a golden opportunity
Email Marketing
When they’ve given you their contact information, you can reward them with useful content and unique offers. In fact, done properly, email marketing is an act of mutual trust.
Golden Opportunity
Although the opportunity is golden, email marketing requires planning and insight. To keep up with your audience’s expectations for a seamless experience, your school may need multiple types of software, functions such as automation and properly organized lists.
Email marketing lets you build a relationship with your current and prospective families during their journey towards conversion. Conversion in email marketing might include submitting an inquire, scheduling a tour, applying for admission, registering for an event, or making a donation. Just remember that you are a guest in their inbox, and—with good planning, thoughtfully targeted content and a respectful strategy—you will have excellent results.
What An Email Marketing Strategy Looks Like
The elements of an email marketing strategy will depend on your school and your goals. Your strategy might include specific tactics or ways to improve existing content. What we recommend will generally include some or all of the following.
INTAKE
The first and most important step is to encourage people to engage with you by signing up or asking for information, so you can bring them into your email funnel—with their permission. If they’re on your school’s website, tactics might include generating inquiries about programs, campus tours or the admissions process. Your strategy should integrate with real-time lead-tracking and lead-management software (e.g., BAM). A pop-up to request something relevant to the user who’s on your site can work if they’re about to leave the site.
LEAD NURTURING
At this stage, you want to build opportunities using content that supports enrolment, especially if it can be customized to suit prospective families. By providing them with the information they’re looking for, your admissions team has an opening for follow-up discussion.
Content can take many forms at this stage—informational guides, success stories, blog posts, virtual tours and program comparisons, to name a few. Further down the admissions funnel, emails can be more functional, providing confirmations for campus tour bookings, application deadlines, event reminders and follow-ups from your school’s admissions team.
CUSTOMER SERVICE
This stage gives you opportunities to engage with new or current families. A first or early email might contain welcome or onboarding content. Further along, you might send deadline reminders, re-enrolment opportunities, or invitations to upcoming school events.
If the email recipient hasn’t engaged with you in a while, you can send a customer re-engagement email that includes relevant updates or an invitation to reconnect. This will encourage them to interact with you after an absence.
COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT
Your community is your email database, so whether you send out a newsletter or admissions information, managing your community means knowing who your audiences are and segmenting them according to the type of content they’re most likely to respond to.
Examples of content at this stage may include school updates, seasonal content, awareness of new programs, referral programs, contest or event announcements, student spotlights or any engaging content that builds awareness.
PROMOTIONS
Promotions may be included under community management, or they may require a category of their own. Promotional emails reward your best customers and help you get in front of leads that haven’t yet converted.
One of the best tactics at this stage is the LTO (limited time offer). By extending an offer with some urgency (“three days only”; “by midnight tonight”; etc.) you greatly increase your odds of converting the customer who opens and reads your email.
LOYALTY
The last step is to track and measure you school’s community satisfaction. That way, you can optimize your content according to the feedback you’re getting.
It’s important to learn what your audience wants—from phone calls, reviews online or feedback forms—and adjust your email strategy accordingly.
Email Campaign Measurement
The only way to understand the success of your school’s email campaign will be to measure the results. In this all-important stage, we are able to measure and monitor many important variables:
- List size and growth
- Open and click-through rates
- List health and deliverability
- Revenue and conversions
- Attribution
- Segment analysis
Our experienced account executives can walk you through what each of these means and how we compare your results with your stated goals and key performance indicators.
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