Do you Treat your Newsletter as a Product?

If you were asked to list your products, how many of you will mention their newsletters on that list.

I'm guessing, a few...

Yes, we still live among marketers who see a newsletter as a channel for updating customers about business developments – and not as a product.

But, just like the product you're selling, newsletters have to satisfy the customer's needs or wants.

When people sign up for your newsletter, they want pure, undiluted value – no tricks, no upsells.

That's how you keep them hooked.

57.7% of marketers send at least one newsletters every week. This means that you've to cut through a lot of noise to make yours stand out.

Treating your newsletter as a product is never hard to do, mostly when you employ the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework.

By way of a brief introduction, the #JTBD framework came out of Harvard Business School, and it has helped many marketers understand:

1. When do customers prefer to buy or hire your products or services (ie, what is happening in their lives when they decide to hire your product or service)
2. What progress are they trying to make with your product or service?
3. Who or what they fired before settling for your product or service?
4. What habits or anxieties delayed the decision to hire your product or service?

Read again the four points above, but this time around, replace the word product with the word newsletter and the word buy with the word subscribe.

Answers to the above questions are essential in understanding the social and emotional needs that drive customers to subscribe to your newsletter.

I've written an interesting piece that shows you how to write emails using the #JTBD framework. In it, I use welcome emails as examples and indicate the do