week to go by without seeing a new newsletter pop up in my network.
It seems that, like me, many LinkedIn users are drawn to the potential benefits a LinkedIn newsletter offers. But is it really worth it? And does it really support a long-term approach to your newsletter strategy?
Before diving into my own experience, let's take a closer look at what LinkedIn's newsletter feature brings to the table.
Why start a LinkedIn newsletter in the first place?
On paper, LinkedInâs newsletters are a killer feature.
As soon as you send out your first edition, LinkedIn automatically invites all your followers to subscribe to your newsletter. This invitation appears in the new connection feed, resembling a connection request, which most people tend to accept without much thought. As a result, you can quickly gain a substantial number of subscribers.
Thatâs exactly what happened to me. The day I launched my LinkedIn newsletter, I gained 1,012 subscribers right away. Achieving that kind of instant growth with a traditional email newsletter is nearly impossible unless youâre sending unsolicited emails, which is far from ideal.
The conversion rate from followers to newsletter subscribers is also impressive. I had 6,486 LinkedIn followers at the time, resulting in a 15.6% conversion rate.
But the benefits donât stop there. After the initial surge of subscribers, you continue to gain more regularly. Every new follower or connection is automatically invited to subscribe to your newsletter, and again, the results are not bad.
In nine months, my LinkedIn newsletter grew to 2,357 subscribersâmore than doubling the initial count. While my email subscriber list grew much faster, the total number of my LinkedIn newsletter subscribers far exceeds my email subscribers.
LinkedIn also promises a lot when it comes to content distribution. Hereâs what it says on its official page:
LinkedIn members can subscribe to your newsletter to be notified about new articles you publish, allowing you to build and grow a regularly engaged audienceâŚafter publishing each newsletter edition, push, in-app, and email notifications are sent to all your subscribers to help drive views.
In theory, LinkedIn provides everything you need to launch a successful newsletter:
- Itâs incredibly easy to set up (it really only takes a few minutesâcheck this page for the tutorial)
- It helps you grow your list by tapping into your LinkedIn followers
- It delivers your content effectively through multiple notification channels.
So why am I not entirely convinced?
Letâs dive into my metrics to understand why.
From the start, I chose to run it in parallel with my email newsletter. Each week, I simply copy the content from my email newsletter to LinkedIn and send it out a few hours later. I encourage people to subscribe to my email newsletter, offering a bit more content there, but both versions include a link to my latest article, which is the primary call to action. Some people prefer to delay their LinkedIn newsletter launch by at least a week compared to their email or use LinkedIn to republish old content. While there are advantages to that approach, which weâll discuss later, it wasnât the strategy I wanted to pursue.
A look at my LinkedIn newsletter metrics
As I mentioned earlier, the growth of my LinkedIn newsletter has been decent, closely mirroring the growth of my personal LinkedIn profile (which is expected since the two are closely linked). However, itâs growing at a slower pace than my email newsletter:
Another positive insight came from analyzing the degree of connection among my LinkedIn newsletter subscribers:
Whatâs interesting here is that 34% of my subscribers are not direct connections. This suggests that LinkedIn newsletters have the potential to spread beyond your immediate network. However, it's important to note that some of these 2nd and 3rd-degree connections might be followers who havenât connected with me directly. Because of this, itâs difficult to gauge just how far the newsletter is actually reaching people who donât already know me.
Now, whatâs more interesting is whether people are actually reading my LinkedIn newsletter. Letâs take a look at the open rate compared to my email newsletter:
The open rate is fairly good, but since LinkedInâs âviewsâ metric is somewhat opaque, I wanted to examine the click rate more closely.
Hereâs how the click rates compare:
And, well, itâs not great. In fact, itâs quite poor, though not entirely surprising.
I suspect the difference in engagement is due to varying attention spans and expectations between those reading a newsletter in their email inbox versus on LinkedIn. Engagement on LinkedIn simply doesnât match what I see with email.
The final nail in the coffin came from this chart comparing the number of sessions to my website generated from emails versus from my LinkedIn newsletter (here referred to as âOrganic Social"):
At first glance, it doesnât look too bad. My LinkedIn newsletter still generates 69% of the traffic that my email newsletter does, and it doesnât take much time to prepare each week. But this number hides a much bleaker reality.
Let me explain.
What are the disadvantages of a LinkedIn newsletter?
As I've outlined above, there are both upsides and downsides to the metrics of a LinkedIn newsletter. While the growth is impressive, the engagement rate leaves a lot to be desired.
However, a newsletter's success isnât just about the numbersâthere are other critical factors to consider. Here are a few reasons why I believe my LinkedIn newsletter is actually diminishing the overall value of my newsletter strategy:
- Poor user experience
Getting readers from LinkedIn to my website isnât straightforward. They first need to click on the newsletter in their feed or through a notification, then read the newsletter, and finally click on the link to reach my website. Thatâs a lot more steps than simply opening an email and clicking on a link, which can frustrate users and lead to drop-offs.
