Email Guidelines

Follow these Enrollment Management guidelines to help you create effective, timely and approvable emails for prospective, admitted and current students.

Content Guidelines:

Content

• Use a focused subject line that is to the point, tells the readers what the email is about and grabs their attention.

• Keep things short and sweet. Students do not want to read through long emails, so avoid emails longer than ~300- 400 words.   
  
• Avoid bullet-point lists of links. Keep your mailing focused with one call-to-action so you can measure your message’s success with confidence.

• Be intentional with your message.
  • Do not overwhelm your audience with a lot of information or tiresome lists. Demonstrate what your area is doing to create possibilities for our students. Go beyond a simple reporting of the facts and tell a compelling story. 

• Leverage the brand voice and tone.

• Put the most important information at the top and key details throughout the body copy.

• Give one clear call to action. In addition to the one thing we want them to know, there should be one thing we want them to do.

• Do not use ‘Purdue University’ in your signature.
  • The mailing is coming from a Purdue email address, includes a Purdue University logo or cobrand, and has Purdue footer information – so the context is provided.

• Complete a final proofread on your message – checking for any errors, confirming links, etc.
  
• Do not use ‘Congratulatory’ phrases in new admitted student mailings submitted after March 1.
  • If you have a Welcome email that uses a ‘congratulation’ type sentiment, that is fine and can continue running. It is only new mailings that will illicit this cut-off.

• Avoid using hashtags in the content of your message. Hashtags are a tagging tool for social media, not for use in copy.​
  • The only acceptable use of a hashtag in a message would be a direct call-out for the message recipient to utilize that hashtag in their future social media engagements:​
    • Share a selfie with us by using #OnlyPurdue!

Variable Data

• Make sure you have the Sender, Recipient, CC, and Subject fields populated before submitting an Email Campaign request.
  • Sender field: “Your Preferred Sender Display Name“ <Sender Email Address> (example: “Enrollment Management at Purdue University” <admscrm@purdue.edu>)
  • Recipient field: {{Email}} or {{Parent-1-Email-Address}}, {{Parent-2-Email-Address}}, {{Legal-Guardian-Email-Address}}
  • CC field: usually variable fields for Parents if applicable (see above)
  • Subject: populate with your desired subject line.
    
• If using the student’s name in your message, make sure you’re using the correct variable field: {{First-Name}}

Design Guidelines

Purdue Brand

• Fonts: The Email Builder tool is set to Georgia, 16pt font.
  • If you copy and paste anything into the Slate mailing WYSIWYG, please make sure you clear formatting on the text so font codes stay uniform.
     
• Bold and Gold your hyperlinks.
  • If you add hyperlinks in the Slate mailing WYSIWYG, make sure you adjust the hyperlink color to Aged Gold or another AA Compliant Purdue brand font color.
  • Do not leave the hyperlinks as the default black color.
    • If you do, when you do a test send of that mailing, you’ll see that those links come through as the blue default hyperlink color.

Images and Video

• If you have an image in the body of the email, make sure it is sized intrinsically to fit the template and center aligned in the mailing.
  • For images the intrinsic size is the size that an image would be displayed if no CSS was applied to change the rendering.
  • The following Email Builder tool templates require the following Top Hero Banner Image sizes:
    • Basic, Advanced, or Profile Email template: 600px wide maximum
    • Newsletter: 480px wide maximum
  • At the bottom of this page, you’ll find steps on how to resize an image in either Photoshop or Canva.
    
• You are welcome to upload your graphics/images to the Slate library – but once your image is loaded in and used in a Completed (Sent) message, you cannot move that image.
  
• Images require alt text to be accessible. If you change an image, you’ll need to update the alt text. 
  
• Ensure the image relates to what’s being shared in your message.

How to resize an image for your email

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