Newsletter guidance

Forward planning and choosing topics

Your first step should be to map out ideas, themes and topics for each of your newsletters to reflect upcoming key University touchpoints relevant to you. These could be:

• High-profile events.
• Awards.
• Campaigns and awareness days.
• Breakthroughs.
• Staff and rankings updates.

You should also leave room for ad-hoc and urgent topics that may arise. A content calendar is a helpful tool when planning your newsletter schedule, as is identifying and building a network of stakeholders and contributors.

As well as topic, you should have a clear idea of what you want the audience to do, and therefore what your CTA should be.

Tone of voice

Now you’ve got an idea of what you’ll be writing about, it’s time to refine how you’ll write. Tone of voice is audience dependant, but there are rules we should follow as an organisation to build brand credibility and maintain our audiences’ trust (and interest) in what we say.  These can be broken down as follows:

We write with confidence

• We lead with the benefit to the reader to inspire their confidence, and we focus on what we do and not what we try to do.

We write with simplicity

• We keep our writing simple and unstuffy, using Plain English and avoiding jargon, repetition, idioms and acronyms.

We write with integrity

• We build trust by backing up our claims and effective signposting, through knowledge of who we are as an institution and through sticking to our values.

We provide more in-depth tone of voice guidance on our dedicated webpage, so please familiarise yourself with it.

Tone of voice guidance

Engaging your audience

In our digital age, we have very little time to really capture someone’s attention. For this reason, your subject line, preview text (this is what appears in your inbox after the subject line), and intro paragraph do a lot of work to keep a person engaged. Here’s how you can help maximise their impact:

Subject line

• Inboxes get full, so be concise.
• Aim for under 70 characters so it displays fully on mobile sites.
• Be authentic, don’t keep people guessing.

Preview text

• It can be tempting to skip this – but don’t.
• The preview text should build on your subject line, offering additional information about what your audience can expect from the newsletter.
• Aim for about 90 characters at the very most.

Intro paragraph

• An effective introduction is warm, short and sets out in full the main point(s) of your newsletter while also explaining why it matters to your audience, i.e. the benefit to them of subscribing and engaging.

Once you’re happy with your subject line, preview text and intro paragraph, make sure the rest of your newsletter content is easy to read and absorb.

Breaking up the text

• Headings and lists make your content more digestible and impactful, are important for screen readers and are used to scan and navigate a page. So be generous with them; they should be descriptive and explain what the following paragraph will say.
• If your content is effectively itemisation, then consider breaking it up into a list. Lists make it easier to scan for key information. Capitalise the first word in each point and keep the information succinct.

Accessible copywriting gudiance

Graphics and images

The human brain processes images 60,000 times far faster than it processes text, so accessible graphics and images are another effective way of keeping your audience on the page.

• Your images should serve a purpose. Choose ones that are relevant to your content and convey some meaning.
• Use high-quality images. Low-resolution images will put people off reading our content (and our brand). Canto is our official media library and houses a range of quality images and graphics.
• Don’t use too many images as this can be distracting and come across as unprofessional. The ideal image-text ratio is 30 per cent to 70 per cent.
• Always add alternative text (alt text) to your images. This is important for accessibility because screen readers will be able to say what the image is, and alt text will show up even when an image doesn’t.

Design toolkit

Canto hub

Signposting

We can guide our readers, maintain their attention and earn their trust through effective signposting.

• Use clear, descriptive links to guide readers and help them take action.
• Keep newsletter content brief and link to fuller information where needed (e.g. a short staff bio with a link to the full profile).
• Always use descriptive link text so readers know what will happen (e.g. 'Book an appointment' rather than 'Click here').
• Include links to relevant support services when covering sensitive topics.

Accessible copywriting guidance

Using analytics

Analytics will tell you how well your newsletter has performed across a number of different metrics. It’s worth paying attention to the ones outlined below, because they are a useful indicator of changes you can make to improve performance.

• Check how many recipients have opened your newsletter.
• Check the number of clicks on the links you provided

A couple of factors you can change to improve performance are as follows:

• The time you send the newsletter. Some platforms offer pointers on this so keep an eye out for those.
• The frequency which you’re sending your newsletters - is it too often or not often enough?
• The topics you’re covering and how they link to your audience’s needs and interests.