Email marketing should be a core pillar of the marketing strategy for every educational institution. Unlike other channels like organic search, paid ads, and social media, you own your email list. This offers you a greater amount of control and autonomy. As if that wasn’t enough, strategic email marketing offers an excellent return on investment, and it can help you achieve a variety of goals.
We’ll walk you through everything you know—including the five email marketing strategies you need for a world-class email program, the objectives these strategies can help you achieve, and some tools and tactics to make it happen.
These are five of the most common goals schools and educational institutions set for their email marketing programs. These marketing goals deliver some of the highest returns on investment in terms of enrollment, tuition, and charitable giving.
Email marketing can help you nurture relationships with prospective students, showing them the unique benefits your school has to offer and keeping them connected your your culture. Email allows you to stay top of mind with prospective students, parents, and teachers/administrators at feeder schools. When executed well, email can grow your applicant pool—helping your school maintain its vibrant learning environment and financial health at the same time.
Keep students informed about school initiatives, extracurricular activities, student groups, events, and more. Email helps you make it as easy as possible for students to maximize their experience at your school, college, or university. Engaged students are more likely to recommend their experience to friends and family, boast about their experience online, and grow up to be “alumni who donate.” If you’re not leveraging email to enhance the student experience at your school, you should be.
Create a “better than social media” atmosphere with your alumni email marketing. Segment your audience by graduation years or interests to deliver tailored updates, keeping everyone in the know of what’s happening with the school and their fellow alumni. Let people know about alumni events and programming, as well as challenges for milestones and current students. Your goal here is to deliver real value for your alumni community.
The biggest donors often care about how many of their fellow classmates are chipping in. Email lets you reach a larger number of people than you would if you simply rely on student (or parent) phone calls to alums asking for donations. With email marketing, you can build robust marketing campaigns for successful giving days, build excitement (and attendance) for your annual fundraising gala, and more.
Fill everything from prospective student days, admitted student days, and dances/formals to reunions, guest speaker events, and fundraisers. Segment your audience and use a drip campaign for pre-event communications like event announcements, RSVPs, ticket sales, and reminders. Then you have the additional opportunity to send a post-event recap with pictures that show how well-attended it was, drumming up even more demand for the next one.
Let’s look at the strategies that will help you achieve the above marketing goals. These strategies are specifically geared towards private school and higher education email marketing, but they easily can be adapted to tutoring businesses, online courses, and other educational institutions.
Leverage the data you have to personalize email messaging. Use the recipient’s name whenever possible and tailor messaging to their needs and, if possible, their areas of interest, like extracurriculars or areas of study.
You might be reading this and thinking, “But my competitor doesn’t,” and you know what, you’re probably right. 70% of brands don’t offer personalized email messages. That’s a missed opportunity. Personalization can generate $20 for every $1 invested. Take the time to personalize. It’s worth it.
Segmentation allows you to deliver messages only to the portion of your audience that’s most likely to care about it. Not only will this make your audience like you more (because they won’t think of you as someone who “sends too many emails”), but it will also help with your sender reputation.
Internet service providers (ISPs) determine whether your email should be routed to the spam folder or the primary inbox based on how your audience engages with the emails you send. If most of your audience ignores or deletes your message, the ISP is more likely to send your email to spam.
When segmenting email addresses, you can do so by different criteria like:
Demographics: Who are your recipients (prospective students, enrolled students, alums, etc)? How are they different?
Audience information/insight: How familiar are they with your school or university? Knowing how connected they are to your brand will influence the cadence and messaging.
Email types: What types of email are you sending—transactional emails, newsletters, prospective student/lead generation, etc?
Automated emails are behavior-driven emails that automatically send when a recipient takes a certain action. Automated emails allow you to send real-time, one-to-one messages that will strengthen your audience engagement and loyalty.
Using automated emails helps you deliver engaging content that’s highly relevant to your email recipient. These personalized, real-time communications make members of your community feel valued. As a result, they’re more likely to take action (whether that’s applying to your school, donating to the class gift, attending a prospective student event, or something else).
Examples of automated email messages:
Welcome series emails
Nurture series emails
Anniversary emails
User verification emails (double-check new email sign-ups)
Is your email subject line strong enough to stop someone mid-scroll? A strong email subject line can be the difference between converting and hitting “move to trash.” Put more time than you think you should into your email subject lines. It’s worth it.
Here are a handful of tips to help you get the most out of your subject lines:
Keep it short (three words if you can)
Write the subject line last
Make it specific
Make it urgent
Test to find out what works for you
There’s no one-size-fits-all for the best email subject line. The best approach will not only vary between K-12 schools and higher education, but it will also vary from higher education institution to institution. Craving some inspo? Check out 141+ Giving Tuesday Email Subject Lines and Examples.
According to recent data, emails sent on Tuesday around 11 AM (EST) tended to have the highest open rates. Open rates tend to drop off later in the week and through the weekend. Of course, you’ll want to test different times to fine-tune your email send times until you find the sweet spot when your audience is most active.
Tuesday at 11 AM (EST) might be perfect for alumni, but it’s less likely to work for prospective students—who may be in class or at school where they’re barred from accessing email at that time. Tailor send times for each segment and use a tool that makes it easy to schedule email campaigns (like Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns).
The right email marketing software makes all the difference. Twilio Sengrid Email Marketing Campaigns sets you up for success from design to deliverability. Our email templates and drag-and-drop tools make it easy to input graphic design and copy. Our approachable email marketing makes it easy to create high-impact email automation quickly.
All that, plus an industry-leading 96% average inboxing rate, segmentation tools, and performance tracking? Yeah, it might just be the secret sauce you’ve been looking for. Start using SendGrid to create better emails today.
