A newsletter that brings 22% of website traffic and opens at 66%
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1LIMS is a Switzerland-based laboratory information management system that helps quality control labs in manufacturing companies manage samples, workflows, and compliance. We had already worked with 1LIMS to build the full content engine, including positioning, case studies, website copy, and an inbound content strategy that took them from zero to 30 monthly conversions. This case study is about what came next.
Laboratory quality control is a serious field. Labs deal with ISO standards, audit cycles, traceability, and regulatory inspections. Which means most content in the space ends up looking the same: compliance checklists, technical bulletins, and dense documentation. Nobody questions it. It's just how the industry communicates.
Most LIMS vendors follow the same pattern with email.
Company announcements in a report-like format. Technical articles about compliance regulations. Thought-leadership pieces about AI-driven autonomous systems.
All dressed up to look serious. None of it something a lab professional would open voluntarily.
The result is an industry where newsletters are invisible. And nobody thinks of them as something that can do more than promotion.
We didn't buy it.
Before writing a single issue, we studied what lab professionals actually discuss in public. We browsed Reddit threads and LinkedIn conversations, read boring industry reports and ran interviews with laboratory and compliance experts.
Turned out, lab professionals have the same frustrations. Chaotic spreadsheets, lost samples, panic before compliance audits, fragmented tools, and manual workflows that should have been automated years ago.
We noticed that people weren't just complaining about these problems. They were joking about them, sharing memes. The conversation was alive. It was nothing like the way LIMS vendors were communicating.
The newsletter tone came directly from the research. Instead of writing like a vendor explaining the product and its features, we wrote like someone who actually understands what it feels like to run a lab, including the gap between what the software promises and what Monday morning looks like.
Labs are staffed by skeptical professionals. They respect honesty and recognize when they're being marketed to.
So we earned the read first.
We didn't want to produce random stories. We wanted a format that could work issue after issue, without the quality drifting or the structure becoming predictable in the wrong way. So we built an editorial framework designed around how people read, engage, and remember.
Each issue follows five sections:
Getting a lab professional to open the email is one thing. Getting them to click through to the website (without feeling like they walked into a sales pitch) is another.
Most B2B newsletters make the same mistake. They spend 80% of the issue building trust, then spend the last paragraph torching it with a "Book a demo" button that has nothing to do with anything that came before.
We built every issue around a customer problem. The product only entered the conversation once the reader had already nodded along, recognised the frustration, and felt understood. By that point, mentioning 1LIMS was natural. Some issues barely mentioned the product at all.
Our goal isn't to close in every email. We want to make the brand the obvious answer whenever the reader is ready to look for one.
The result is a 59% average click-through rate, with some issues reaching 100% CTR.
Over nine months, the newsletter became 1LIMS's third-largest traffic source, built entirely from zero, with no paid amplification.
Overall sessions grew 146.69% across the period. Newsletter drove 22% of those sessions – a channel that hadn't existed at all in the previous period.
Early issues delivered open rates between 60–66%, with click-through rates reaching between 84% and 100% on select campaigns. In a field where most vendor emails go straight to the archive, these numbers meant the content was landing.
The direct traffic growth is particularly notable. Readers were navigating back to the brand on their own.
Technical industries are full of newsletters that exist but don't matter. They exist because someone decided the company should have one, not because anyone asked what the audience actually needs. The lesson from 1LIMS is that newsletters designed around the reader's reality and not the vendor's product roadmap, build a relationship with a market.
You can team up with us to define your positioning, build a content strategy and operations, or create copy and content. We want your audience to not just notice you but to actively seek you out, waiting to hear what you have to say next.
