Back to School 2023 Email Campaign

The Back to School time of year was an annual promotional priority for PBS KIDS. To engage the parent audience, I developed a new strategy that emphasized topics that resonate with parents during this emotional and busy time in their lives. I reviewed and analyzed the performance data from the PBS KIDS for Parents site to see what resources performed well during the time period in previous years.

 

From there, I used the top performing articles as the lead resources and built out the rest of the emails based on a unifying theme. Once I had the theme, I identified and curated relevant resources (articles, activities, recipes, games, video clips, etc.) from PBS KIDS series that could accompany the lead article. The article headlines often lent themselves well to subject lines as well. Throughout the campaign, I made the subject lines clear and concise, using the most relevant words at the beginning.

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The campaign ran weekly from July through August 2023 with the following themes:

• Help your child make new friends

• Creating routines for kids

• Back to school resources for parents

• Help children cope with separation anxiety

• How to cope with after-school meltdowns

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After the campaign, I could clearly see that the timely content was key to encouraging the audience to click. Some of the key metrics and takeaways were:

• The article, "How to Cope With After-School Meltdowns," was the most popular resource of the quarter

• The after-school meltdowns email had our second highest clickthrough rate in 2023

• Overall, this quarter saw a 51% increase in clickthrough rate YOY 2022-2023, largely due to the effectiveness of this campaign