Newsletter—product marketing & thought leadership
Another project I helped Ready Education with was their newsletter. They already had a Product Update email that was being sent sporadically, but it focused solely on new functionality that had been added to the platform and the company found that this format wasn't driving enough engagement.
Since there wasn’t a dedicated marketing team at the time, the product team took the lead for this first iteration of a more regular content strategy.
Originally,
the click-through rate was
25%
and the open rate was
1.2%
Objectives & Strategy
The company had decided they wanted a dual purpose newsletter that could drive feature awareness as well as brand engagement for our existing customers and that could potentially reach —and be relevant to—prospects.
We redesigned the newsletter to a format that would:
Update the customers about what the product team was up to in terms of the platform itself;
Curate higher-education industry news that were useful for student engagement;
Showcase our partner-customers when they were featured in the news, and;
Promote Ready Education’s own blog content.
The newsletter was planned to be quarterly, to follow the higher-education student lifecycle and address timely topics and trends.
Updated template
March 2020 —COVID-19 edition
The updated template showed to be flexible enough to accommodate different key focuses. For example, for March 2020, it made sense to replace the Blog section with pandemic-related resources to help institutions navigate the new realities of an online-only campus.
Highlight Ready Education’s COVID-19 webinars helped institutions build student-facing content easily to get them prepared for online classrooms and the move to online. Students were more aware of next steps.
Results
The newsletter quickly saw much better engagement and click-through and even allowed the Campus Success team to upgrade 3 customers with add-on features on the platform.