Any school can benefit from the power of email. Not only is email marketing a great way to attract new students, but it is also one of the best ways to stay in touch with students, parents, faculty and staff. You can use it to send alerts about upcoming events, to drive interest in fundraisers, and generally to keep students, their parents and the wider community informed about what is happening at your school.
But how can you get the most out of your email campaigns? Here are some email marketing tips for your school.
Build a list of subscribers
Before you start your email marketing campaign, you need to have a strategy for collecting prospects’ email addresses and getting their permission to contact them. Otherwise, you could appear as spam or just be annoying to a user that never signed up for your emails.
Here are some strategies for collecting contact information:
- School fairs. These are great for getting contact information from potential students. The email addresses gathered will act as your top-of-funnel contacts or ones that you are just starting to draw into your university.
- Social media. In order for social media to help your email marketing efforts, post content that leads potential students to your website. Provide links to email subscription landing pages in each of the posts, so that upon entering your website, users can subscribe to your newsletter or other emails.
Write compelling content
Content is one of the most important parts of an email. It is what will either make or break your goal to successfully inform and convince potential students to choose your university.
Here are a few tips to keep in mind that will help you reach your email marketing goals:
- Keep it simple. Deciding on a university can be stressful, so emails should relieve, not increase stress in potential students. Make your point shorter and send out emails that only cover the most important information. However, try to make each email as useful and informative as possible, so that you are not sending several emails on the same topic.
- Personalise your communication. Make sure you personalise each email with individual students’ names. It may seem like a small change but this helps students feel like your emails are written specifically for them and that they have a special place at your university.
Optimize for the best results
Once you have collected email addresses and started sending information to potential students, you may think you are finished creating your email marketing strategy. However, there are still a few things to keep in mind.
- Optimize for mobile. We have already talked about how important a mobile strategy is for student enrolment. And it terms of email marketing, your emails should be easy to read on mobile. Make sure to format texts and images responsively. Additionally, keep paragraphs short, use headers, and great visuals.
- Test and improve. To understand which elements are successful and which ones you could improve, you should run A/B tests on your emails. When you take time to test the elements of your emails, you will be able to pinpoint the one that will promote the most opens and conversions.
Respond
There is nothing worse than not getting a reply to an important email. If you are going to take the time to email prospective students and want them to attend your university, you should also make sure that you reply to their responses in a timely manner. A late email could send the message that you do not care or do not have time for questions, which is a huge turn-off to students that need answers.
Thanks for taking the time to read our blog post with some email marketing tips for your school. At faethe.marketing we have been helping schools to successfully increase enrolment through email marketing. So if you are looking to recruit more students for your programmes with minimal cost and effort, feel free to reach out to us.