Wayne State University
Warrior strong
Login
Search
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Resources

Guide: Sending Email Newsletters

Tutorials

Our CMS training course offers technical tutorials for creating and sending your email newsletter.

Web training

Newsletter editors should complete CMS and web accessibility training (items one and two) prior to gaining access to the newsletter. Upon completion of the training, please contact clas@wayne.edu for access.

Inspiration

For inspiration and ideas, here are some newsletters from other departments.

Your email newsletter editor toolbox

The University Editorial Style Guide provides formatting and standards for all university communication. We highly recommend installing Grammarly (spelling and grammar checker) to assist you with editing your newsletter and articles.

A quick guide to news and spotlights explains what's a new vs. spotlight article, along with samples, suggestions, and tips.

Use our free graphic design software, Canva, for creating graphics or editing pictures to include in your newsletter. Contact clas@wayne.edu to request access for your department.

Overview

Sending your newsletter

If you're starting to prepare for your newsletter but are not yet ready to publish, see preparing your email newsletter.

  1. Before you compose a newsletter, remember that the content (stories, articles, links) must already exist on your department website or another web page (e.g., link to a news article). You'll need to decide if these articles will be news or spotlights and then add them to your department website, making a note of the link for each article to include in the email newsletter.
  2. Follow the steps for composing and sending an email newsletter using the CMS tool.
  3. Once your newsletter is composed and ready, be sure to have a second or third pair of eyes review it for grammar, spelling, correct links, and appropriate picture/image sizing and quality.
  4. If the newsletter is being distributed to alumni, contact Hannah Olszewski to schedule email delivery via our Philanthropy and Alumni Relations database. ⚠️ Important: Please do not send alumni newsletters using your own email list.

    If the newsletter is going to a non-alumni audience, i.e. community, students, faculty, etc., you can use a listserv to distribute the email.

Once your newsletter is sent, Hannah Olszewski will be able to provide an analytics report (see example) detailing insights and performance metrics such as opens, clicks, etc.

Preparing your email newsletter

The why

  • Newsletters are a great way to engage alumni and other audiences with what you're doing and how they can be a part of that
  • Engaging alumni helps with fundraising and volunteering, as well as hiring and mentoring opportunities for students
  • Email newsletters, in particular, have several advantages over paper newsletters:
    • Real-time analytics such as number of opens, clicks, demographics, what content performed best, etc.
    • More efficient to produce by using email templates, your current website, and the university's master alumni database
    • More cost-efficient: No paper, packaging, or postage required
    • Web-formatted content can be compiled gradually (throughout the year) and repurposed several times over as promotional content for your department via websites and social media

Where to begin

1. Set a publishing date.

Set an annual date that your department will publish its newsletter, e.g., beginning of October. This will allow you to rally the troops and resources needed, as well as think about content that you'll want to share.

2. Post stories throughout the year.

Email newsletters are essentially a compilation of existing articles (news and spotlights) that are already on your website. Though you will likely add articles specifically for the newsletter during publishing time, make it a practice to publish articles throughout the year. By doing this, you'll have several pieces of content to choose from come publishing time.

3. Find at least four stories.

Your email newsletter should have a minimum of four stories that are either news or spotlights. It's preferable to curate more than four stories so that your newsletter looks as strong as it can be, but no less than four. Remember that CLAS marketing (e.g., News Center) and university editorial (e.g., Today@Wayne) teams produce various stories for the departments throughout the year. This existing content can be repurposed for your newsletter.

4. Use a content template.

While the categories or sections of email newsletters will vary from department to department (based on what you requested), here's a beginner template to identify what content to feature.

⚠️ Important

  • While highlighting faculty news/achievements is significant, it's important to put more emphasis on students and alumni to help encourage support.
  • When highlighting research, always remember the humanity angle: What does it mean and why does it matter? Example: Taking it to the streets: Fighting urban diabetes and obesity.

What faculty are saying about email newsletters

"The Department of Political Science has found the assistance provided by Hannah Olszewski in producing an email newsletter to be invaluable. This mode of distributing information about the department, its faculty and students, and major activities and developments provides extensive contact with alumni and is both inexpensive and efficient. It is highly recommended."

Daniel S. Geller, professor and chair, Department of Political Science

"In 2020, for the first time, the Junior Year in Munich program opted to send our annual alumni newsletter via email. In doing so, we were able to track how many readers we had, and which stories were the most popular, using the heat map analytics. This will help us in thinking about what kind of content to include in future editions. We are also able to showcase each story individually from the newsletter throughout the year, which has been helpful for our social media promotion and engagement. Switching to an online newsletter provided multiple benefits to better understand our reach and continue to connect with our alumni!"

Jackie Smith, program coordinator, Junior Year in Munich

"The analytics associated with the electronic newsletter make it easy to see the effectiveness of our outreach and which stories alumni are interested in reading."

Matthew J. Allen, professor and chair, Department of Chemistry

"Environment and cost paperless newsletters are better for the planet. They are probably also lower cost to produce! (Color printing ain't cheap or convenient, in my limited experience). Archiving it's easier to retain and access older editions when stored electronically. Editing and content richness with electronic format, you can embed hyperlinks and enrich your material in other ways (maybe even embed a video!?). Analytics open rates, clickthroughs, etc. give you real feedback on what you put out there. With a "snail mail" delivery, one doesn't know whether it was delivered, whether or how it was read, so it's less gratifying and more detached from any sense of actual engagement with your audience. Analytic reports, beyond simply reminding you that you actually have an active and receptive audience (which is a good reminder!), also give you concrete data to make better-informed decisions about the sort of content your audience is interested in, guiding future content planning. It could also inform discussions about possible changes to the frequency with which the newsletter is delivered, etc."

Vanessa DeGifis, Ph.D., chair of Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures

"I think that sending it out in email format helps us to see not only how many alumni we're reaching but also what content they are interested in reading on the heat map. It has also helped me to work with you and Lisa to ensure our alumni profiles are being updated and that we're reaching as many alumni as possible."

Jackie Baldyga, facility coordinator II, Department of Chemistry

"Our digital newsletter was easy to compile and looked professional and dynamic. It allowed us to reach alumni who hadn't heard from us in years and also allowed us to feature the exciting work that our students and colleagues are doing. I also loved that we could work on stories over the course of a semester, and then assemble them into a digital newsletter whenever we were ready: Stories did double-duty as current events and then later as part of a more unitary narrative."

Elena Past, professor of Italian, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures