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Confession:  I can’t stop talking about gardening and food.  Even when I’m talking about email marketing.  You’ve been warned.

As the days grow cooler here in WNC, gardening is giving way to food preservation.  As I was canning tomatoes the other day, I started thinking about the formulas for canning and how they apply to other aspects of life.  When I worked my way around to email marketing, I had to laugh.  Canning and email marketing are really much the same!  You need fresh content, the ability to ensure lasting quality, and enough pressure to make it all happen.

Fresh Content:  Canning takes the brilliance of summer and captures it safely for later enjoyment.  You want your fruits or vegetables to be as fresh as possible.  The same goes for newsletter content.  Include timely content in your email newsletters, whether you use seasonal content, market for specific holidays, or include the latest news.  The one big exception is if you are creating an auto-series that will send out to new subscribers at unknown (to you) times.

Lasting Quality: There are very specific proportions of acid and time/pressure combinations to ensure that food doesn’t go bad while it’s sitting on the shelf.  While some marketing communications are incredibly short lived (flash sales or a video of your company doing the Harlem Shake), you also want to include some content with longer shelf-life.  Think about your newsletters as a time capsule - you want to capture the fun cultural memes of the day, but you also want some dignified communications to come through as well.

Just Enough Pressure:  If you don’t reach the appropriate pressure levels while canning, you might kill everybody who eats your food.  That’d be a real bummer.  It would also be a bummer to send out marketing emails that didn’t have a strong call to action.  This pressure can also be achieved by cross-pollinating your social media with your newsletter to gain greater exposure.