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Email is one of the best communication and marketing channels for K12 schools. This is a great way to share the latest news, important news, back-to-school protocols and upcoming events with parents.This channel has An incredible 36% open ratewhich means that when you send an email, there’s a good chance your message will reach your home.
However, before you can send an email to support a parent, student, staff or donor, you need their email address. In this article, we’ll show you how to build your K12 email list and why it’s important to do so.
Why you should build your email newsletter list
The school’s email list naturally degrades. Parents remain on your school’s email list as long as their child is enrolled at your school. If a child transfers or completes grade 12, parents may unsubscribe from your list or lose interest altogether.Not to mention, approximately 0.4% of parents unsubscribe from your list Even if their kids are still in school.
With that in mind, you can see that if you don’t go the extra mile to continually build your email list, eventually, you’ll have no one to email to. If you don’t have an email list or it’s restricted, you won’t be able to:
- Drive direct email marketing campaigns and raise funds for various programs
- Keep students, parents, and staff informed and supported wherever possible
- Conduct surveys or research for non-teaching staff, teaching staff or students
- Hosting competitions, organizing sporting events, games and shows
Why web forms are the best choice for creating high-quality listings
One of the easiest ways to get an email address for the K12 newsletter is through a form on an existing website. You can use several types of web forms, such as:
- Opt-in form: When you want to request a parent to register for a specific event, competition or your school newsletter.
- pop-up form: Place this type of form on your most visited pages or blog posts. As the name suggests, the form pops up when a web visitor performs a predefined action, such as showing an exit intent (for example, moving the mouse to the top right). Pop-up forms are great because they grab the reader’s attention and prompt them to take a specific action before you lose them entirely.
- landing page form: These can be used for promotions and as lead magnets, so you can direct visitors to these pages and grow your listings in a more conscious way.
and BenchmarkONE K12 Edition, you will have no trouble creating any of these forms. We provide you with customizable templates that you can use as a springboard for inspiration to design forms that significantly grow your list.
As contacts start to flow in, we help you manage and segment them to ensure you’re sending the right message to the right group—no more looping eighth-grade parents into messages specific to first-grade parents.
Tips for Growing Your Regional Newsletter Email List Using Web Forms
Here are some helpful tips to help grow your K12 email list:
- maintain a consistent brand
Whether you’re creating a pop-up form or an opt-in form, make sure the design matches your website’s color palette. This way, when you add forms to your web pages, they don’t look out of place.Most marketing automation tools, like BenchmarkONE, give you tons of templates to choose from Makes assembling your school newsletter super easy. These templates help you do most of the work, and you can change up your school logo and colors, so your messaging aligns with your school branding.
- Place the form strategically on the school’s website
If you’re using opt-in forms, add them to strategic locations such as landing pages, sidebar widgets, headers and footers, or at the end of your blog post. For pop-up forms, choose when you want them to appear, such as after a user has spent a certain amount of time on your page or when they show an exit intent.
- Make your forms mobile-friendly
Most parents, teachers, and non-teaching staff use your school and district content on mobile phones. So make sure your forms are mobile-friendly so they can easily fill out on their mobile devices anytime, anywhere. The last thing you want is to lose potential subscribers because they can’t read or notice your signup form.
- Provide value to web visitors in exchange for their email address
If you ask parents to sign up for the school’s newsletter, your content should be valuable to them. Instead of posting too much at once, focus on which topics resonate the most with your readers.
Getting parents and other voters to read your newsletter can be difficult, so you want to make sure you help yourself as much as possible. Share only key information and insights, and do so in a way that demonstrates the importance of subscribing to your newsletter in the first place.
- Subscribers are encouraged to sign up for friends and family
Create a helpful district newsletter that interests parents, donors, or parties outside the school community. For example, you might choose to publish a newsletter series to help parents manage their children’s digital safety. Then ask parents to recommend the newsletter to friends and family. Since this is a topic of concern to every parent, regardless of their child’s school, many will likely subscribe to your newsletter, especially if their school doesn’t cover the same content.
In general, be selective about this. Getting more people to subscribe to the newsletter in your area is great, but only if they really value receiving it. Make sure that when you encourage people on your email list to share your newsletter with others, they understand the value of doing so. For example, if you share upcoming regional basketball games and tournaments, there may be extended family members who would love to learn about them and therefore want to subscribe to your region’s newsletter.
Growing your email list for regional newsletters may sound very confusing and overwhelming, but with the BenchmarkONE K12 version, it’s a piece of cake.Use the tips mentioned above and see what our marketing automation and CRM software can do for you Schedule a live demo.
