Let’s talk about email marketing! You might be under the impression that email has gone the way of the dinosaur when it comes to marketing your school. After all, there are much flashier options out there, including social media advertising or video marketing.
However, take a quick look at the statistics, and you may change your mind! While email marketing is remarkably low-cost, it generates an astounding $38 for every dollar spent. That’s a return on investment (ROI) of 3800% — incredible!
Email marketing can be a valuable tool for boosting enrolments at your school, however, the key is focusing on your audience. Your audience is made up of the individuals on your send list, and if you’re actively marketing your school, they are likely prospective parents who have recently expressed interest in your school.
Here are our four best tips to engage these parents through your email marketing.
Prospective parents receive a lot of emails every day, so you need to make sure that yours will stand out in their (overcrowded) inbox. The best way to do this is to make the information you’re sharing relevant to parents. They’re looking to engage with authentic and personalised messages rather than generic news blasts.
Sounds good, right? However, as most admissions teams will attest, writing individual emails to every single prospective parent will eat up a good chunk of work hours. Instead, you can make your content more personalised by:
Personalisation is now a non-negotiable if you want your email to resonate with your target audience. By implementing these tips, you’ll improve your email’s open rate, click-through rate, and bounce rate — all of which will almost certainly lead to a boost in enquiries about your school.
While personalisation is the big key to email marketing success, it will all fall apart if you aren’t regularly checking and updating your send list. Dirty data is a leading cause of revenue loss for many schools and businesses because it wastes your team’s valuable time and it causes you to make decisions based on incorrect information.
Whether you’re using a customer relationships manager (CRM) or email marketing software, you should be able to easily perform a quick lead spring clean. To do this, first, create a list of ‘inactive’ leads by applying a filter that shows all of your contacts that haven’t engaged with your school in a reasonable amount of time. The time frame is up to you, however, a good rule of thumb is to count any lead as ‘inactive’ if they haven’t opened one of your emails in over a year.
Once you have your list of inactive leads, you need to decide whether:
If you believe that the lead is no longer interested in receiving emails from you, you can either remove their information from your system or attempt to re-engage them with a phone call or a final email. If you think their contact details are incorrect, you can reach out in another way to update their details.
Subject lines are a crucial part of email marketing. They’re your hook and the number one factor that determines whether recipients will open your email. While you should never click-bait your leads into opening an email, it’s still important that your subject lines are intriguing and punchy enough to generate some interest.
You can do this by:
Before settling on a subject line, put yourself in your recipient’s shoes and ask yourself whether you would open the email based on the subject line alone. If the answer is ‘no’, play around with it until you’re 100% satisfied.
Emails that try to tackle too many topics or are too wordy tend to be far less effective than emails with a single objective. If you have lots of information that you want to share with prospective parents and students, you can always work it into a drip campaign.
Drip campaigns offer bite-sized pieces of information through a series of emails sent at regular intervals. For example, a drip campaign might automatically send a welcome email when a subscriber signs up and send further information every few days.
The key to a successful drip campaign is to include a clear call-to-action so your prospective parents know what to do if they want to engage further with a particular email. This could be a link to a blog post or a video to learn more about the topic presented in the email. It could also be a request for someone in your school to reach out to talk further.
There’s no big secret to implementing engaging email marketing campaigns for schools. It all comes down to keeping your audience at the centre of everything you do. In this post, we’ve looked at four ways that you can do just that:
Digistorm’s admissions management system, Funnel, offers the functionality you need to engage your audience through email marketing. With features such as personalisation tokens, automation and segmentation, you can create campaigns that engage your audience, while nudging them towards enrolment at your school.