Beefree blog

24 Ideas for School Newsletters

Emily Santos
Emily Santos
Aug 6, 2021
24 Ideas for School Newsletters
24 Ideas for School Newsletters

As summer winds down, prep time for the busy year ahead comes ever nearer. Before you know it, it’s time to start getting back into touch with teachers, parents, and students. Get a head start on the school season by developing an engaging school newsletter to connect with your community.Regular newsletters with high open rates indicate that your communications are being viewed. Newsletters also foster transparency and trust by ensuring that everyone receives the information they need. But with all of the competition for attention, your school newsletter runs the risk of being missed, or even worse, hitting the spam folder.Education-related emails sit at an average open rate of 34%. To meet or exceedthis benchmark, we recommend that you implement the following best practices, draw on inspiration from example templates and use these ideas to engage your community.

School newsletter best practices

Sending a school newsletter will benefit your community. You’re providing them with essential information, crucial updates, and exciting news to circle them into the conversations that are happening. How can you make sure that these important messages don’t get deleted? Start with best practices to captivate attention.

  • Don’t overload with content. Less is more. Focus on the value of your content and narrow in on 2-3 main points to hit in each school newsletter. Overloading your emails with information is a sure way to end up in the archives. Many teachers, students, and parents appreciate a more concise email that brings value. Keep things simple and get straight to the point.
  • Design for mobile. Optimizing your school newsletters for mobile is crucial since nearly 50% of email opens are coming from these devices. With parents, teachers, and students constantly on the move, desktop design has taken a backseat. Your community needs information fast and at your fingertips to stay up-to-date with  changes and events.
  • Personalize. Apply personalization strategies to your emails to increase engagement and hear more feedback on your school newsletters. Take advantage of personalizing the subject line by using a first name or nickname that your subscriber goes by. Also, assure that the content you are sending is relevant to your desired subscribers. If they don’t feel connected with the content you are providing them with, rethink your purpose to reframe the desired plan and outcome.
  • Find the best time to send. Consider optimal times to send an email before choosing when to send an email. Your day, time, and frequency needs to cater to your subscribers and their schedules. Students read their emails at different times than teachers and teachers may read at different times than parents. It’s all relative to their schedule and interest in what your school newsletter has to offer. A great way to ensure that your school newsletter is reaching your subscribers at the best time is to ask your subscriber list. The goal is to provide value, so quality over quantity is the goal. 

Ideas for teachers 

As a teacher, enhancing your students’ knowledge and creating the best learning experience is a top priority. But you have an array of other responsibilities as well, like keeping parents informed about what their kids are learning by showcasing some of their work.If you’re planning on staying up to date with informing both students and parents, then using teacher newsletter templates is the best way to quickly initiate that line of communication. These examples will help you get started with brainstorming what to include in your school newsletter.

Newsletters for students: 

  • Field trip or class events: Share details on the upcoming events that your students will be able to look forward to.
  • Get involved: List volunteer opportunities and other ways to get involved with the community.
  • Important dates: Include a class schedule, syllabus or any crucial dates students need to remember and prepare for.
  • Self-care: Share mental health-related info. 
  • Book recs: Include a list of book recommendations/book of the month.
  • Meet the student section: Create a meet-the-student section where you ask a student a couple of questions that the class may not know about them and then feature them in the school newsletter. 

Newsletters for parents: 

  • Meet the teacher: Students are back to school and it’s made parents curious as to who’s going to teach their child all year. Send a brief description along with fun facts about you so they can warm up to you before the school year begins.
  • Supply wish list: As a teacher, you aren’t provided with many supplies or money for supplies to have a fully functioning classroom environment that would create the best experience for students. Include a list on your school newsletter to encourage parents or community members to donate supplies.
  • Contact info: Send your info and ask for theirs in return to initiate a line of communication. 
  • Pictures: Parents love to see pictures of their kids, especially in school while they are away from them. Add pictures from school trips or in-class activities - they will love to see their kids in action
  • Important dates: Keep parents informed of what their children are learning about and when. 

Ideas for college departments and career centers

There are endless opportunities when it comes to college newsletters due to the diversity of the student population. Advance your newsletter by sharing valuable info that can apply to different sectors of the student body. We’ve got you covered on ideas for your college newsletter.

