Email marketing means sending out a business-related message, generally to a collection of individuals, via email. In truth, you could classify every email you send to a student/parent/guardian as email marketing. It involves using email software to send out information, share news, request registrations etc.
To effectively promote your school, consider using email marketing as part of your marketing strategy.
Email marketing is a good way to promote your school to potential students. It also keeps current students and their parents/guardians informed with important messages. And by creating a school community you can drive advocacy for your school, college or university.
As part of creating an email marketing strategy, here are some useful email marketing tactics you should consider:
- Ask yourself why you’re sending the email. Has someone just downloaded your prospectus or are they looking for a potential school to send their child to next term? If it’s in response to a call for information, make sure you address that need.
- Email automation. Once set up, email automation is great for driving awareness and registrations. For instance, you can automate sending an email when someone downloads a prospectus or signs up for an open day or event.
A study by Experian found that triggered emails generate 624% higher conversion responses compared to standard promotional emails. Automated emails have an average open rate of 70.5%, compared to 15% for regular emails (Epsilon Email Institute).
- Call to action (CTA). Sending out a beautifully crafted email is great. But if you don’t have a call to action (CTA), you’re missing out on potential engagement. You should give clear instructions to your reader about exactly what they need to do!
- Email frequency. It might be stating the obvious, but if you send out emails too often, you might find your unsubscribe rate increasing! On the other hand, too infrequently and you may find that your audience has forgotten you and enrolled somewhere else! You can learn how often your audience wants to hear from you by sending a quick survey.
- Content. Try to make your content engaging and interesting. If possible, include links to videos in your emails. Welcome message videos or virtual school tours can be helpful for your audience. Note: Use links not actual videos as most email browsers won’t display them.
- Send out an email newsletter. These can be useful as part of your email marketing strategy. They are a good way of communicating information to students and parents/guardians.
- Personalisation. Wherever possible, personalise your emails as this will increase engagement with recipients. Recent studies show that personalised emails deliver six times higher transaction rates compared to non-personalised emails.
- Mobile design. Email marketing software company, Campaign Monitor, found that more than half of emails are opened on mobile devices. So it’s crucial to optimise your emails for mobile to ensure success.
- Segmentation. Segmenting your email lists by demographics and interests can improve the effectiveness of your email campaigns.
If you send out emails with non-relevant information to your recipients, they will quickly disengage.
These tactics are not exhaustive but are a good way to start your email marketing journey.
Some reasons to use email marketing in your school are:
- Admissions. You can use email marketing to reach out to prospective students and give information about your curriculum. This may attract more students to enrol at your school.
- Events. You can promote events such as open evenings, reunions, taster sessions etc. Using email marketing can encourage greater attendance.
- News and updates. Keep everyone informed about what’s happening at your school or the wider education sector.
- Fundraising. Email marketing can be an effective tool to increase fundraising donations from students or their parents/guardians. By highlighting the impact of their donations, this may encourage more support from the community.
- Student engagement. You can use email marketing to share important information with your students. An engagement email can remind people of deadlines, share event info, or give study tips.
Increasing engagement doesn’t have to be a chore! The Education Agency team has extensive experience in creating successful email marketing campaigns. If you’d like to speak with the team to start the ball rolling on your next email marketing campaign, get in touch.
