The advantages of ‘two-click’ newsletters

School newsletters accessed through a link in an email, as opposed to newsletters displayed in the email itself (like those created using Mailchimp, for example), offer several advantages for both the parents reading them and the school itself. These advantages include improved deliverability, enhanced design capabilities, better user experience, and increased engagement.

Firstly, let’s consider the more technical advantages of two-click school newsletters that the school can enjoy.

Improved deliverability rates

School newsletters accessed through a link in an email have better deliverability rates. When newsletters are embedded within an email, they are often flagged by email providers' spam filters, leading to higher bounce-backs (or lower deliverability rates).

On the other hand, newsletters accessed through a link in an email are more likely to land in the recipient's inbox, as they are not hindered by these spam filters. This means that more recipients are likely to receive, and more importantly open the newsletters, leading to a wider reach for the content.

Save time & resource

If you want to create a professional-looking newsletter that includes galleries of images, videos, web forms as well as text, it’ll take much longer to achieve in a traditional publishing platform like MailChimp. What’s more, you’ll likely have to pay more to enjoy the superior functionality and formatting that you get included within the Schoolzine platform.

Send the same link via multiple channels

The beauty of sending a link to a newsletter is the flexibility it provides you with. With a Schoolzine newsletter in particular, you’re able to send this same link via app notification, as a social media post, and place it on your website, as well as traditional email. 

What’s more, you can customise the headline message you put on the email or app notification, summarising the most exciting parts of the newsletter, to really incentivise parents to click through.

Keep school branding consistent

A newsletter created as a unique URL or web page in a Schoolzine style platform means schools can keep their branding spot-on, every time. At the set-up phase, we will work with you to ensure the header for your newsletter looks great on every device, for every single newsletter that is distributed. Not only will it look sleek and sophisticated, it can match your website, prospectus and other branding perfectly. 

If using a publishing platform which includes images or video, you’re also at the mercy of email providers, nearly all of which now automatically restrict the download of any such media. 

Newsletters that are accessed through a link in an email also have huge benefits for the parents reading the newsletter too…

Enhanced design capabilities

School newsletters accessed through a link allow for enhanced design capabilities. When editors create newsletters that are embedded within an email, they are often limited by the constraints of the publishing platform they are operating within. This type of email formatting can severely restrict design options, such as font choices, layout, and including multimedia content. 

In contrast, newsletters accessed through a link to content on Schoolzine’s parent engagement platform can be designed with more creativity and flexibility, allowing for visually appealing, engaging and mobile responsive content. This can lead to a more professional and polished look for the newsletter, which can captivate readers and keep them reading right to the end. Let’s look at some of these design capabilities in more detail…

Google Translate in school newsletters

Does your school have a high EAL community? If so, your parents will love the functionality provided by this type of newsletter, which lets readers translate into any one of over 130 languages. The level of engagement your school can enjoy through such a tool is outlined in our article: How to engage with your EAL parent community.

Embedding calendars & including forms

The nature of Schoolzine’s newsletters means that you can easily include the whole dynamic calendar within your newsletter, or even individual events. In fact, you can include any of the platform features inside a newsletter, like web forms, polls or social media feeds

The end result is seamless, consistent and easy to achieve, every single time.

User experience

School newsletters accessed through a link provide a better user experience. Embedded newsletters in emails can sometimes appear cluttered and overwhelming, with excessive scrolling required to view the entire content. In contrast, newsletters accessed through a link can be presented in a user-friendly and mobile responsive format, with clear navigation (like Schoolzine’s helpful content indexing), easy-to-read content, and interactive elements. This can result in a more enjoyable and convenient reading experience for recipients, leading to increased engagement and retention of information.

Higher engagement rates

Because of this improved design capability and functionality, newsletters accessed in this way tend to have higher engagement rates. When newsletters are displayed in the email itself, recipients may quickly scan through the content or even overlook it altogether, as emails can be easily deleted or ignored. 

However, newsletters accessed through a link require recipients to take an additional step, which indicates a higher level of interest and commitment. This can result in recipients being more invested in the content and more likely to take desired actions, such as clicking on links, reading crucial but not necessarily exciting information, or simply just reading to the end!

If you are looking to create effective newsletters that captivate and engage your audience, consider using a link in your email instead of embedding the newsletter content directly in the email. Of course, we can help with that; we’ve been helping schools to create emails like this for over 15 years. If you want to know more, get in touch with us for a quick no-pressure demo.