Lessons for Succeeding with Enewsletters

Internet Retailer reports that Home Depot had 25,000 sign-ups to their email garden club in the first 24 hours. I think there are two lessons to this kind of success.

Valuable Content- The newsletter is about gardening not just Home Depot. Content provides real value to readers not just sales pitches. People have come to trust Home Depot to bring quality products and information to them.

Easily Spreadable- Clearly Home Depot touched a nerve with this offering. Gardeners are hungry for intelligent valuable information about plant material, tools, supplies, etc. Therefore gardeners are likely to network with other gardeners. Clearly gardening network hubs very quickly spread the word about Home Depot's new club.

These lessons apply to all email newsletters and especially B2B newsletters.

In order to become a must read newsletter you must provide content that is more than just company news and sales pitches. Articles that provide insight, analysis or news about industry events and trends provide real value to the readers. These are the e-newsletters that are opened an read consistently.

Newsletters need to find the right readers to be of value to their publishers. One of the best ways to do this is to make it easy for existing readers to share the value of your e-newsletter or e-zine with others like themselves. Just as Home Depot benefited from word of mouth as gardeners told other gardeners your business could benefit from your readers telling others about your e-newsletter. It starts by asking readers to forward your newsletter to people they think it would be relevant to. Did you know that this reader behavior can be analyzed and encouraged with incentives?

In fact there is a lot insight that can be gained from reader behavior. At BeTuitive we call it customer intuition. Not only do we strive to help businesses large and small provide excellent content but we also focus on developing valuable customer intuition by observing customer behavior as they interact with your email newsletter. To find out more schedule a 27 minute live online demonstration here.