Public relations professionals can agree that some of the best emails – other than responses from Journalists – come in the form of a newsletter.

Newsletters serve several purposes, and showing off content is just one of them! The letters that are curated correctly can help businesses achieve their goals by increasing leads and retaining more customers.

According to Hubspot,a successful newsletter fulfills a clear goal and inspires readers to click open at a high rate.

“Even though e-newsletters are one of the most common types of emails to send, they are actually some of the hardest to do right.”

In the spirit of the new year and taking on new initiatives, we’ve compiled a list on how to create a newsletter people want to read.

Continue Reading for tips to create a meaningful newsletter.

Garden Media has produced its highly anticipated trends report for more than a decade. To honor this milestone, we spent the year honoring our favorite trends of the past!

Here’s a look at the top trends we brought back to life in 2016!

This year is winding down, which means we’re busy as elves creating end-of-the-year reports. Getting earned media coverage meaningful for our clients is our number one priority as their public relations partner. 

All through the year, we aim to provide material helpful to our clients’ goals and bottom lines. We craft stories and press releases, work with key influencers and pitch our client’s key messages to gain coveted media placements, which is by far our top priority since these placements show our PR efforts visually.

We thought it would be fun to take a look at a few of our top media placements that we garnered this year, how each hit was achieved and why it mattered to our clients.

Drum roll please!

This is an excerpt taken from an article by Elizabeth Petersen on Millennials in the garden in the December issue of Digger Magazine. Katie enjoyed sharing trends and insights about Millennials with Elizabeth for this insightful piece. 

As Baby Boomers have retired and downsized, their long-standing financial support of the nursery industry has fallen off.

But a new generation of gardeners called Millennials is poised to pick up where Boomers left off — grabbing their shovels, growing their own food, decorating their spaces with plants and re-invigorating the nursery industry.

The holiday season is here – which means goal setting and planning for 2017, lots of holiday parties and, for many, giving back to others.

In fact, the holidays are the most popular time for companies to harness the spirit of giving. Nearly 34 percent of all charitable giving is done in the last three months of the year, 18 percent in December alone.

It's for this reason that #GivingTuesday was created, a global day dedicated to giving back. This year it fell on Nov. 29. Next year it falls on Nov. 28. 

Here at Garden Media, we celebrate the holiday spirit by giving back at our annual Christmas Wrap. This year we had the pleasure of working with Oxford Church of the Nazarene and the Lighthouse Youth Center, a para-church organization that gives back to youth ages 9-18.

We gather as a team to sing Christmas songs, eat cookies and wrap our gifts. It’s a time of year when thinking about others is easy, fun and makes us feel good.

But enough about us. Let's take a look at what some of our favorite companies do for others:

In this week’s Trending Thursday post, we’re reflecting a decade into the past when people started to recognize – and then alter – "reckless” habits.   

As the country started to embrace holistic, natural options when it came to products and food, people started to pay attention to what was happening below the surface of their garden.

Consumers realized that the path to healthy plants started in the ground.

Reckless gardening was out and safe gardening was in.

Continue reading to learn more about the Safe Gardening trend.

Every good pr professional knows that building solid relationships with the media is key to having a strong list of contacts to can call upon when needed. PR pros can meet new contacts via pitching, conferences and networking.

This Fall, GMG traveled to The Big Apple for a media tour with Costa Farms.

Find out how we made this tour a success.

For this week’s trending Thursday post, we’re looking way back to a simpler time – at least when it came to the garden.

In 2004, we stated that busy was out and classic, simple gardens were in.

Americans were weary of trying to put together mixed containers that ended up looking overdone and tasteless.  They avoided pairing too many plants together the way they avoided “wearing plaids, stripes and big floral prints together.” 

The home gardener gravitated toward the mono-impact container idea. And with that trend came a simple outdoor concept.

Continue reading to learn more about Classic Gardens.

Jargon: special words or expressions that are used by a particular profession or group and are difficult for others to understand.

Those who work in PR are all too familiar with this term. How many times a day can someone hear the word “influencer” before they’re completely bored?  

No one – especially journalists and consumers -  likes buzzwords.  So why does our industry love to use and overuse them so often?

The good news is that there’s always time to unlearn the drab words that drag our copy down.    

Read more to unlearn these overused words.

In this week’s Trending Thursday post, we’re looking back nearly a decade to 2005 where the online revolution was in full force.

People were just beginning to use the internet – which was easily accessible nation-wide – as a fountain of knowledge that helped them learn about new products like never before.

This widespread access to new information lead to consumers feeling overwhelmed by choices in garden centers and other stores. In order to combat this feeling, consumers turned to trusted personalities to help make choices for them.

Continue reading to learn more about Curated Consumption.