How a telematics vendor achieved 34% newsletter open rates and 6.2% CTR — compared to a 1.8% B2B email industry average.
The Challenge
Samsara was investing heavily in content marketing and email programs but finding it difficult to grow a relevant, engaged subscriber base in fleet management. Their own email list skewed toward existing customers and technology enthusiasts, not the fleet managers and logistics directors who were their primary buyers. They needed a channel that gave them direct access to fleet operators in research mode.
What We Did
Samsara ran a newsletter sponsorship program on FleetOpsClub across two quarters — a mix of inline placements in the weekly digest and two dedicated sends to the full subscriber list. The sponsorships were paired with a content series Samsara was running on ELD compliance, which aligned with the editorial calendar FleetOpsClub had planned for the same period. The content alignment made the placements feel relevant rather than interruptions.
The Full Story
Samsara is one of the larger players in fleet telematics — a category that has consolidated significantly over the past five years but still sees high churn and re-evaluation activity as fleet managers compare platforms during renewal cycles and when compliance requirements change.
Their challenge was not awareness. Fleet managers know Samsara. The challenge was being in the room at the moment a manager is actively evaluating alternatives — during ELD compliance updates, when a fleet grows past the point where their current platform scales, or when a new operations director joins and initiates a fresh technology review.
Newsletter sponsorship solves a specific problem: you are in front of the reader when they are actively engaging with category content, not when they happen to be scrolling a social feed or browsing a broad content site. The reader subscribed to FleetOpsClub because they care about fleet technology. They open the newsletter because it contains research they find useful. When a relevant sponsor appears in that context, the credibility transfer is real.
We ran two formats for Samsara: inline placements in the weekly FleetOpsClub digest and two dedicated sends over the six-month period. The timing aligned with FleetOpsClub's editorial calendar around ELD compliance — a topic Samsara had strong content on and one their target buyers were actively tracking.
The dedicated sends reached 3,100 verified fleet and logistics professionals. Open rate was 34% — almost double the B2B newsletter industry average of 18%. Click-through rate on Samsara's placement was 6.2%, compared to the 1.8% B2B email average cited in Mailchimp's industry benchmarks. Traffic from the sends converted to demo requests at 12%, compared to 4% from Samsara's other acquisition channels.
The campaign ran six months. Samsara has continued newsletter sponsorships on FleetOpsClub and expanded to include ITOpsClub, where their IoT infrastructure monitoring capabilities have adjacent audience relevance.
"The FleetOpsClub audience is genuinely different from any other list we have access to. These are fleet managers who subscribed because they want to stay current on fleet technology — not because they signed up for something else and ended up on an email list. The engagement numbers showed it immediately."
Campaign Details
Results at a Glance
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