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Mastering Newsletters for Effective Communication [Edlio Webinar]

Added Feb 23, 2025 •

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Want to strengthen your school community connections? Watch this webinar and discover how Edlio's Newsletters can help you build stronger communication with families and staff. In this webinar, you'll learn: - Best practices for crafting engaging and informative newsletters. - Strategies for sharing essential updates and celebrating school successes. - How to easily schedule and deliver your newsletter through Edlio. Explore content ideas to enhance your communication: - Principal/Superintendent messages - Upcoming events and important dates - Student and staff spotlights - Program highlights and achievements - Volunteer opportunities - Community partnerships

Show Transcript

hello and welcome to today's webinar on mastering newsletters for effective communication my name is Taylor and I am a trainer here with Ed Leo and I'm going to lead you through this short and sweet newsletter where we are going to cover all things news letters so let's go ahead and get started if you're looking to strengthen your school Community connections Ed Leo's free newsletter feature is really helpful and helping you build stronger communication with families and staff so in this webinar we are going to go over best practices for engaging crafty um and informative newsletters I'll share with you some strategies for sharing essential updates and school successes and highlights are different newsletter layouts and how you can easily schedule and deliver your newsletter through edlio including building your contact lists of who of course you want to be at the receiving end of those newsletters we'll go ahead and make a simple newsletter exploring content ideas to share via newsletters such as principal or superintendent messages upcoming events and important dates you might want to use newsletters to highlight student and staff spotlights or program highlights and achievements any volunteer opportunities or calls for Action Community Partnerships that you want folks to know about again this is going straight to your school communities inbox so we have um a lot of possibilities to go ahead and share information there Beyond just on our homepage and website a few best practices I want to go over before we build our newsletter and our contact list is um some quick overview so you want to be mindful of anti-spam laws in your area when you're crafting your newsletter um we again have a lot of um layout options to help you build your newsletter but I'm going to go ahead and steer away um from words that is going to end up in folks spam uh inbox or otherwise get blocked so I'm writing in all caps um including the word free um in too many areas including the subject line are things that could uh land your newsletter in the spam inbox so you want to go ahead um and be a little bit mindful of those and especially uh Billy galy of your know your audience when do do folks um check their inboxes you can go ahead and send or schedule thoughtfully for a good hour for the newsletter to end up in folks inboxes um statistic basically that's usually the morning when folks are checking their inboxes or um just after dinner time could be another good time for your school now we're going to be able to upload our contact list so all the folks that you want to reach with your newsletters as well as with the free edlio emailing tool if you need any help uploading those lists we'll go over it in just a moment but you can always reach out to client success at client success edlio.com now as we're going see in our draft newsletter that we are going to compose is that um your uh audience is going to be able to unsubscribe and manage their emails uh preferences directly it's going to be added directly in their inbox is going to be added automatically by the edlio newsletter uh layout Builder so you don't have to worry about that and should a parent or School Community member go ahead and unsubscribe that's going to automatically be updated in your contact list for for you so you're just going to focus on composing effective email and newsletters that we will go over today without having to spend the energy on managing on subscriptions um you are going to uh automatically have those folks um be unsubscribed from your contact list and we're even going to be able to see the delivery report how we can check um you know that our newsletter got to the right folks and all of that so with that let's go ahead and get into our dashboard where I am going to go ahead and create my newsletter oh alright so here we are in my dashboard I am in my uh demo site School let's go ahead and uh hop over to our homepage clicking there will take you to your home page if you're live and I just want to note that we're going to be able to easily pull all of the news that we've done the hard work in creating here as well as all of our calendar events easily on to our newsletter so that's the layout I'm going to show you today if you have any questions on how to add news and calendar events um I'm going to share with you an opportunity to join us live to go ahead and touch up on those skills you can also always head to the help center and check out our previously recorded and live webinars just like this 1 going over these features specific deep Dives again at help.edu we want to again pull those news and calendars that we've already done the hard work of creating to post to post on our website to pull into our newsletter easily with as minimal work on our end is web admin as possible to land in folks inboxes so we're going to go to our hamburger menu down to mass communication and to newsletters when we first come into newsletters we are going to receive a repository of all the newsletters