• by Jess Nelson , February 6, 2017

Rheem Manufacturing Company partnered with BrightWave to produce the company’s first email newsletter, scheduled for rotation this quarter.

Rheem is an Atlanta-based producer of water heaters and boilers, as well as air conditioning equipment and indoor air quality products. Rheem is primarily a B2B organization selling its products to partner retailers, who in turn sell items directly to companies and consumers alike.

Rheem worked with fellow Atlanta-based email marketing services firm BrightWave to produce its first email newsletter, which provides its trade customers with product and company news.

Email newsletters were the most common type of email sent by marketers in 2016, according to a November study by Clutch, which cited that 83% of 300 email marketers specified they had sent a newsletter campaign in the past year. Although email newsletters may have originated in the batch-and-blast era of email marketing, they have evolved to become enticing information centers for subscribers.   

“The newsletter has permanently evolved into a very visual media,” says Rich Wilson, vice president of customer experience at BrightWave. “When targeted to the right list, email newsletters work a lot like magazines.” 

Wilson describes how magazine readers may skim images and short subheads until a story catches their attention -- a reading pattern mimicked in the flexible newsletter template BrightWave built for Rheem. And just like in the B2C realm, says Brightwave, B2B communication should be driven by well-produced visuals.

“The image sets the tone for what the reader will experience on the other side of the click, but must be balanced with a short subhead or text to convey the overall idea symbiotically,” says Wilson. “It’s also a good idea for all of a newsletter’s images to work together in a holistic way so that the newsletter has a theme and readers have a reason to see what the next newsletter edition has to say.”

BrightWave’s newsletter template was designed to be adaptable and reusable so that Rheem can continue to utilize the design in future iterations of the newsletter. The template is also coded to be responsive, so it will render correctly on a mobile device or desktop computer.

“The fact that you’ve been effective at delivering content makes it more likely that your brand newsletters will be remembered and even anticipated by the reader,” says Wilson.