You've been studying your audience relentlessly, tweaking your content to tick all the right boxes. And it's working: Your open rates are booming, and your readers are clicking through. But they're still not taking that last, ever-elusive step: the "forward to a friend."

Creating shareable email content is a critical art that your small business needs to learn, tweak, and perfect. The impacts on lead generation and brand awareness are huge. But how do you nail this?

In the 2017 B2B Content Marketing Trends-North America report by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, email emerged as the leading channel marketers use to distribute their content (a whopping 93%). Why? Because it's direct and highly effective-your audience is already deep in the funnel. But to do it well, you need to think like a strategic content marketer. You need to build authentically useful content-guided by a razor-sharp, nuanced, and specific understanding of your reader sitting on the other side of the screen. The newsletter needs to be informative, targeted to the customer's pain points, and highly engaging. Then you need to optimize it so that sharing is a no-brainer.