that we have sent here we're going to be able to see at a glance some of our report staffs or uh stats or if our newsletters are still in draft mode so I'm going to be able to see every newsletter that I've sent and come back here to check out our delivery report um we want to make sure that you know this is not a good sign of course I'm using a demo uh contact list so I'm not worried about this status but if this was a real email I would want to make sure more than 75% um of my recipients are not not receiving this email in other words only a quarter of folks are receiving this we would want to go in and check about um who is potentially unsubscribed or we don't have up-to-date contact info and we'll go ahead and check that after we go ahead and create a newsletter in the top right we're going to click new newsletter and we're going to see those layout options that I mentioned so again we have um some basic layouts here we just have 1 solid text box to create um a uh email esque newsletter for folks here we have some text box with some images so the gray is image do I want 1 large image to side by side images um do I want to side by side text blocks to describe those images or a solid layout same down here but we have um some of those side columns now as I mentioned we're going to check out the news and events newsletter because we've already done all that work of adding news to our website and events to our calendars and I'm going to be able to capitalize off that and pull all of that into my newsletter so that if folks aren't heading to my website they can definitely get these news in their inbox so we're going to go ahead and continue and now we're going to start building this newsletter so on this newsletter you'll notice I have 4 text boxes so I'm going to go ahead and drop some text into each of those text box now you'll notice that the text box here is a little bit simpler than with um my page block or my news block I can go ahead and source code if you're familiar with code you can go ahead and uh give folks a link so if I had a sign up for winter wonderland I would go ahead and add that sentence in here to indicate the hyperlink Maybe sign up today and go ahead and drop that sign up link all right let's go ahead and drop messages into our other 3 boxes knowing again we can add text links and we can go ahead and play around with the code if we're familiar but I'm not going to be able to at specific media I could of course hyperlink a video or hyperlink um to another place in my website like maybe my photo album or video gallery but if you're looking for a specific image to be on your newsletter you might want to go ahead and scroll down to change layout and choose again 1 of these layout options that give you the ability to add that highlighted photo all right so go ahead and add our third and fourth texts here all right so now I'm going to go ahead and capitalize off of all of those events and news I already have posted on my website here we're going to be able to add events not just from our homepage calendar but any additional calendars you have added again you can learn how to do this in 1 of our CMS study halls or in any of our help center articles or uh pre-recorded webinars we're going to be able to go ahead and choose any of those upcoming events for our winter and spring newsletter that we're building so again we can go ahead and add all of those events that are going to be relevant and then we can go ahead and add more news stories here so I can come and add news again from my homepage news and announcements or any of my secondary news categories that I might have I want to go ahead and add all of those news that are relevant to this time of year maybe the open house is what we're really pushing I'm going to pull that to the top I'm going to be able to do that you can add as many news articles as you want so you can see if these are relevant to my time of your I can go ahead and select those um of course it's going to uh expand your newsletter so you want to think about adding a good number of information um not necessarily overwhelming folks you can always again schedule newsletter to go out um next month to go ahead and include um those additional stories so that your newsletter is not too long um but not too much of a best practice here again add what's going to be relevant to your school community when I've added all of the information I'm going to come up to preview newsletter and it's going to show me what that newsletter looks like on a phone so I can make sure again I can folks scroll it in a manageable time are they getting um all of the important information and then what it looks like on a desktop maybe I want to go ahead and um uh even out the symmetry of this post maybe I want to uh cut some words from spring into learning or expand Teacher Appreciation Week same with my text box up here I can go ahead and work on that Symmetry and then as I mentioned Peaks folks are going to be able to go ahead and unsubscribe or manage their email preferences from their inbox when we're ready let's go to return to message I'll maybe choose to make any and it's to that text to go ahead um make my newsletter as symmetrical as possible if I want to save and exit I'll always be able to come back uh to this draft and send later or I can continue to send now now if this is your first time creating a newsletter you're going to have to manage senders and it will likely will have asked you to do this even before you get to this screen what is managed centers mean it wants you to go ahead and edit your sender so as an admin you're going to be able to send the newsletter as yourself or as the school do you want this to send as your District name or your school's name do you want it to send as your principal's name your superintendent's name what do you want that from email um to list there so that