Manhattan-Elwood Public Library District

Michelle mainly works alone on promotions for her library. She says LibraryAware has made her work easier in several ways.

“It's made a lot of the design elements and last-minute ideas simpler,” explains Michelle. “I know that the LibraryAware artists have already done the graphic design work, and it’s beautiful. I know I can add book covers without having to search for them or worrying about copyright.”

“It's also allowed us to be consistent with our branding, making sure promotions look like they come from the library. And LibraryAware is significantly gentler on our budget than having a separate email service.”

While Michelle uses LibraryAware to create her library’s public-facing promotions, including social media posts and widgets for the library’s website, her frontline staff also use LibraryAware to make displays and other materials for readers. 

When Michelle took on the responsibility of emailing patrons of the library, she wanted to create messages that were targeted and enticing, because she knew that was the key to effective email marketing. She says LibraryAware made it easy for her to create an email strategy focused on delivering the right information to the right community member at the right time.

“Maybe I don't meet as many people every time I send an email, but I'm meeting the right people who really want that information and really want to engage with it,” states Michelle. “That has made a great impact.”

To do this, Michelle created interest groups, which are listed on her library’s opt-in page through LibraryAware. Michelle reaches her community through:

• Age-specific event eblasts
• Outreach to expired patrons
• Teacher outreach
• Early literacy emails

But among her most effective emails are the ones she created to target teens and tweens! Yes, you read that correctly.

“Teens tend to be the unicorns, the mythical creatures,” muses Michelle. “We never, ever actually see them in the library, and when we do, we're just like clapping our hands and trying not to scare them away.”

“I sent an email with a handful of upcoming teen and tween events, and that drove traffic to my website and increased my traffic that day by 139 percent. It makes a huge difference, even if they're not necessarily clicking in that email, knowing that that's translating and driving them to somewhere else where we have even more information, and we can get even more engagement. Long term is tremendous.”

Michelle uses LibraryAware’s onboarding email templates to educate new cardholders about all the wonderful services her library provides. She says the onboarding series has helped her library keep the “I didn’t know the library had that” comments to a minimum.

“It was really my first big project when I started really working in this role,” explains Michelle. “There were a couple of templates already in LibraryAware, and so I started there and just kind of built the series by asking myself, ‘What else do I want my patrons to know? How can I train them and make sure they have Wi-Fi hotspots, a library of things, 24-hour access, smart lockers, and so forth?’ Also, I have our library’s email opt-in on every single one of those onboarding emails so they can choose if they want to receive specific newsletters.”

Michelle sends new cardholders an email once a week for six weeks, starting with this message. She’s been running this onboarding series for a year and a half.

“Our open rate for just this calendar year has been about 58 percent on average, which is about four percentage points higher than last calendar year,” says Michelle. “We're continuing to grow our patron base, but we're also continuing to make sure that they know exactly what we offer. And it's especially since we opened a second branch that that has been helpful, because people were coming into that branch and not knowing, you know, what was available.” 

Michelle managed all this year’s summer reading promotions. That’s a huge job for one person.
But she wasn’t worried.

“I knew LibraryAware had my back,” she says. “I went to the Summer Reading Template Party to see the unveiling of the designs. It was great because LibraryAware already had ready-made templates with the branding. I just need to change the dates and add my own QR code on there. We used the half-sheet flyer reading logs and the bingo cards. We could rely on LibraryAware to make things go smoothly and make everything match.”

Michelle also used ready-made summer reading email template designs to build excitement and boost sign-ups. She started about two weeks before the program began by sending this email with a built-in countdown timer. The following week, she sent this email prompting people to sign up for the program. The result?

“Thanks to those emails, traffic to our website went up 85 percent, and we had 152 people sign up for some summer reading before we even began summer reading,” exclaims Michelle. “In fact, we ended up having more people sign up for summer reading in the two weeks in which we sent emails than we did for all of 2024’s summer reading program.”

Like many libraries, Manhattan-Elwood is thoughtful when building its collection. They have lots of great titles, and they want to make sure readers know they can come to the library for a great read. But reaching those readers isn’t always easy. Michelle uses her built-in NextReads newsletters to bridge that gap.

“It does so much of the work for us,” says Michelle. “Most of the titles included in the newsletters are newer. But there’s always a backlist of titles that readers may have missed. I get a lot of clicks on a lot of those titles.”

“NextReads also helped us be more efficient. For a long time, we had endless carousels on our website of titles. Almost every single new item would go on a carousel. But that involved a lot of staff time to create the carousel from scratch. NextReads is great because you can automatically turn the list of books in the newsletter into the carousel widget that you just put into the website.”

“You get multiple points of contact and recognition for patrons, and it's saving my staff a ton of time, because nobody's having to find these books and manually add them one by one into a carousel. It automatically repopulates with those next reads titles when they go out, which is an incredible time saver.”

"Our circulation manager uses it as well,” says Michelle. “When we get the Next Reads advanced lists, we'll all go through those, and we'll add titles to our collection, because we know these books are coming down the pipeline. They're going to be well rated; a book expert vetted those titles, so it's giving us great recommendations."

Michelle has this advice for any library looking to create more effective, engaging library promotions while saving staff time:

“Stop and think about kind of those three biggest things that you wish you could do with promotions, or you haven't had time for, or you just didn't know how to do,” explains Michelle. “LibraryAware has your back and will make those things easier.”

“It improves what you offer to your community, and it keeps you more efficient. It will keep your branding looking great, and it's going to do so at a price point that your taxpayers are going to be happy with. I don't have to pay per individual email like I would with some of those other email platforms, which makes a huge difference. It's saving us hundreds and hundreds of dollars every year, and I'm getting everything in one place, which is amazing.”