Want to make your school newsletter to parents and kids more lively and interesting? In this article, we will take a detailed look at a school newsletter, its main features, some design requirements, school newsletter ideas, and several examples of newsletters from various educational institutions.
What is the school newsletter?
It would seem, why do schools and other educational institutions need their mailing lists? These emails are sent to parents of children and children separately or as one general email for all of them. Often these emails are sent by the school principals or class teachers of the students.
School newsletters serve three purposes:
- Informative. Basically, this is an update of students and their families about various special events in the school, notifications about courses and electives, as well as important dates, major awards, and essential information about education. For example, you can send small guides and recommend different documents and study materials organized by the Studocu educational platform and all the other learning resources. This will help students find answers to study-related questions, the latest research from other students, and lectures from teachers worldwide. So being informative in your newsletter will give you additional benefits.
- Engaging. The school newsletter should engage recipients with stories about past events, achievements of both the school and individual students, and much more. It’s a vital tool to encourage social engagement and help student development. Besides that, it can share in various ways how families can actively participate in school life and more.
- Reminder. School life is extremely busy, and it is quite easy to get lost or forget about important events in a student's schedule. School newsletters come to the rescue in such situations, as they can remind the students of upcoming events, tests, competitions, exams, sporting events, and more.
Frequency of school newsletters
Since these school newsletters are sent out on an ongoing basis, they all have a specific schedule. Each educational institution determines it for itself. It can be monthly, weekly, bi-weekly, and so on.
Best content practices for a school newsletter
Like any other, school newsletters should follow certain requirements for school newsletter content and template formatting to maintain the style inherent in the educational institution. Incorrectly formatted emails can lead to slow loading speed, accessibility issues, and brand consistency issues. This section will look at the basic tips and rules you should follow when creating a school newsletter, accompanied by school newsletter ideas.
1. Avoid attachments
You should not do this as much as you would like to pack the subject information into a separate file and attach it to an email. Often, such files are quite inconvenient and can slow down the information distribution process. According to surveys, 73% of people need to update files after they've been sent. In addition, 62% of people lose files sent to them in attachments. And this is unacceptable when sending out important school information.
In addition, such files can cause problems with accessibility, as there is a possibility of poor adaptation of the files to different devices with different screens. So refrain from attachments and devise a more convenient way to present information in the email.
2. Make your school newsletter’s copy clean and concise
This is one of the successful newsletter best practices. Each email in the primary school newsletter should be easy to read and convey information without unnecessary epithets. The email's subject line should be concise, delivering the main idea of the email. Practice being brief because research says that most emails people receive (regardless of industry) don't have more than 300 words. And this is not surprising since every year, the number of emails in people's inboxes is increasing. So value the time of your students and parents with short emails that will not turn into a full-fledged novel.
3. Use high-quality media files
In addition to well-written text, your school newsletter should contain high-quality photos and videos (if the purpose of the email is to include them). If you have a staff photographer, then have him or her create quality media files for your school newsletter to make it visually appealing. Or find students who are ready to take photos of the most important events in school life. And do not forget that stock images are always at your disposal with Stripo(both paid and free).
4. Stick to your email style guide and school colors
Brand consistency is an extremely important thing not only for the school newsletter but for any newsletter in general. You want your emails to be seen by as many parents and students as possible. So the statistics tell you the same thing, that 70% of studies confirm that brand consistency is the key to communication with the audience.
So develop your style guide, which will include the integral attributes of the educational institution, logo, colors, and much more. This will help to distinguish your school newsletter from other educational institutions.
5. Personalize your school newsletter
Personalization is a great way to increase the engagement level of your school newsletter. According to a survey, 60% of the most successful marketers consider personalization one of the most important tools to enhance email marketing campaign engagement. Make your emails more personal by addressing recipients by name. This can apply to both the subject line and the greeting in the email itself. Also, if the email is being sent on behalf of the principal, adding a sign-off with the principal's signature would be a great finishing touch.
6. Work on your subject lines
Subject lines are the face of your email and what makes the first impression on your audience. For your school newsletter, neglecting its quality can have a negative impact on the effectiveness of your emails. According to research, 64% of email recipients decide whether or not to open an email based on the subject line they see. Make your subject line catchy and personalized, but don't forget about conciseness. In addition, keep an eye on the length of your subject line, as your email can be opened on devices with different screen sizes, and different email clients can cut characters in subject lines. Research shows that the ideal subject line length is around 41 characters.
7. Think about school newsletter accessibility
A large audience of students and their parents who will read your school newsletter increases the chance that there will be a person with certain disabilities among the recipients. Consider this when creating school newsletter templates.
Disabilities can be color blindness, visual and hearing disabilities, and dyslexia. As a result, the following tips are worth taking into account in order to make your school newsletter as accessible as possible:
- use sufficient contrast colors of different shades;
- add descriptive subject lines to your school newsletter templates;
- use only legible fonts;
- add alt text to all the images and GIFs in your school newsletter;
- make your links meaningful;
- optimize your school newsletters for mobile devices.
You can learn more about how to make not only school newsletter templates but also any other emails as accessible as possible in our special blog post.
School newsletter ideas to use in your campaign
The school newsletter is a real field for experimenting with email subject lines and email content. We decided to make a small selection of school newsletter content ideas for you to ignite some inspiration.
Tell about changes
Have your campus or school cabinets been reshuffled? Have new dormitory buildings been added, school clubs canceled, or has the gym been renovated? Be sure to highlight this in your school newsletter template. Just like the Wharton School did in their email, they discussed the construction of their research building.
(Source: Email from Wharton School)
A quite informative email was made in the educational institution's colors and photographs of this newly built building.
Highlight ongoing events
Pupils and their parents should see that school life does not stop for a minute and interesting events always occur within the school walls. So cover them in your school newsletter to keep school community members aware of ongoing school life. It is a great way to encourage children to be involved in extracurricular school activities.
(Source: Stripo email template)
For example, talk about a sports event in which the school's football team took part and show the star performers of the football match. Or highlight student awards they won recently. Or let your recipients take part in the drawing competition as judges. Choose a good news story your students and parents will find interesting and worthy of attention. After that, put it in the school newsletter template.
Remind about upcoming school events
As we wrote above, busy school life cannot all fit in the head of the student, and therefore, it is worth telling and reminding students from time to time about upcoming events. Competitions, championships, olympiads in subjects, school proms, and school president elections are all worthy of attention to keep students involved in school life. So, keep reminding about them in your school newsletter.
(Source: Email from Columbia University)
Columbia University is a good example of this approach. In their email, they briefly told, reminded, and invited everyone to discuss important topics with professors and graduates of various faculties.
Show teachers to students and parents
Such emails will be extremely useful for students and their parents since they will meet with teachers more than once throughout the year. Show and tell them who is behind their children’s education, what subjects they teach, and so on. A great touch would be adding links to the teacher's profile on various social networks or the school's websites. Or you can add a short interview with each teacher to the school newsletter so students and parents can get acquainted with stellar academic staff.
(Source: Stripo email template)
This will help newcomers to get to know those who will teach them until graduation and keep parents informed and in touch with teachers in case of emergency.
Wrapping up
Creating school newsletters is a responsible task, as these emails will accompany your students and their parents throughout their education years. Students will draw from them valuable information, rejoice at the school's victories and individual students, take an active part in the life of the school, and much more.
We hope this blog post with essential tips will help you create an exceptional school newsletter that will become the flagship of your online interaction with your students and their parents. While you're thinking about the email design and your content, you can start making the first drafts of it in Stripo.
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