- No control over the delivery
I have no idea who receives my LinkedIn newsletter or where they access it. Some people have forwarded me the email version of the LinkedIn newsletter, and it looked terrible. Others donât receive any email or notification at all. This lack of transparency is frustrating.
- Limited data
Apart from the âViewsâ that LinkedIn provides, I donât get any other meaningful data. As shown earlier, I have to rely on workarounds to compare LinkedInâs performance with my email newsletter.
- No ownership of the subscriber list
LinkedIn lets me see the profiles of those who subscribe, but beyond that, I canât export or segment my audience based on their interests. If LinkedIn were to shut down its newsletter feature tomorrow, I would basically lose all my subscribers instantly.
- SEO competition
Some of my LinkedIn newsletters have outranked my own website for the same article on Google search. This happens because LinkedIn has a higher domain authority, and it doesnât allow you to set a canonical URL when reposting content, which can hurt your SEO efforts.
- Unfair competition
What LinkedIn newsletters have going for them is the convenience they offer to subscribers. They only need to accept a connection invitation to be "subscribed" to the newsletter, making it far easier than sharing an actual email address. This lower barrier to entry gives LinkedIn an unfair advantage over an email newsletter.
Considering all these drawbacks, especially the last one, Iâve come to the conclusion that LinkedIn might be cannibalizing the growth of my email newsletter.
At the end of 2023, when my newsletter was still new, I asked a few of my LinkedIn subscribers if theyâd like to be added to my email list instead so they could receive the full version of the newsletter. It was a small sample, but 100% of the respondents said no!
While itâs true that not everyone likes to receive newsletters via emailâespecially given how many we all get these daysâIâm convinced that if my LinkedIn newsletter didnât exist, some of those subscribers would have signed up for the email version instead.
So, for me, itâs clearly a no-go thatâs pushing me to take action now, but if youâre reading this, donât take it as a general statement that LinkedIn newsletters arenât worth it. In some situations, they can be a great strategy. Before I close with my own case study, let me quickly outline how you might use LinkedIn newsletters effectively.
What is a LinkedIn newsletter good for?
Despite my own experience, I believe there are several effective ways to make a LinkedIn newsletter work for you:
- As a spin-off
Several traditional media outlets have started using LinkedIn newsletters as a spin-off from their primary email newsletters. The idea is to leverage LinkedInâs advantages without cannibalizing your email subscribers. Typically, these LinkedIn newsletters feature âmost-readâ articles or focus on a specific niche. This approach works well if youâre already producing a lot of content on your website and can repurpose it in this format. For example, The Wall Street Journal was an early adopter of LinkedIn's newsletter feature and launched a newsletter dedicated to its "Careers & Leadership" content. This LinkedIn newsletter has since gained more subscribers than its email counterpart.
- As your main channel
Some people opt to make LinkedIn their primary platform for newsletters, foregoing an email list altogether. While I donât see this as a sustainable long-term strategy, it can be effective for LinkedIn influencers with a strong follower base. A LinkedIn-only newsletter can amplify the rest of your content on the platform and create more engagement opportunities. Plus, it's easier to manage than an email newsletter, and LinkedIn is even introducing a new feature to help you monetize your newsletter.
- As a reposting strategy
Another viable option is to republish your existing articles in full within a LinkedIn newsletter. If you choose this route, make sure thereâs a significant time gap between the original article and the LinkedIn version to avoid Google ranking LinkedIn higher than your own site due to its greater authority. This strategy can help you repurpose old content and promote it to a new audience without competing with your latest articles.
Iâm always eager to learn from others, so if you are trying any of these strategies, Iâd love to hear about them!
As for my own strategy, Iâve decided that this approach isnât the right fit.
Moving forward: email newsletter only
After considering all the arguments discussed in this post, I've decided to shut down my LinkedIn newsletter and focus exclusively on my email newsletter.
Yes, I will theoretically lose a lot of the reach I've already accumulated, but since my main goal is to build a real connection with my readers, I think this is the right decision.
While the LinkedIn metrics may look impressive on the surface, I feel like they actually mask a significant cannibalization of my email strategy.
In any case, it's not like I'm completely dismissing the benefits of LinkedIn in the B2B space. Of course, I'm still going to post regularly on LinkedIn and use it as a discovery platform to drive traffic to my website, so it's not a total loss.
I've actually been putting off this decision for quite some time, and I have a feeling that the longer I wait, the worse it will be. So better now than later!
So if you've been subscribed to my LinkedIn newsletter and want to stay up to date with my latest articles, make sure you re-subscribe to my email newsletter on this website instead!
And if you're interested in the topic of newsletters, check out my article on the 8 most common mistakes B2B newsletters make.
