How to Grow Your School District’s Email List with Online Forms

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Email is one of the best communication and marketing channels for K12 schools. It’s a great channel to reach parents share updates, important news, back-to-school protocols, and upcoming events. The channel boasts an incredible 36% open rate, which means when you send an email, there’s a high probability your message will reach home. 

However, before you can send an email to support parents, students, teaching staff, or donors, you need their email addresses. In this article, we’ll show you how to build your K12 email list and why doing so is extremely important.

Why You Should Build Your Email Newsletter List

A school’s email list degrades naturally. Parents will remain in your school’s email lists for as long as their kids are enrolled in your school. If the kid transfers or completes 12th grade, the parent will likely unsubscribe from your list or just completely lose interest. Not to mention, approximately 0.4% of parents unsubscribe from your list even when their kids are still enrolled.

Taking this into consideration, you can see that if you don’t double down on continually building your email list, eventually, you’ll have no one to send emails to. And if you don’t have an email list or it’s constricted, you will be unable to:

• Drive direct email marketing campaigns and raise funds for various programs
• Support students, parents, and teaching staff by keeping them as informed as possible
• Conduct surveys or research targeting non-teaching staff, teaching staff, or students 
• Run contests, organize sports events, games, and shows 

Why Web Forms are the Best for Growing a High-Quality List

One of the easiest ways to capture email addresses for your K12 newsletter is through forms on your existing website. There are various types of web forms you can use, such as:

• Opt-in forms: Used when you want to request parents register for specific events, competitions, or your school newsletter. 
• Pop-up forms: Place this type of form on pages or blog posts that receive the highest traffic. As the name suggests, the form pops up when the web visitor performs a predefined action such as showing an exit intent (moving their mouse to the upper right-hand corner, for example). Pop-up forms are good because they grab the reader’s attention and prompt them to take a specific action before you lose them altogether. 
• Landing page forms: These can be used in promotions and as lead magnets so you can direct visitors to these pages and grow your list in a more conscious way.

With BenchmarkONE K12 Edition, you won’t struggle to create any of these forms. We give you customizable templates which you can use as a springboard for ideas to design forms that grow your list significantly. 

When contacts start streaming in, we help you manage and segment them to ensure you’re sending the right message to the right group—no more looping grade eight parents into messages specific for grade one parents. 

Tips for Using Web Forms to Grow District Newsletter Email List

Here are some helpful tips for growing your K12 email list:

1. Maintain Consistent Branding

Whether you’re creating a pop-up or opt-in form, make sure the design matches your website’s color palette. This way, when you add the forms to the web pages, they won’t look out of place. Most marketing automation tools, like BenchmarkONE, offer you tons of templates to choose from that make assembling your school newsletter super easy. These templates help do most of the work for you, and you can swap in your school logo and colors, so your messaging is consistent with your school branding. 

1. Place the Forms Strategically on Your School’s Website

If you are using opt-in forms, add them in strategic places, such as landing pages, sidebar widgets, headers and footers, or at the end of a blog post. For pop-up forms, choose when you want them to appear, such as after a user has spent a specific amount of time on your page or when they show exit intent. 

1. Make Your Forms Mobile-Friendly

The majority of the parents, teachers, and non-teaching staff consume your school and district’s content on mobile phones. For this reason, make sure your forms are mobile-friendly so that it’s easy for them to fill out anywhere and anytime on their mobile device. The last thing you want is to lose potential subscribers because they couldn’t read or notice your sign-up form. 

1. Give Web Visitors Value in Exchange for their Email Address

If you are asking parents to sign up for the school’s newsletter, your content should be valuable to them. Don’t send too much content at once, and pay attention to which topics are resonating with readers the most.

It can be hard to get parents and other constituents to read your newsletters, so you want to make sure you’re doing yourself as many favors as possible. Only share key information and insight and do so in a way that showcases the importance of being subscribed to your newsletter in the first place. 

1. Encourage Subscribers to Enroll Friends and Family

Create a helpful district newsletter that parents, donors, or parties outside your school community will find interesting. For example, you could choose to deliver a newsletter series to help parents manage kids’ digital security. And then ask parents to recommend the newsletter to friends and family. Since this is a topic of concern for every parent, regardless of their kid’s school, a good number may subscribe to your newsletter, particularly if their school doesn’t cover the same. 

In general, be selective with how you go about this. Having more people subscribe to your district newsletter is great, but only if they’re going to truly value receiving it. Make sure that when you’re encouraging those on your email list to share the newsletter with others that they understand the value in doing so. For example, if you share upcoming district basketball games and tournaments, there are probably extended family members that would enjoy knowing about them and therefore want to be signed up for your district newsletter. 

Growing your district newsletter’s email list may sound super confusing and overwhelming, but with the BenchmarkONE K12 edition, it’s a cinch. Use the tips mentioned above and check out what our marketing automation and CRM software can do for you by scheduling a live demo. 

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