70k+ Subscriber SMB Finance Newsletter

70k+ SMB readers

51% avg. open rate

1.9% avg. CTR

As a B2B company grows, it gets harder to meaningfully connect with customers at scale. Newsletters solve this—which is why we built one at Relay as the business scaled from 1k to 100k customers.

>>> More samples here.

Relay is a small business banking platform that serves a highly fragmented market of 33M+ business owners in the US. These SMBs span multiple industries and have a diverse set of interests when it comes to financial news. So, in building the newsletter strategy, we had to take into account some unique requirements. 🔭

✅ The newsletter would need to have wide appeal. Our audience includes first-time founders, accountants, CPAs, and serial entrepreneurs.

✅ It would need to align Relay with SMB finance topics without being boring. (Since Relay’s core brand promise is keeping SMBs on the money.)

✅ It would need to be flexible in what content was presented. We couldn’t rely on the CEOs personal brand, nor guarantee a steady stream of new monthly content generated by Relay.

By tapping into existing trending topics, On The Money would fulfill all of the above needs.

Our main goal: keep Relay top of mind with customers + prospects, without creating excessive production overhead. So, we came up with a set of newsletter sections that enabled us to publish consistently, while staying flexible with what kind of content we covered. The result was a modular framework:

This framework gave us a few advantages.

⏩ First, the well-defined, bite-sized sections meant we could distribute the work to multiple writers and ensure newsletter continuity even if someone left the writing team.

⏩ Second, each section could evolve as needed or be skipped if relevant content wasn’t available. For example, if no new case studies had been published, we could simply skip the “Behind the Business” section—while still sending out the newsletter.

⏩ Third, the newsletter wasn’t dependent solely on company-generated or user-generated content—this helped us avoid production bottlenecks.

Our production process had three phases:

Editorial Selection

Writing & Design

Editing, Staging & Distribution

The On The Money newsletter solidifies Relay’s brand positioning and maintains healthy metrics—with average open rates of 51% and click through rates of 1.9%. It also contributes to the following strategic outcomes:

🚀 Relay maintains regular touchpoints with users and prospects by providing value (and not exclusively selling).

🚀 By building a relationship with the users at scale, we access to audience-generated insights (see the survey data in newsletter issue #7).

🚀 Consistently distributing content to an engaged audience becomes a major asset in co-marketing partnership negotiations.

Book a 30 minute call to learn if we’re a potential fit.