  • Freshmen: Give freshmen the inside scoop on all the exciting things taking place on-campus; include tips on how to study and even an advice section from upperclassmen.
  • Writing Center: Throw in top writing tips or advice for students to read and apply in their next essay, this is useful for undergraduates and graduate students. Include the hours of the writing center and how students can make an appointment as well.
  • On-campus events: Talk about upcoming concerts, free giveaways, educational forums, fundraisers and other exciting events going around on campus.
  • Clubs: Share details about new clubs on campus and how students can join.
  • Athletics: Share the athlete of the week, team events/game schedules, and helpful material on collegiate athlete health and wellness. Even include pump-up quotes and tail-gate details to get more students involved in supporting college athletics.
  • Alumni: Stay connected with alumni through a creative newsletter that excites them. Invite them to school events and even include a spotlight feature to share their story and successes they've achieved post-college to inspire other students and to build a bridge of communication between undergraduates and alum professionals.
  • Career center: Share interviewing tips, job/internship opportunities, job/internship fairs, and insight from professionals to help guide students towards their dream career.
  • Department-specific: From psychology to chemical engineering, different academic departments will reach their students in different ways. Include department-related club info to encourage students to join or share a schedule for career planning lunch-in sessions with industry professionals.

Ideas for school districts

Districts have plenty to manage when it comes to keeping a constantly flowing stream of internal and external communications with teachers, students, and parents. Preparing school newsletters to reach each desired audience is overwhelming due to the abundance of content. Check out these ideas to better your school newsletter communications.

  • Staff meetings: Schedules and recaps of what was said, or information on new curriculum implementations can be included here. 
  • Tips: Provide insightful tips that teachers can use and take advantage of, for instance like organizational tips.
  • Events: Organize and include info about school supply fundraisers or other initiatives to help equip teachers with the resources they need to be successful OR inform parents with details about the next back to school picnic or community events throughout the year. 
  • Faculty honor roll: Spotlight teachers or staff that have achieved success inside or outside of the classroom to further their connections with one another.
  • Updates: Include info about new changes or happenings with the curriculum or other details that may affect teachers or students.

Key Takeaways

School newsletters throw a line of communication to teachers, parents, and students to build more of a human-to-human connection amongst such a large body of people. Evaluate your content to provide more value. This will increase your subscribers and that connection you are working towards.Include some of these newsletter ideas in your next email, and remember to:

  • Design for mobile
  • Keep content to a minimum for each email
  • Personalize the information
  • Find your email cadence (time, date, frequency) 

Design with BEE Pro and apply some of these inspiring ideas to your next school newsletter to better support your community.

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Send Error-Free Emails with Confidence Using Beefree

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Beefree team
Beefree team
15 Apr
2025

We’ve all been there: You craft the perfect email, hit “send”, and just as you settle into the satisfaction of a job well done, someone slacks you: “Hey, something doesn’t look right with that campaign.” 

If this sounds familiar, you should know that you’re not alone: According to the 2025 Really Good Email Survey “90% of email marketers say they have a history of noticing mistakes in their emails after they’ve hit the send button.

This becomes especially common when your team constantly juggles multiple campaigns or makes edits until the last minute. Sadly, even the smallest mistakes don’t just slip through the cracks; they cost you.

Luckily for us all, mistakes can be avoided. And no, not by lighting a Pre-Send Protection Candles™ and hoping for the best. But rather by equipping your team with the right tools that work with your team – not slow them down. Let’s talk about it!

Building your team’s safety net for mistake-free emails with Beefree 

When everyone involved in the email creation process is aligned and supported by smart systems, executing mistake-free emails becomes second nature. Instead of scrambling to do damage control, you’ll want to set up the tools and processes that help your team focus on what they do best: creating emails that connect, convert, and confidently represent the brand.

In this article, we’ll discuss how you can use Beefree to: 

  • Reduce human errors 
  • Implement systems of checks and balances 
  • Establish guardrails & frameworks for on-brand email design

1. Catch mistakes before they happen with Smart Check

Missing links that lead nowhere? Forgotten subject lines? HTML emails that get clipped in Gmail? It’s easy to make little mistakes that derail your campaign’s performance. 