this is a recognizable Center and folks open your email then who are we sending to well here I'm going to have all of my contact list so let's go ahead and save our draft and come and go ahead and build our contact lists otherwise known as the people that we're sending this email to so we have our email saved as a draft I'm going to come in to mass communication and contact lists here I'm going to say 2 types of contact lists I'm going to see my um schoolwide contact list which can be a custom or a data file contact us we'll go over that in just a moment or I can see teacher specific contact lists whether from personal Pages AKA teacher pages or classes um if you recall from teacher page trainings and information folks are going to be able to subscribe to teacher pages or to individual classes that teachers post on their teacher page is building them a subscription list that they will then be able to use the same newsletter feature as we have learned it um up until now they'll be able to send to those subscription lists so a teacher can make a classroom spoke focused newsletter and send it to their parents a a teacher doesn't have to wait on those folks to subscribe they can also come edit their contact lists just as we are doing right now um for any future or are further information on teacher lists we have again um some really awesome study hall opportunities and resources on our help center helped at edlio.com so you can check those out if you want to learn a little bit more about uh teacher accounts and teach Pages again we'll focus on those schoolwide contact lists so data file or custom if I come to create a new list it will ask me to choose between those a custom contact list is what we'll be doing today I can simply add bulk or individually add contacts um through a CSV file so you can just pull everyone from a spreadsheet from your sis however you have those contacts add them to our formatted CSV file and then bulk upload them more add them individually or you can do a data file sync contact list this is going to sync your contacts from your sis if you have any questions about this you can come to uh click on this hyperlink learn a little bit more and reach out to client success if you need any assistance so we could create a new list from that button we just saw or I can go ahead and edit an existing list simply by clicking the List's name now here I'm going to see the type of list that I have are they those custom lists are they data are they from personal pages and how many subscribers do those teachers have all right so um we want to go ahead and edit our parents Guardians list so I can go ahead and click right here and here I can see all of the folks in my parent Guardian list I'm going to go ahead and add single contacts if I want or again add in bulk downloading that CSV template dropping all your parents' information you're going to have columns to add their phone numbers you can add that if you want to explore our uh mass communication voice text email package but if you just plan on sending emails just uh adding their emails will suffice and then once you uh go ahead and upload that here it will bulk upload this parents and Guardians list so then I can come back to mass communication and newsletters to go ahead and send out my draft so let's go ahead and click on our draft to edit 3 dots always lets us edit as well now I want to go ahead um and come down to continue and send this newsletter out so I'm going to go ahead and pull that contact list maybe I have a few different contact lists that I want to um add I can add as many as I want I could even add an email address on its own let's go ahead and give this a subject line the best practice here is short and sweet 2 word subject lines get the highest open rates statistically so let's go ahead and and give that a short headline and decide to send now or send later send later is great to go go ahead and economize your time as a web admin creating multiple um you know pieces of content in the same settings so I can go ahead and not only schedule my newsletters but also when my news is going to post um I can also go ahead and send later so that I sent it a good time for this newsletter to land and folks is inbox in the chances that it's going to be read so we could say I'm going to send tomorrow at 8 AM because that is when folks um are going to likely see this and be able to open it have time to read it or whatever the time may be lastly this button allow newsletter to be viewed publicly on our website is a really awesome tool because this is going to give the newsletter a UR L I'll then be able to pull that URL and include it as a news item on my um on my homepage or maybe I want to create a friendly URL AKA redirects those can be found in page management and redirects creating a very short URL that's easy to share by word of mouth or written form for folks to go ahead and have access to that newsletter maybe I want to create a page as a newsletter archive and go ahead and Link all my previous newsletters um both in PDF form as well as link form so folse are going to have access to that lot of different options here by clicking this um box we're going to be able to get that URL and will always be able to unpublish that URL pulling it off the web should we want in the future all right so we can let's go ahead and send now so we can say our delivery ability report let's go and send now and our winter newsletter was successfully sent all right so it you'll notice it changed the name of the subject to the same subject line as that uh period in folks is Inbox allowing you to know um you know okay which newsletter do I want to check the report this had 8 of 9 recipients received this newsletter so what happened with those recipients I'm going to come to my 3 dots and go ahead and click the report to view I have delivered and unsub described