Newsletters can be an effective way of sharing all kinds of information with your audience, from news and events to stories and profiles. If your department or office has a newsletter, apply these best practices to ensure you’re sticking to campus brand and accessibility guidelines, as well as delivering a useful and compelling message to your audience’s inboxes.

Strategy

  • Determine your primary audience and what your goals are for the newsletter. These factors should influence what you include in the newsletter, as well as its frequency. For example:
    • Newsletter — from the CAMS department
    • Primary audience — Cinema and Media Studies majors + students who have enrolled in CAMS classes in the past. 
    • Goals — Increase awareness of CAMS-related events and programs, share career resources, and share asks for help with projects. 
  • Survey your primary audience to get a sense of what they’d like to hear from your department and how frequently, and any feedback they have on your office’s current communications. 
  • Determine newsletter frequency and be consistent in timing your sends. Keep in mind that more frequently than once a month is a big time commitment, and even quarterly might be fine depending on your goals.
  • Keep a content calendar for each newsletter to track what you’ve covered and plan what you need to cover in future issues.

Appearance

  • Give your newsletter a distinctive feel within campus brand parameters. Observe campus brand guidelines in use of color, fonts, graphic elements and word marks.
  • Ensure all newsletter content meets digital accessibility standards.
  • Include alt text for images. It is helpful for those that use screen readers or if images don’t load. Alt text should provide a description of what is in the image, and include important information like times or dates that are included in the graphic.
  • Add blank space to enhance readability. Use padding tools to add 10-20 points of padding between text/image blocks. Look for a “layout settings” or similar section when you click on the text/image block you wish to edit.
  • Use legible typography. Use a minimum of 14-point font size. Left-aligned text reads more easily than center-aligned text.

Content

  • Keep your subject line short and ideally, include a call to action. Aim for about 40 characters (or 5-7 words). Longer subject lines run the risk of being cut off by email servers. 
  • Arrange your newsletter so your audience doesn’t have to scroll through it to find the most important information.
  • Limit the number of content items and overall length. There is only so much newsletter your reader is going to be willing to parse. Keep text in the body of the newsletter brief, and link out to longer articles as needed.
  • Gmail will automatically “clip” newsletters with too much text/imagery. Clipping will hide the bottom portion of your email in a recipient’s inbox and they will have to click a link to view the full email in a separate tab. Avoid clipping by writing concisely and limiting the number of images in your newsletter. Send tests of your newsletter to yourself in Gmail to confirm clipping will not occur.
  • Avoid phrases like “Read more” and “Click here” for hyperlinks. They don’t meet accessibility standards. Instead, include hyperlinks with descriptive text, so that the reader knows what the link will take them to.
  • Have themed sections, e.g., “News,” “Upcoming Events” as part of your newsletter template.

Preparing to send

  • Put together a pre-send checklist. Outline the steps in the review/approval process before you hit the send button.
  • Send a test to yourself every time you make edits to an email draft. Emails can’t be edited once they’ve been deployed, so make sure you review multiple times until the content is perfect.
  • Make sure that reviewers aren’t just looking at the written copy. Confirm that links work, images are displaying correctly, and that there are no other formatting issues.
  • Review the draft on multiple devices. Content may display differently by device (desktop vs. mobile) and by email platform (Gmail vs. Apple Mail, etc.). This review will help to make sure your formatting remains consistent.

For more information about what email platforms are supported by the College, see the Newsletters and HTML Emails page.