All hail the ubiquitous eNewsletter, a crucial part of making an impact with your digital outreach and one of the most essential types of emails you should be sending.

Among B2B marketers, 83 percent use eNewsletters as part of their content marketing program, and 40 percent say it’s critical to their content marketing success. And chances are you’ve probably signed up for a few yourself.

ENewsletters may seem like email marketing at its most basic, but they’re actually a major part of a dynamic and progressive email marketing strategy. With 59 percent of consumers reporting that marketing emails influence their purchasing decisions, it’s clear that the more modes of outreach you have, the better — and an eNewsletter is a great way to anchor all of that communication in one effective package.

Here are four reasons that eNewsletters should be at the top of your email marketing priority list.

1. They Humanize Your Brand

Brands are people too. Well, okay, not exactly, but when it comes to effective outreach, you absolutely need to be putting personality — and a human touch — behind how you communicate. Digital marketing has heralded a turn toward more accessible, friendly, and trustworthy messaging, leading to a consumer base that doesn’t just want to relate to your brand as they would a real person but that expects to.

So how do eNewsletters help you achieve this? Show your subscribers what you’re up to, share company updates, and give your audience an inside look at your business. These are ways to humanize your brand that you can’t necessarily accomplish in other forms of outreach. Your eNewsletter is a place for you to get a little more creative and personal with the tone and content in your email template, in turn strengthening connections that can help sustain both short- and long-term brand growth.

2. They’re Resource Driven

As a marketer, you’re creating a lot of content that can help educate (and convert) your prospects and leads. How you disseminate that content matters, though, and you need to take steps to ensure that you’re getting the right resources in front of the right people. Segmented email campaigns are the gold standard for getting this done, but your company eNewsletter has a pretty important role to play here too.

ENewsletters are an easy way to distribute your newly published content to your audience. As a supplement to segmented campaigns, they offer one more way to reach your email recipients with the types of information they need to move on to the next step in the buyer’s journey, and an additional opportunity to get your message out the world.

3. They Keep You Top of Mind

In this unprecedented age of commercial competition, it pays to invest time and resources in brand awareness. You want to be the first company that your leads think of when they need a solution to the problem you’re focused on, and in that same vein, you need to do everything you can to ensure your competitors don’t take that coveted top spot. That’s where eNewsletters come in.

Conveying information is a key function of e-newsletters, but building brand awareness is perhaps their true purpose. ENewsletters are a regular and dependable form of outreach that offers value without asking for much in return. Your subscribers signed up because they legitimately want to know what’s going on with you, so take the time to check-in and make sure you always stay in front and center.

4. They Help Position You as a Thought Leader

Use your eNewsletter as a space to share your content and other high-quality pieces relevant to your readers. This helps establish you as a thought leader in your field, communicating to your subscribers that you have your fingers on the pulse of what’s relevant to your industry at large.

A well thought out, well-intentioned e-newsletter will almost always include content that isn’t just driven directly back to your own site.  By sharing interesting and/or need-to-know pieces from other reputable content publishers, you show that you’re not just interested in clicks and conversions but also in a bigger dialogue.

Remember, 99 percent of consumers check their email every day, and most of them check it multiple times throughout the day. E-newsletters are just one more way that you can make meaningful connections and achieve your broader marketing goals. They might not be the most glamorous of marketing endeavors, nor are they enough to sustain your efforts on their own. But, when used as part of a comprehensive strategy, they can be a critical driver of email marketing success.

Want to take your email newsletters to the next level? Start by strategizing around the major benefits mentioned above. Think of what you can do to boost your eNewsletter in terms of personality, content, brand awareness, and thought leadership, and see how fast a simple e-newsletter turns into so much more.