Your Guide to a Successful (and Stress-Free) School Email Strategy
Developing a new email strategy for your school can feel overwhelming. With so many tools and opportunities at your fingertips, it can be hard to know where to begin. We’ve developed a guide to help make it manageable, so you can build an email strategy that aligns with your prospective families’ needs and helps you reach your conversion objectives.
STEP 1: Set The Right Goals
They say, “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” Especially when it comes to email strategy, setting clear, achievable goals will build a roadmap for the rest of your work ahead. Common high-level objectives for independent school marketers include:
- Increasing the number of inquiries
- Driving event registration (or attendance)
- Encouraging applications
To identify the right goal for your strategy, evaluate your current challenges. Where do families tend to drop off in the admissions process? What are the biggest gaps in moving them to the next conversion point? With this information, you’ll be better equipped to create an effective email strategy.
You should also consider which goals an email strategy is best suited to address. For example:
- If your goal is building awareness, you might focus first on paid search strategies to generate interest before using email to guide families through the admissions process. Learn how to level-up your school’s search marketing.
- If your goal is moving families through the admissions funnel, you can focus your emails on addressing their common pain points and delivering timely, actionable information.
Keep in mind that a good strategy doesn’t just serve the needs of your school – it also serves the needs of your prospective families. Think of email automation as an extra team member who’s been hired to work towards achieving both needs, by delivering exactly the right message at exactly the right time.
Step 2: Align Your Actions with Your Goals
Once you’ve identified your key objectives, work backwards to build an email workflow to support those goals. Here are a few examples:
To Increase Inquiries:
By the time they’re on your website, families are aware of your school, so your goal may be to encourage them to take the next step by engaging with your admissions process (or team!)
Once you’ve optimized your website or landing page to ensure families can easily find your inquiry form, lead with a low-investment email series that invites them to learn more about your school, your admissions process, or other information they need to move further down your funnel. Here’s a checklist to start with:
- Optimize your website to ensure families can easily find your inquiry form.
Provide an incentive to sign up for your email list, such as:
- Access to an exclusive resource (e.g., a guide to exploring schools in your area or a checklist for admissions preparation.)
- Registration for a virtual event where families can learn more about your school.
- Refine your messaging to provide enough information to pique readers’ interest without answering all their questions. This leaves room for follow-up conversations.
- Develop 3-5 emails that touch on key points you would like to share with families new to your school. Ensure every email includes ways to get in touch with your team, or to continue learning about your school. Learn how to uncover and leverage your true differentiators.
To Drive Event Attendance:
Visits, whether in-person or virtual, are almost always high-converting opportunities. If this is an area you’d like more families to attend, use email to highlight the value of an event or provide easy ways to get on campus. Often, this type of content can live either on your website or in emails families receive after inquiring. Consider positioning your event-related copy as follows:
- Emphasize what families will gain (e.g., meeting teachers, touring facilities, or receiving an application fee waiver).
- Use urgency messaging: “Seats are limited” or “Register by [date].”
- Send countdown reminders to build anticipation.
- Send a follow up email after the event has passed to thank families for their attendance (with follow up information on taking the next steps!)
To Encourage Applications:
At this stage in the funnel, chances are your families already know a lot (or as much as they think they need to know) about your school in order to move forward. Here, email content would center less on your school, and more on helpful information and reminders to start or complete their application. Consider structuring your emails to reach this objective as follows:
- Offer a personal touch: Introduce your admissions team and encourage families to reach out with questions.
- Clear the barriers: Provide tips or resources to help families approach the application process confidently.
- Use strong calls to action (CTAs): Offer a clear admissions roadmap and direct families to the next step in your process.
- Find a balance: Remind families enough so they can apply in a reasonable timeframe, but not so much that your communications become a nuisance.
Step 3: Build Your Foundations
Effective strategies are backed by informed goals and insightful planning. Here are some foundational steps you can take to set yourself up for success:
Segment Your Audience
Not all families need the same information. For example, families considering grade 9 entry likely don’t want details about kindergarten or grade 5 programming. However, families with younger students may be interested in knowing there are growth opportunities for their children beyond the next few years.
Being intentional about what families want to know—at which stage—is critical. Segment your audience by age and stage, then tailor your workflows to ensure content is relevant and timely. Focus on guiding each segment down their unique funnel, and provide helpful information to them at each step.
Select the Right Tools
Choosing the right CRM or email platform can make or break your strategy. When guiding your team in making these decisions, consider the following questions:
- How difficult will integration be? Can the platform work with your existing systems?
- How well can these platforms scale? Does it allow for growth as your strategy evolves?
- How many contacts can the platform handle?
- How customized can we make our communications? If automation is the goal: how much manual work will be required to ensure all is working well?
An email strategy doesn’t have to be complicated. If you start by defining your goals, understanding your audience’s needs, and choosing tools that fit your workflow, you’ve already made major strides in reaching your objectives. By focusing on one goal at a time, you’ll create a strategy that works—without feeling overwhelming. Ready to get started? Begin with your most pressing goal and build from there. Each step you take will move prospective families closer to joining your school community.
Learn more about how to market to current families.
At Metric Marketing, we develop measurable and practical strategies to help private and independent schools like yours to make the most of your marketing efforts. We’d love to discuss your private school’s marketing requirements with you. Contact us today to speak with our marketing professionals or use the form below to sign up and receive more marketing tips in your inbox.
