Simple E-Newsletter Updates Boost Click-Through Rates

CLIENT

Teach For America

SERVICE

Integrated Marketing, Lifecycle

INDUSTRY

Nonprofit

+30% click-through rate

+43% click-to-open ratio

Smiling students working with a teacher at a classroom table

BACKGROUND

Teach For America is a nonprofit organization dedicated to recruiting and supporting teachers to ensure every child is able to receive an equitable education. Teach For America finds, develops, and supports a diverse network of leaders, working together to end educational inequity. Teach For America reached out to Cro Metrics when they discovered they needed leadership and execution for their large email program after noticing declining engagement rates from their core audience.

Challenge

Low Engagement Signals Underlying Issues

Teach For America provides supportive resources for teachers and school administrators. One of those resources is a biweekly email newsletter focusing on tools, tips, resources and additional opportunities. The e-newsletter shares classroom tips, lesson plan suggestions, grants and benefits such as Better Help subscriptions for educators. We noticed that the e-newsletter’s overall click rate and read-through rate were decreasing over time. Because of the critical support and guidance found inside the newsletter, we knew we needed a solution and quickly began testing to improve engagement.

Solution

Leverage Behavioral Insights to Guide Design & Messaging Decisions

During the initial stages of the project, we noticed that the majority of clicks were happening in the small section of the newsletter called Resources and Opportunities. Inspired by this insight, we restructured the template of the newsletter and put all of the content into the Resources and Opportunities section. We also shortened the copy of the newsletter and made it easily skimmable. We then performed our initial experiment, determining click-through rate as our key metric.

Results

Higher Engagement, Extended Mission Reach

These simple newsletter updates resulted in a 30% increase in click-through rate. We also saw a 43% increase in the click-to-open ratio, signifying that more people were reading through the entire email.

Beyond stronger metrics, these improvements meant that more teachers and administrators were accessing the tools and resources they needed to better support students. The revamped email program not only enhanced engagement but also reinforced Teach For America’s broader mission of ensuring educational equity through ongoing communication and connection.