For schools, communication is key. It is essential that both parents and students are kept up to date with what is happening at the school. While there are a variety of methods that can be used for communication, distributing newsletters is up there with the best of them.
Newsletters enable schools to share a wealth of information with parents and students, and since most newsletters are in digital form, it is a highly cost-effective, and rapid, way of sharing information.
More and more schools are now producing newsletters thanks to the wealth of benefits they boast. However, unfortunately, many newsletters are remaining unread or, worse, parents are not acting upon the information in the newsletters. At this point, you might as well not distribute the newsletter in the first place
Our goal on this page is to share with you seven marketing tips that should not only boost the number of reads your newsletters get, but also ensure that more parents (and students) act upon the information within.
1. Know Your Audience and Segment Your List
Many schools try to create a ‘one-size fits all’ approach to their newsletters. This means one newsletter for everybody. The problem? Most of that information will be useless to the vast majority of the readers. This means that most people will avoid reading the newsletter since it is just a waste of their time. To boost read rates, you’ll need to segment your list. This means understanding who the audience for each newsletter is, and ensuring that people only receive newsletters loaded with information relevant to them.
At the minimum, you should split your list down into three newsletters – parents, students, and staff. Understand what each group wants from your newsletter. Make sure they only receive that information.
If you’re willing to put in the effort (and you really should if you want to boost read rates), you’ll need to split the list down even further. Why not segment the list by year group, class, or interests? It helps to keep each newsletter shorter, and far more relevant, to the readers.
2. Use Eye-Catching Subject Lines and Previews
It’s all well and good creating an email that people will be enthralled reading (or, at least as enthralled as one can be reading a school newsletter), but you need people to open up an email to actually read it. This is easier said than done, with the vast majority of emails just getting deleted or archived before they’re opened. This is why creating an eye-catching subject line is a must.
A strong subject line is the first impression you’ll give to people. Make sure it is descriptive, while also suggesting that the email really needs to be read. Make sure people know it is from your school. If you subscribe to other business-related emails, have a look at what they do. Think about which ones you open up, and which ones you avoid. Take some ideas from them.
Most email platforms also allow for a pre-header text, which is essentially just the first few lines of the email. This can be read before the email is opened up properly. Ensure that your pre-header text includes information about what will be found in the email. This is your one chance to encourage people to open up that email.
If you’re up to it, you can also try split-testing email subject lines. So, one half of your mail list gets one subject line, the other half gets a slightly different variation. You stick with the one that gets the best open rates.
3. Keep it Visually Appealing and Easy to Read
Nobody wants to read through huge amounts of information. So, keep your newsletters easy to read. There’s a much bigger chance of people making it through to the end. This means that you should make ample use of headers (so people can scan the content to find what they want), bullet points, and short paragraphs. If something can be left unsaid, leave it unsaid.
The design should also be consistent between newsletters. You should also ensure that you use your school branding, and plenty of images.
Finally, test all newsletters to ensure they read well on mobile devices. This will be where the vast majority of people will be reading their emails.
4. Include Clear Calls to Action (CTAs)
Throughout your newsletters, you’ll likely need your readers to do something. This might mean visiting the school’s website for more information, RSVPing to events, submitting feedback, etc. Obviously, you want as many people to do this as possible. So, you’ll need to be incredibly clear about what you want people to do. This is your call to action (or CTA, for short). A CTA tells people, in clear terms, what they should do next. For example ‘Visit Website’ or ‘RSVP Now’. You need to make sure CTAs are easy to spot, and reference multiple times throughout the newsletter.
We highly recommend using bold links for the CTA (so they’re easy to spot), or even images. We promise you if your CTAs are clear, you’ll get a much higher response rate to your emails.
5. Promote Your Newsletter Across Multiple Channels
Readership for your newsletter will only be high if you can get people signed up for it. Remember – you shouldn’t be signing people up automatically for your school newsletter (in most cases), so promote sign-ups properly. This includes:
- Add newsletter highlights (or even the whole newsletter) to your school’s website, share it through social media, or even any apps that your school might use to communicate with parents.
- Get teachers to tell students about the email newsletter in class, or even tell parents during parent-teacher meetings.
- Generate QR codes for your email newsletter and put them up around the school. People can then scan the QR code to register for the email newsletter. You can also include the same QR code on any correspondence you send to parents.
6. Track Performance and Improve Over Time
Your newsletters will never be perfect. However, each one you send out can get closer to being perfect. You just need to analyse how the email is performing, and make necessary adjustments.
With the right analytical software, you can keep tabs on how people are interacting with your emails. This includes open rates, the content they are reading, etc. You can even find out when the best time to send an email is if you want to improve open rates.
Use all this data to make small adjustments to your emails over time. The key is small adjustments. You don’t want to make great changes to the newsletter every issue. This will be quite jarring for your readers. If you do things properly, you’ll gradually get more people reading the email.
7. Embrace Multilingual Audio Newsletters
For most of your potential newsletter readers, communicating only in English is fine. However, you’ll still want to reach those with less-than-perfect English somehow. This is why it is important that you create bilingual newsletters. This way, nobody feels alienated. Creating multilingual newsletters will ensure everybody can read your emails.
You should also bear in mind that not everybody can read fluently. Again, you don’t want to leave them out.
Now, we don’t expect you to create multilingual newsletters from scratch. It is a lot of effort, and requires fluency in multiple languages. Instead, we suggest you use our easy-to-use content management system (CMS). Not only does it make creating school newsletters a breeze, but also offers automatic translation for your newsletters, ensuring everybody can be reached. It can even create audio versions of your newsletters (again, automatically) helping those who may struggle with reading.
By creating multilingual emails, you can help to build trust in your school, as well as ensuring that everybody who should be reached can be reached.
School Newsletter Marketing Tips
Marketing a school newsletter is not really that different from marketing a business email. Sure, you probably won’t be making any money from your school newsletter, but you still want it to reach as many people as possible. Putting hard work in will ensure that your newsletter has the greatest reach imaginable.
Our marketing tips are simple – create multilingual emails, create eye-catching emails, proper promotion of your emails, and constant testing of the content to see what works. If you can put in the effort, you’ll have an incredibly successful school newsletter.
Don’t forget – your school newsletter is a key part of your school’s communication strategy. Make it work, and everything gets so much easier.
Get in touch with our team today to learn more about our school website design and school marketing services.