Learn more about Smart Check → 

Beefree’s Smart Check automatically checks your designs and alerts you of any red flags so you can fix them before they cost you opens, clicks, or conversions. Think of Smart Check as your built-in QA partner who will catch:

  • Missing links
  • Heavy images that could slow down email load times
  • Missing subjects & preheaders that impact engagement
  • Missing alt text on images that hurt your email’s accessibility
  • Large HTML files that might affect deliverability (or get clipped in Gmail)

2. Keep every email on-brand with built-in guardrails 

Most of us don’t nail the perfect campaign on the first try. Great emails are a team effort. However, when multiple teams are involved in the email creation process, branding can quickly go off the rails. 

A misused font, clashing colors, or buttons that are too small to click don’t just make emails look disjointed—they can damage your brand’s credibility.

With Beefree’s Advanced Style Kit, you can set clear, predefined guidelines for fonts, colors, spacing, and more—so every design starts on the right foot. Once configured, all new emails automatically inherit your brand styles, reducing the need for constant oversight and minimizing errors.

Advanced user permissions let you lock down specific design elements, giving you full control over what can (and can’t) be edited. That means anyone on your team—regardless of design expertise—can confidently create emails that look and feel like your brand.

3. Empower your team to create with confidence with reusable content

When your team isn’t bogged down by the cumbersome process of creating content from scratch (or fear of going off-brand), they can move faster—and with far more confidence.

With Saved and Synced Rows, you can provide your team with pre-approved content blocks—like headers, footers, and other commonly used design elements—that they can use in their designs without creating them from scratch. That ensures design consistency, eliminates redundant work, and makes email creation a lot faster.

Learn more about Saved Rows → 

4. Ensure your team is aligned with centralized reviews and approvals:

Creating the perfect email often takes a team of designers, copywriters, marketers, and other team members working together. But when multiple people are involved, endless back-and-forth and feedback scattered across multiple conversations and channels can slow things down, lead to miscommunication, and ultimately cause mistakes. 

With Beefree’s built-in commenting, your team can collaborate and share feedback where the work is actually happening—right inside the builder. And if you’d like to involve external reviewers into the review process, you can do that as well. 

Learn more about commenting → 

Plus, with Beefree’s built-in Approval flow, you can ensure your designs are reviewed and approved by the right stakeholders. Stay aligned with real-time notifications on design changes, lock edits on approved content, and get a clear view of project status for smoother team collaboration and high-quality results.

Learn more about Approvals →

5. Need an additional pair of eyes? Use the power of AI to support your team

Take some weight off your team's shoulders and use AI to support them in the final stretch. Whether it’s catching typos, flagging inconsistencies, or suggesting optimization, AI can be a saving grace when deadlines are creeping in.

For those times when you can’t remember the difference between “there, their, and they’re,  Beefree’s  AI Writing Assistant is there to help. This eager-to-learn helper can  review your copy for grammatical errors, tone of voice, and even share suggestions for making it just a bit more compelling. Our AI Writing Assistant can also seamlessly translate content or automatically generate ALT text for images to enhance the accessibility of your emails. 

Learn more about AI-powered content creation in Beefree →

The tangible cost of email mistakes

Mistakes don’t just impact performance; they slowly erode credibility. What starts as a small oversight can be a massive inconvenience for your readers, sending them straight to the unsubscribe button. As for your team, mistakes chip away at their confidence. Instead of brainstorming for the next campaign, they’re scrambling trying to figure out how to do damage control.   

When done right, email is a powerful tool for connecting with your audience. But a single mistake can unravel that connection and undermine trust.

  • A missing or broken links can interrupt your subscribers’ journey to conversion, negatively impacting campaign performance.
  • A missing subject lines means your emails won't stand out in the inbox, hurting your open rate
  • An awkward typo might signal a lack of attention to detail
  • An off-brand design can make your brand look disorganized
  • An email that gets clipped in Gmail because it’s too big means some subscribers might never see the full email content.

Design error-free emails and send with confidence with Beefree 

Beefree helps teams of all sizes create polished, on-brand emails—without the risk of costly errors. With built-in safeguards, streamlined approval flows, and collaboration tools that keep everyone aligned, Beefree acts as your team’s system of checks and balances. From first draft to final sign-off, you’ll have everything you need to send with confidence, build trust, and get results.

Try Beefree's Business for free for 15 days and get access to all of Beefree’s tools that help you catch mistakes, streamline collaboration, and send with confidence every time. Or schedule a call with one of our experts to discover everything Beefree can support your team.

