Easy to Read + Engaging Emails
We know that communication is critical to the success of a PTO’s endeavors and email is often the quickest way to reach parents. Unfortunately, it’s how EVERYONE is trying to contact your parents…our inboxes are full!
Even when you can get the parents to open you’re email, you’re competing for their attention with a million other distractions. How can you make sure that your email gets open and read?
Avoid Sending Basic Blocks of Text
If you’ve got a tool that allows you to break up the topics in your email with headers, separation lines and/or images, use it! This may help parents navigate the email quickly and stop to read the parts that pertain to them.
Big chunks of text all run together. Keep it short and pointed. Break it up as much as possible. Help readers want to read your message.
Create a Go-To Template
You may actually be able to train your parents to know how to find the information they need in your newsletters! This helps reduce the friction between seeing the email and opening the email.
Consider an outline that you follow each time you draft an email/newsletter: opening/welcome, information that needs a timely response, updates on recent events, contact link.
It’s not a one size fits all, but if you think about what information you’re relaying with your email and group it into a consistent flow from week to week or month to month, you might see increased engagement.
Respect Readers’ Time + Space
I get it, there are times when there are a lot of things going on and a lot of information that needs communicated out. As important as it all feels to your group, most parents just end up feeling burnt out on emails.
You’ve got to be the gatekeeper – decide how often emails will go out and create a communication plan based on this frequency. Take a look at your calendar and determine what will need to be emailed out, who will provide that information, and how you’ll keep emails/email length manageable for everyone. This will help set expectations with your teams and streamline your efforts.
How often have you received an email and thought I don’t have time to deal with that right now? Help ensure that PTO emails don’t carry that weight by sending them at a predictable frequency, limiting extra/one-off emails and editing to make sure they don’t get too long.
Why We Use Smore Newsletters
Our group found that the emails our school server allowed us to send were just big blocks of overwhelming text. Plus, it was hard to include links and images without everything looking out of line (and data). People were missing important information and saying “well no one told me!” But we did…we emailed it…so many times!
Easy to Use
Get started writing and formatting as quickly as you can push the little “plus” sign.
Smore offers all of these preformatted options so all you have to do to create an easy-to-read newsletter is point, click and type.
Easy to Send
Our administrative staff signs in and uploads our parent email lists at the start of each school year. When it’s time to send, we just click the share with email button, select the mailing list (or you can paste in email addresses) and send.
Personally, I love to set this all up and then use the scheduled send so people get it around 8 am or 2 pm (it coordinates well with our drop off and pick up schedule so I know they’ll be in their car looking at their phones).
Navigation Menu
Each time you create a “title” in the body of your newsletter, Smore will add it to the navigation menu that shows at the top left of the newsletter when readers click in. This makes it easy for readers to see an outline of the email and click into the topics that pertain to them. So if you’re not interested in the Mother-Son Outing, you can skip over it!
Create a Template
It’s easy to create a consistent and professional feel by selecting one of their formats, backgrounds and text options and then using that combination each time you send an email.
Multiple Ways to Share and Archive
We like to keep an “archive” of our past newsletters on our PTO and School website to make it easy for everyone to find what they need. Smore provides links to share on socials, link to in websites or even embed.
*Not an affiliate link, just love the site!