In January, a big name who raises capital in the tech space reached out to me again.
We had worked together for nearly one year before. I used to write his educational email newsletters. Quick context over his business:
1 subscription-based platform
1 consulting/investment business that closes deals between $100k - $3m
Everything went well, but email wasn't a priority back then. We decided to wrap up our collaboration amicably since the investment didn't make sense.
Fast forward to January 2026, and he texted me again.
This time, on the kick-off call, he said something I hadn't heard in 3 years of writing newsletters.
“Nils, this is not a newsletter where you're trying to sell a hundred people a coaching program at $5,000 a year. We need to close one deal per month for this to make sense to me.”
We've been working together for 5 months now.
While writing for founders in the info businesses and capital space is different, the basic principles of email still apply.
This is what I'll cover in this edition. By the end of it, you'll know:
The 5 baseline elements every good email newsletter needs, regardless of your business
the 3 differences between writing newsletters for SaaS capital space entrepreneurs and info businesses
one metric most platforms won't calculate for you that makes a huge difference if you're in the SaaS capital space, and how to start tracking it today
BONUS: I included a free email template you can literally copy paste into Claude It's an email you can use to get low unsubs and great replies (it doesn't matter the business you're in)
First, the 5 elements that every good email newsletter needs.
1/ a hook that gets the audience to the next sentence.
The first 3-5 lines have one job: make it impossible to stop reading. A specific scene, a result, a line that creates genuine curiosity.
2/ a clear value proposition.
Tell the reader exactly what they're getting before you give it to them. The best way to do this is to state it explicitly, up front, after the hook. In this email, I shared my value prop in the 3 bullet points above.
3/ packaging.
This is the structure that makes the value visible. Numbered lessons, named layers, a checklist, a framework. The reader should be able to see the destination before they start reading.
In this email, I told you we'll talk about the 5 elements that make a newsletter good, and the 5 differentiators for SaaS capital emails vs. info businesses.
4/ formatting.
MailBlaze reports that 74% of people skim newsletters. So we need to make sure we bold the key point in each section. Write headings, and add white space between every idea. Optimizing for scanning first isn't a bad idea.
5/ non-obvious content.
Obvious information presented in an obvious way is the fastest way to train your readers to stop opening. Every edition should deliver either something the reader genuinely didn't know or something they already knew, shown in a way they've never seen before.
As explained in our Writer's Guide to Creating Valuable Content.
Writing a great newsletter is the same skill whether you're selling a $5,000 program or a $3m consulting contract. Knowing whether it worked is a different conversation…
We have two fundamentally different approaches to info businesses and investment space:
Info business: needs more volume, the focus is on click-rates and booked calls. 100 booked calls at 10% close rate can be worth $50k.
Raising capital: needs proximity, 1 good reply can be worth $3m.
The problem is that most email advice is written for the first type - the info business.
There are 3 differentiators between info business and capital investment email marketing:
1/ how many people you actually need
Our GP in the investment space needs to close one good deal out of the 8 emails we send to his list each month.
He told me, “Get one really good reply per email. That's a huge win, it's 52 leads over the year. If we deploy 30% of those and put a million into each deal, we just used email to move $15 million. We make $1.5 million off that.”
The info business founders need 100-200 booked calls per edition.
A big win from one single email sent looks like this:
A business that closes deals from replies, like investment businesses, need less clicks but more conversations started.
Which means the metrics we look at need to be different from the common “Subject line, click-rate, booked calls” advice, the differentiator number 2.
2/ which metric you look at first
There are 6 core metrics we look at for both clients:
Open rate → measures attention volume
Click rate → measures action volume
Booked calls → downstream from the click rate
Reply rate → measures effort (a quality signal because effort is costly)
Reply quality → measures fit (the actual quality measure)
Unsubscribe rate → measures resonance, promise, and intent
For an info business, the order of importance is:
open rate
then click rate
then booked calls
then unsubscribe rate.
You need enough people seeing and liking your email to the point that not many of them unsubscribe and most of them click, and book a call.
For an investment business, this order is flipped.
Reply rate first
Quality of that reply
Unsubscribe rate AND click rate together (more on that later)
The big takeaway is - when your email is a big lead driver, the deal size plays a big role in the metrics you optimize for.
3/ click-rate in relation to the unsubscribe rate
This metric deserves its own section because it's not just a number. It's related to what you put in the email.
For our GP, we sent a run of direct-response editions with revenue numbers, quick hits, and links to case studies.
Click rates looked good, above his benchmark, but then we looked at the unsubscribers.
Every time we sent two or three in a row, the numbers moved together.
Clicks up
Unsubscribes up.
We were winning and burning at the same time.
For an info business, one unsubscribe is a potential $5k deal. But the top-of-funnel keeps working, and the list keeps growing daily.
For the SaaS capital client, one unsubscribe could be a $100k to $3m conversation that is lost. The list is small, qualified, and doesn't replace itself.
So we needed to be more careful with the click-to-unsubscribe ratio.
The math is simple: divide your click rate by your unsubscribe rate. A higher score means your content is keeping people in faster than it's pushing them away. Quick rundown of our data analysis you can use for your business:
You can literally give this screenshot to Claude, give it your email performance sheet, and ask it to give you a data breakdown like the one above. You'll easily see which editions are bringing you lots of clicks, but costing you subscribers.
Anyway- in both cases, the ratio follows the content.
For our GP, we made these elements mandatory in every email, in any order:
Open with a trend graph. Something that shows where the market is moving. His audience looks at it and thinks: I knew something was shifting.
Name the enemy. The path most founders default to, which costs them money and ownership. In this case, we don't argue against the path or the enemy. We just show the math.
Then show the case studies. We simply show the founders who took the path our client is suggesting in the email, with numbers, deal size, and a detail most of the audience can relate to.
As promised, here's a template you can use if you have an audience who loves numbers:
Results say a lot - we had one of the lowest click-rates in 2 months, but look at the replies (even though the rate is very low… one deal = $100k+ for this GP):
Anyway -
Open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate… everyone reads the same numbers in emails.
But a click on a link to book a call and get a $5,000 coaching program has a different business impact than a reply or click to get a $100k deal.
We gotta compare apples to apples.
/Nils
P.S. If you want to know what your click-to-unsubscribe ratio looks like across your last six editions, LMK. We'll calculate it, have a look at your list and emails, and give you 1-3 improvements you can make. First come, first-served.