Newsletter best practices

CollegiateParent

Newsletters can be a great way to keep in regular contact with parents and to help ensure both parents and students know about important deadlines and processes. We've compiled a few best practices below. What have you found to work well, or what problems do you have with your own parent email newsletters?

Make sure designs are mobile-responsive and easy to read on a phone

We find that up to 60% of parents read emails on their phone instead of a tablet or computer. Most email clients allow you to test how your email will look on a mobile device. Take a look at your email before sending. Also, instead of having all of your information in the email body, try using short excerpts and call to action, with the full text hosted elsewhere. For example, if you have a lot of information about family weekend, instead of having parents read the entire article on the email, (and having them miss the important financial aid information and housing dates that are hiding below), put a quick call to action with the family weekend date, and link to the rest of the family weekend article on your site. Don't have a way to put content up on your site? Don't worry, you can easily do that with your content package articles. Simply include your short excerpt and use the link we provide.

Note: We follow these practices in the email newsletters we run and manage for universities. If you are looking for help, please contact us for more information.

Avoid sending too many messages in one email, and put the most important ones on top

In every email that we send, we find the number of parents who click on a link diminishes exponentially as you go down the newsletter. We would suggest avoiding having more than 3–4 articles per newsletter. Also, keep your text pithy and to the point!

Get into a rhythm

Send your emails on a regular basis if possible, but don't overwhelm parents' inboxes. Once or twice a month is great for most schools; parents feel like they're getting the information they need and you don't have to put too much information in each email, but they also aren't feeling like their inboxes are flooded.

What do you think? Comment below.

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