Topic 2: eNewsletters

[mharmon]

One of the things on my to-do list was to find out how to create and manage an email. I, too, would like more information on the one that is potentially free for under 10,000 a month. I was a little taken back by the cost of iContact, although I would still probably do it if it turns out to be the best one.

We just had parent info night for upcoming sophomores. This might be a nice way to contact schools and parents and give them information about the program. I feel empowered!

[nyokota]

We send out email to our entire school community about once a month as a way to remind everyone about the newspaper. What we find, though, is that people are email-overloaded, and stop looking at their email unless it's from their teacher or boss, so even though we publish new articles each week, we don't want to add to the volume of Inbox email. In addition to email overload, there's the cost factor which would be in addition to other things we pay for (subscriptions, website hosting, software, etc.). I guess I'm not thinking we'd use email marketing services (or e-newsletter providers) at this time despite the attractiveness of the newsletters.

[natalie.wojinski]

I've been working with eNewsletters for almost two years now, but not as a classroom teacher. I'm the newsletter coordinator for the California Geographic Alliance, so I put together our monthly missive to members (no, I didn't plan that). Looking at the newsletter, I can see that it is jargon heavy, but members generally know what the various terms mean. In other words, it might not be good for an outreach newsletter.

http://campaign.constantcontact.com/render?v=001MtBt-olyudmWc1fbwgPZy0pYLlFxsj_Mh0-nly8uOs7kY6ncHcSFQghRfdEuAj0HgX-h4ZHkRbZGtUtlC1VBJ4BgFueQ6H-5dsA6Ut_GKGzZ-Vj9zIIiMg%3D%3D

We use Constant Contact as our service and chose that after looking at several other options including Mail Chimp. Typically, these mailing services don't include archiving and photo storage. All of these services seem to be much too expensive for classroom or even newspaper or yearbook staffs. I would love to have a weekly parent eNewsletter for kids in my geography classes, but it's just too much.

Recently, I added the ability to subscribe through email to my teacher blog. I'm testing that using my own email to see if it's something that I want to do with parents.

I have looked at the analytics for our newletter. We're just about at industry average (industry being educational organization newsletters) for our open rate (# of people who open the email). Our clickthrough rate is a bit below average, but getting better (clickthrough is the number and type of link that is followed). What we did find is that our two special edition newsletters have had both the highest open rate AND the highest clickthrough rate.

[dsmith-harper]

I just created one using icontact. Very simple setup. I think this would be great as an all-school tool, and also for each teacher to maintain contact with parents.

We do a quarterly 8 page newsletter for parents through academypublishing.com. For the past two years I've been the person in charge of this, but I may have to pass it on to someone else this year since my teaching partner has been moved to another school and I'll have half again as many students this next year as we had together this year. I think my time is going to be limited. However, the newsletter we do produce is paid for by advertising that the company sells to local merchants. The school provides the postage. This has worked very well for us, but because we only send it out quarterly, a lot of things get missed. The icontact or similar system would be a good idea, I think.

Dianne Smith-Harper

[ballew]

eNewsletters to parents and students are efficient and effective for keeping our yearbook audience in the know. We use them to primarily to market: advertise the sale of the yearbook, group and people section photo session dates, but we also try to keep our students and parents aware of items such as deadlines for friendship ad submission and photos for the video productions we will create for different events during the school year (i.e.) academic dinner celebrations, senior luncheons, assemblies...

We could use them even more effectively for focus group responses. We have used social networks such as Facebook, email and texting to distribute our eNewsletter. We need to learn to use other social networks as well. For us, reaching audience is always the most tricky part of using eNews.

[ymanculich]

I really like the idea of using an email newsletter to celebrate our successes in yearbook. Perhaps the editors could create one after we have made a deadline, adding photos that were used in the layout and/or profiling a yearbook student of the month. There are a myriad of possibilities. I do know that when I receive these types of emails, I am more apt to read it than if it's a plain text email. I have heard good things about Constant Contact from friends of mine who use it to promote their businesses. I could see one being sent out at the beginning of the year to parents regarding picture day, the purchase of a yearbook, baby ad requirements, yearbook distribution, etc.

[ymanculich]

I do have a question for you Aaron. What is the easiest and cheapest way to have access to stock photos? Is there a way to subscribe so that one can use images without violating copyright laws?

[schaeferd]

The eNewsletters are nice. As other advisers suggested, I think it would be great for Yearbook news and updates. I would love to use them for my English and journalism classes, but I'm not sure if I'd spend the monthly fee.

I noticed that Vertical Response also sent postcards, and they were pretty reasonably priced in bulk. I could use those as a Save the Date for our annual journalism competition. I normally don't do mailings, but the postcards seemed kind of fun and I could address it to the staff, and continue sending emails to the advisers.

[manfull]

I do have a question for you Aaron. What is the easiest and cheapest way to have access to stock photos? Is there a way to subscribe so that one can use images without violating copyright laws?

There are stock photo places out there you can subscribe to like iStockphoto.com, veer.com and Shutterstock.com. There are others, I'm sure you can search and find them but those are the three ones that come to mind first for me.

[chowsir]

After previewing just about all of the companies, I liked the versatility of jango mail, especially its HTML editing tool. What made me decide not to try it was the base price of $30/month. It would be great if our school gave us funding to use it to communicate with our parents and community stake-holders.
I have been asked this question several times by our parent-liaison regarding tools that lets her send our e-mail blasts to parents more effectively. I will definitely share the links with her and see if our administration will fund it.
It would be a great tool to use for our journalism program, perhaps in collaboration with the parent e-mail blasts, so both our parent and student populations get more updated news, announcements, official messages.
I also agree that many people get email overload, and the tendency is to delete or mark as spam when they get too frequent, repetitive enewsletters. Perhaps the analytics end of these services could point us toward what works and doesn't.
I'm guessing students may prefer receiving SMS over email updates.