Is the traditional school newsletter dead?

Newsletters have been around a long time and are a common marketing tool within most schools - but just because it's been around for a long time, does it mean it's still a useful and effective tool?

In this blog we're going to look into why many believe the newsletter is dead, and conversely, why many think it's still a great marketing tool to attract prospective families, and engage with your school community. We'll summarise with our thoughts, and some action points for your school.

Are school newsletters boring?

School newsletters are often filled with self promotion, recent news, and student success stories, amongst other information that can be perceived as uninteresting to all parents but that of the featured child!

Many school newsletters do as they say on the tin, just fill a letter (email) with news about the school, but that's not enough to consistently grasp the attention of the many families that read it - and delivering consistent uninteresting information will only drive parents closer to hitting the dreaded 'unsubscribe' button. 

To keep current and prospective families interested in engaging with your school newsletter, you need to provide value.

Providing value can take many shapes and forms, but the key takeaway is to include information that the parents will want to read and will gain something from.

• Less generic information about the school
• More information on how they can supplement their children's learning
• How they can help their children excel in a sport team
• How what the school is doing is benefitting their children
  
  

Include content that will entertain, use this newsletter as a chance to show parents what a great experience the students are having!

Providing value can become a lot easier to do if you personalise your emails, which leads nicely onto our next point...

Are your school newsletters personalised?

Dedicating one newsletter to the whole of your school and distributing it to the families of all your student body will inevitably involve sending out a lot of information that is irrelevant to a lot of parents.

Segmenting your school newsletters will help you to send content that is relevant and interesting to the reader. An obvious step is to create multiple newsletters each dedicated to a specific area of your school - Pre-Preparatory, Preparatory, Senior or Sixth Form.

Alternatively you could have different sections within one newsletter, although this could overload the newsletter so if this is the route you choose, make sure you consider easy navigation throughout the newsletter like using anchors.

By creating an anchor on a specific part of your newsletter you can add a link to that section of your content. You can then insert anchor links within the same piece of content to let readers navigate to that section without having to scroll.

An easier route to personalisation would involve using your school CRM to personalise your newsletter. HubSpot CRM lets you personalise each email sent with the parent's unique name, and also lets you use smart content which will show different content based on a number of different categories. The most relevant category for schools is the contact list membership, however you can read about all of the different categories here. 

By using smart content with the contact list membership, you're able to segment your contacts over different areas (Pre-Preparatory, Preparatory, Senior or Sixth Form, for example) and send one email, with different content for each of your lists. This could include different imagery, copy and call to actions!

How else can I gain customer insights for personalisation?

Gaining customer insights is key for personalisation in your newsletter! So how else can you gain customer insights?

A great way to determine the content that parents are interested in is to track their journey through your website. Hotjar is a great piece of software that allows you to record how users move through your site, it also allows you to generate a heat map of what generates the most clicks on your site. So if you see a big red patch on your heat map over the top of a specific blog, then you should look to include content like that in your newsletter.

Gaining customer feedback through forms is a great way to develop your insights, but we'll touch on this more in the next point. However, we will speak about a development of customer feedback here; situational analysis of anecdotal experiences.

Speaking with parents face to face, maybe at a school event, is a great way to uncover insights that a form never could. Using open ended questions you can spark a conversation that can lead to great insights - it's also hard to ignore a face to face conversation in the same way someone might ignore a form on an email!

Generate interaction through your newsletter

Generating interaction through your newsletter is a great way to both build value and generate feedback that you can use to continually improve your newsletter. There's loads of ways to generate interaction, especially with newsletter being almost entirely online now!

In terms of generating interaction for feedback, this could look like a poll, or maybe a link to a landing page with a form submission. Asking parents for their views and opinions will help to make them feel more involved with the newsletter, and they're more likely to keep coming back as a result. 

Don't be afraid to try new things within your newsletter, the benefit of it being a monthly issue that goes out is that you get 12 attempts each year to build and improve on it - why not try a competition one month? If it generates interaction and you see more email opens and clicks the following month then there's a new tool you can use in your newsletters! 

And if 12 attempts in a year doesn't sound enough, you should consider A/B testing (easily done through HubSpot's email marketing), which involves sending 50% of your contact list one email and the other 50% a different email. What you change is up to you, but it might be worth only changing single variables at a time so you can get a better understanding of the yield of those individual variables. See the image below for what sort insights you'll get from HubSpot A/B testing!

Avoid the dreaded unsubscribe

There's a few boxes to be ticked to ensure your newsletter does what it's supposed to. Your newsletter is there for you to keep parents up to date with the latest school news, but also to impress your subscribers. So, here's a few areas on top of what we've already covered to make sure you cover in order to impress your subscribers and avoid unsubscribes.

• Ensure the content of your newsletter is closely associated with your school and your school/website themes.
• Ensure your newsletter is well written, filled with relevant information, and content rich.
• Include a range of content (text, images, videos, gifs..)
• Avoid copyrighted materials
• Fact check your articles

How to combat the view that newsletters are dead?

One issue with the newsletter is the view that it already is dead. Parents might already have a preconceived view that they're not interested in newsletters, and although if they start reading yours they might change their mind, that's worth nothing if they're not going to open it in the first place. So how can you combat this?

It might be worth considering renaming your newsletter to not include the word 'newsletter'. This ultimately comes down to what you'd like to call it, and might be relevant to your school name. You could consider referring to it as a 'club', which may help to make it feel a bit more exclusive as well. There's almost an endless list of possible names for for your newsletter, and changing the name may yield an uptake in new subscribers so it's definitely worth considering!

Ultimately, it's not a case of the newsletter being dead, it's a case of the newsletter being used incorrectly. It's no longer enough to just send out school news each month. You need to build value, segment and personalise, generate interaction, and maybe even rename. 

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Action Points

• Use insights to utilise smart content 
  Benefit: Content is relevant to reader
• Develop content to engage school community
  Benefit: Word of mouth marketing 
• Capture and store data on prospects and current families to personalise content
  Benefit: Engage the reader
• Consider a rename
  Benefit: Reignite your newsletter

Need help with your school newsletter or other marketing assets? Talk with one of our experts and see how we can help you build value.