E-Mail Newsletter

[Chris_Hofer]

Since many of our instructors have been on Summer break, I would like to send out an e-mail relatively soon with a brief summary on what they may have missed ... especially if they haven't been checking their e-mails or have not logged in to our instance of Canvas.  (To provide some background, we typically use either e-mail or the Canvas dashboard to communicate information to instructors.)  I thought it would be nice if I could find some kind of e-mail template on the Internet that I could use inside of an Outlook e-mail (and then edit as necessary).  I'm not marking this as a question but rather a discussion since there may be multiple answers...but do you use any kind of e-mail templates when communicating information?  Are there any good (and free) sites that have templates available to use?  And how do you bring these templates into an e-mail message via Outlook?  (I've never done that before...shocker!)  Just looking for something that looks nice and would be of interest for our instructor to read through.

[JanineJones]

I'm getting ready to do the same thing. I have been on the look-out to find a strong way to get messages out to our  users. We are in the process of streamlining how to best communicate for our district, so for now, emails that get forwarded and an internal website have been my main points of communication.

The first obstacle for me was getting my content forwarded, and the next was getting users to actually read it. My last messaging was a few weeks before school ended, but was by far the best received. For reference, it was the second time I had used this format.

I used Smore, which is free and after 50 views (I think) I started to get the analytics on the "flyer" I created. I'd say that the reviews were really positive, and for the time of year I was pretty impressed by the views it was getting. Smore made it really easy to make clear messaging and the templates look great.

We posted a link to the flyer on our internal site, and used a screen shot of the flyer, along with the link in the email. I liked the simplicity, and that the email could be quickly scanned for content then forwarded, and users following the link would give me the data.

Here is a link to the flyer

Although this worked well, I have only created a few flyers and I know that at some point I would need to pay to continue to use it. I'm curious to see what everyone else has been using, Smore is easy to use, but I'm not in love with it or anything.

[mmitchell]

Janine,

Smore could have saved me so much time. Thanks for sharing!

We send out a faculty newsletter, but it's something I built and designed manually. I'll have to check out Smore to see how it handles adding images and responsive CSS.

[Chris_Hofer]

JanineJones​...

What's the difference between signing up (free account) and the paid version of Smore that I see on the website you've given above?

[snugent]

Hi Chris

We did an email newsletter for another project way back when. If you have server access and use Outlook and Internet Explorer, you can send out an email newsletter with the steps below. It's about the only thing IE is useful for anymore. :smileygrin:

1. Create your newsletter page and post it on the server. Keep it simple since some email clients may not like advanced CSS.
2. In Internet Explorer go to your page and from the File menu go to File > Page by Email.
3. Outlook will display with your "page" as an email message ready to send.

[Chris_Hofer]

In my blog posting from October 12th, I had written about creating a newsletter from scratch inside of Outlook using tables.  I think I've found an easier way to do this.  I've posted a new comment here if you'd like to take a look:

Creating an E-mail Newsletter

[ColinMurtaugh]

FWIW, we use MailChimp (http://www.mailchimp.com) to send these kinds of messages.  Aside from making it very easy to create professional-looking email content, it has a lot of other features that we like, such as handling subscribe/unsubscribe requests from users, and analytics (e.g. tracking how many people opened the email).  We have a free-tier account which lets us have up to 2000 subscribers and 12,000 messages/month.

--Colin

[Chris_Hofer]

50581462​...

When you send a newsletter through MailChimp, do you have to input all e-mail addresses for each of your instructors that you want it to be sent to?  We have a single e-mail address that our IT department set up for all our full-time faculty which we can use to send a mass e-mail message/newsletter.  Would that work with MailChimp?

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi 50581462​...

So I've still been using MS Publisher, but I'm getting frustrated with the way it displays in Outlook.  So, I asked my supervisor if it was ok to investigate things like MailChimp.  I'm not sure if you had a chance to see my question from last November.  What are your thoughts on using a single e-mail address in MailChimp to distribute to many faculty?