To encourage University of Cambridge alumni to stay engaged, we created a magazine-style e-newsletter that generated a high click-through rate.

Background

Increasingly positioning themselves as communication hubs, alumni organisations are using effective e-newsletter design to deliver tailored news, events and opportunities that ensure university students remain engaged long beyond graduation.

Challenge

Academic institutions often face some resistance when trying to preserve student engagement after they’ve finished their education. That’s why the University of Cambridge asked us to develop a suite of e-newsletters that various departments could use to encourage alumni support and active involvement.

Solution

Working closely with the digital communications team at Cambridge gave us an insight into the challenges that academic institutions face in preserving student engagement, and creating a connection with alumni and maintaining their support is essential to achieving their objectives. This helped us focus on the best ways to deliver relevant content to the audience, and develop an effective cross-departmental communications tool – user-friendly, and also sleek and impactful.

The email newsletter design we created is striking, versatile and informative.

The magazine-style layout features large hero images, a bold colour palette and scannable blocks of content that could easily be repurposed by departments in different ways to keep the look and feel of each newsletter fresh.

Focusing closely on the psychology of readers, we developed an email newsletter that would immediately capture the attention of alumni and encourage them to scroll and click through to tailored content about university news and activities.

Ensuring that the newsletter design was optimised for mobile devices was key, so we recommended a mobile responsive design to help make the content more accessible for all users, allowing current and former students to really engage and feel close to their university.

The final e-newsletter design was well received and resulted in increased open rates for the university’s alumni association.