so I might have had some folks on this um list that had previously unsubscribed here is how they're going to show up versus all the folks that have delivered as time goes by I can see our feet folks this newsletter are they clicking on any of the links and if I have any clicks I'm going to have a click map down here that's showing them which links they clicked on so so you'll get all of that information if you have any um undeliverable email addresses you'll be able to see that here too I want to review the newsletter to say okay this got a lot of opens um I don't remember quite what I wrote you can click here to go ahead and review and if you want that URL you can click public view here and we're going to see our newsletter on the web that's how it looks on the web or back from my newsletter home I can always grab that URL over here public view again that will give me that URL um so we see a of those um contacts in my contact list did not work out um we've you know always your delivery reports are going to be better once you give it some time after delivering so you can see those open rates and click rates and now that it's tried to send to all of those email addresses it's going to tell me um probably that many are not deliverable uh because those are just demo emails all right if we want to pull that URL off the web okay we no longer want that page to be visible to folks making private then uh takes down that URL if I want to download the report to share with my school leadership my board I'm able to do that I'm always able to make that link public again so unpublishing it was not um uh you know a permanent action there now the last thing I want to show you is a few other ways that you might um use your contact lists and build your contact lists so 1 is to go ahead and um come down here to page management and over to homepage widgets and um using homepage widgets to build your contact list so you can see here I have a form widget that is already drawn onto my page scroll down onto my homepage I'm going to see that it's asking me if I want to join Whitney career peps newsletter so I can go ahead and give my first name last name email and phone and I have to to give my first name and email address in order to sign up to the newsletter so how can you create this on your own homepage again you're going to go ahead and put a form widget somewhere on your homepage do you want it to be towards the top towards the bottom what do you want that title to be is this to fill your newsletter contact list is this to fill your volunteer contact list to your PTA booster club whatever contact list you're trying to fill you can go ahead and edit your title indicate the fields that you're going to display and what you're going to require that folks fill out in order to submit um their contact to your contact list and then importantly what contact list you want anyone who fills that out to go to so in my case join our newsletter when I fill out my name right here now I'm effectively subscribed to the newsletter demo text list until I manage my own preferences and unsubscribe or until you go to that contact list as a web admin and delete me you can see the behavior of the widget how do you want it to work what colors do you want um it to to appear as making sure to save your changes when you're done um and it's going to give you a green saved when it's saved successfully we of course did not choose our contact list so this was not saved successfully um so we'll go ahead and delete that and even when you delete things we want to go ahead and save changes and uh wait for it that as saved confirmation at the top here now the last tip that I want to give is that you don't have to use contact lists only for email uh for newsletters you can also send emails you're going to see that under mass communication and um uh broadcasts here on your screen it might say push and social this is the same area this is going to allow us to come and add a new message and instead of creating a whole um newsletter I can simply create an email I can also push to my social medias um in 1 message draft here and if I have text and Voice or the school news app this is a free app that will allow families to receive a push notification I can go ahead and select those channels too I'll give a message name um just a title my message report and then I'll go ahead and continue and again draft the message for the channels that I have selected um being able to even add additional translations so I can write my original email in English and choose up to 3 additional languages that are relevant for my school Community to be added to this email that will be automatically added to uh text to speech voicemails voice messages if you have voice and your post notification so again you can go go ahead and continue and and choose your contact list to receive this email and that's also going to be feature available to you when you create a news item to go ahead and push that news item not only to your homepage but also to focuses inboxes and tear social media so those are just a few ways to build your contact lists allow people to opt into communication from your school and different ways that you can use that contact list that you've built all right with that we have gone over all of the content for our session today I want to encourage you to come to an up uh upcoming study hall session um these you are going to be able to um focus on other skills and features of the CMS you can see we have uh broken them into 6 different topics so we'd love to see you there and if you have any questions including if you want a direct link to those study halls reach out to us at client success at edlio.com and we're happy to help you with any of your CMS needs thanks so much and I hope you have a great time sending newsletters

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