Using Beefree with Marketo Engage 101

Learn how integrating Beefree with Marketo Engage can help you build high-converting, on-brand email campaigns— faster.
Luca Penati
Luca Penati
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2025

Marketo Engage is a powerful tool for marketing automation, but when it comes to email design flexibility, many users find its built-in editor limiting. Creating visually compelling, mobile-responsive emails often requires custom coding or workarounds, slowing down workflow and making it harder to execute high-quality campaigns efficiently.

That is where Beefree comes in. By integrating Beefree’s no-code, drag-and-drop email design platform with Marketo Engage’s advanced automation capabilities, teams can build professional, responsive emails without coding headaches and push them directly to Marketo in just a few clicks.

This article explores:

  • The challenges of designing emails directly in Marketo
  • How Beefree solves these pain points
  • A step-by-step guide to integrating Beefree with Marketo Engage
  • Common FAQs and troubleshooting tips

The challenges of designing emails directly in Marketo

Marketo’s built-in email editor is useful for basic templates but presents several limitations for marketers and designers.

  • Limited design flexibility – Customizing layouts, fonts, or interactive elements can be difficult without custom HTML or Marketo’s proprietary syntax.
  • Technical barriers – Advanced customizations often require HTML knowledge or an understanding of Marketo’s email template language, which may not be ideal for non-technical teams.
  • Time-consuming manual processes – Without a centralized style kit, teams may struggle to stay on-brand and often have to manually recreate headers, footers, and other reusable content blocks for each email, adding extra steps and slowing down production.

Due to these challenges, many marketing teams turn to external email builders like Beefree, FeedOtter, or Knak to improve design efficiency and automation.

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Why Beefree is the best email builder for Marketo Engage

While other external email builders like Knak and FeedOtter also integrate with Marketo, Beefree offers distinct advantages.

  • No-code drag-and-drop builder – Enables teams to design professional emails without writing any code.
  • Advanced design features – Provides more customization options beyond what Marketo’s built-in editor allows.
  • Mobile-responsive templates – Ensures emails adjust automatically for both desktop and mobile devices.
  • One-click export to Marketo – Simplifies the process of moving email designs directly into Marketo Engage.
  • Ability to update existing templates – Allows quick updates without requiring manual re-imports of HTML files.
  • Team collaboration – Enables teams to work together in real time, with built-in guardrails and approval controls to ensure error-free emails before exporting.

By integrating Beefree with Marketo, marketing teams eliminate design frustrations and manual email imports, allowing them to focus on high-performing email campaigns.

Learn more about Beefree's integration with Marketo Enagage [https://support.beefree.io/hc/en-us/articles/24837761625618-Export-Emails-to-Marketo]

(source)

How to update existing email templates in Marketo

Instead of manually editing HTML, Beefree allows users to edit emails in Beefree and update existing ones in Marketo Engage with one click.

  1. Open the email design in Beefree.
  2. Make changes and click “Export.”
  3. Select “Update Existing” to overwrite the previous version in Marketo Engage.

This feature ensures that emails and templates remain up to date without requiring complex HTML edits or duplicates.

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Frequently asked questions on using Beefree with Marketo Engage

Can I use Beefree with other ESPs besides Marketo Engage?

Yes! You can connect Beefree to any ESP, MAP, or CRM including Mailchimp, HubSpot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and others. To learn more about how to integrate Beefree to your sending platform watch the video below: 

For a full list of our native integrations visit [https://beefree.io/integrations].

Are there any limitations when exporting Beefree emails to Marketo?

Yes, there are a few important limitations to be aware of:

  • Charset emojis are not supported in Marketo. Including emojis in your email content may result in an error. To prevent this, Beefree automatically replaces unsupported emojis with a placeholder. For more details, refer to the [Marketo documentation on emoji support].

Preheader text is not a native field in Marketo. However, Beefree includes it by embedding the preheader directly in the email's HTML code during export.

Additional resources and links

Why you should use Beefree with Marketo Engage

By integrating Beefree with Marketo Engage, marketing teams gain a faster, more flexible way to build high-converting, on-brand email campaigns—while leveraging Marketo’s powerful automation and analytics to track performance and optimize results.

  • Design responsive, professional emails with ease.
  • Maintain brand consistency across every message.
  • Collaborate efficiently and gain insights to improve campaign performance.

Ready to elevate your Marketo email marketing? Try Beefree today and streamline your entire email creation process.

Start your 15-day free Business trial today!

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