Crucial Communication or Paper Planes? Use email instead.
We all know how crucial communication home to parents is for the success of our schools. Schools rely on parent support for teacher help, supervision on trips, fundraising, organising their own children to have the right equipment for activities, feedback on initiatives, school fees, overdue library books ……the list goes on. It’s easy to justify the reams of notices that are sent home to keep parents in the loop with what is happening.
It’s the volume, cost and time involved in collating and distributing paper based notices that cause schools a real headache and even if your school is diligent at getting notices out, how can you ensure that parents are reading them? How do we know that important notice about tomorrow’s parent teacher interviews hasn’t been used as a paper plane on the way home, marinaded with wet socks in the bottom of a child’s bag or thrown in the bin with the remnants of their school lunches? Usually we only find this out when upset parents blame the school for poor communication or a lack of response to a request sent home makes it obvious.
Sending notices directly to a parent’s email inbox automatically solves some of these issues, using the unique features of Maxmail’s email platform gets around the rest.
These days parents use email every day and organise their activities at both home and work electronically. Shared diaries, email folders, sms and calendar reminders keep many busy parents in line. Paper records are cumbersome and easily get misplaced.
Imagine:
• Sending professionally branded, relevant and personalised information out to parents in a timely manner, via email – enabling parents to be better informed and more involved in their children’s school lives
• Slashing the cost and manual admin work associated with sending notices out
• Being able to gauge how many parents have opened and read your newsletters
Maxmail makes communicating with your students and their families easy. Using the email template builder you can upload images and branding from your existing website or even a word document. Capturing and managing email addresses is also easy, either upload lists in a CSV file or you can build an online form in Maxmail and get parents to register for email communication, the information they key in will go straight to Maxmail. All of this can be done without a huge input from your web provider. You don’t even need to have anyone on your staff that’s really tech savvy in order to use Maxmail.
8 great reasons for your school to use Maxmail
1. Easily managed mailing groups
By managing your mailing lists inside Maxmail, email communication can be sent home easily to targeted groups e.g. whole school, junior/middle/senior school, by class, absentees by day, in fact you can “slice and dice” your database by selecting students using any criteria. Capture email addresses with the easy to use Maxmail web form builder – or upload in CSV format from your existing database.
2. Dynamic content = relevant information
By using smart tags, student’s names, birthdates, classroom numbers, teacher’s names or even variable invoice amounts (school fees or stationary fees) are automatically put into each email – read from the database of information you have collected. Custom fields allow you to gather any information you need to include.
3. View opens and clicks
Automatic notification that an email as been opened and read will give you assurance that parents are receiving and reading newsletters. Alternatively emails can contain a link where a parent will click on e.g. “Please tick to confirm you have read and understand this notice”. Their response will be recorded in Maxmail for you to view at any stage. Using this feature, you are far more likely to get a response than when using the physical sign off sheets that parents need to return.
4. Scheduled and auto-responder emails
You can set up Maxmail to send emails automatically for example an email on a student’s birthday, 6 monthly dental nurse reminders. New enrollments can be captured and managed e.g. an email can be scheduled to arrive in a parent’s inbox 1 month before a child’s 5th birthday to contact the school about a school visit.
5. RSVP and opinion polls/ surveys
Using this function of Maxmail you can easily create and publish professional looking surveys to get feedback from parents on your initiatives and avoid time consuming collation of results. Using an intuitive drag and drop interface you can mash up questions, answers, page layouts, video clips and more to create an intelligent survey in minutes. Also, if you use this function as part of a newsletter, parents can simply click on a link, fill in a couple of boxes and respond to parent help requests straight away!
6. Online
When emailing links out to parents for sites that assist in home learning, parents are more likely to visit these websites than typing a long winded URL into their browser from a printed sheet. This also applies to email addresses for staff. Because Maxmail is a web application, your admin staff can work either from home/ school or anywhere that there is an internet connection
7. SMS for instant communication
This feature can be used to send urgent or important communication via txt messages for e.g. sports cancellations, trip cancellations, unrecorded absentees , ad hoc parent teacher interviews, etc with the option for set reminders. Parents can receive these at any time during the day and don’t have to wait until their child comes home with important time critical notices.
8. Pricing – The Best Bit
Schools using Maxmail are excited about the low monthly cost and the fact that there are no fixed contracts!!! Plans start from $25.00 per month for 1000 emails and range to the unlimited plan for enterprises at $250.00 per month. SMS messages are just 17 cents each.
Go on, see for yourself.
To sign up for a free 30 day Maxmail trial visit www.maxmailhq.com
Vote for the most effective marketing channel
From the interesting responses I have received so far, I think it is fair to make your opinion public.
So here’s a public poll where you can decide and see what others think is the most efective marketing channel today.
[polldaddy poll=1025002]
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