Email marketing is a constantly evolving practice, and each year brings new best practices and tactics. It’s no different for school email marketing, which needs to keep up with best practices if they want to maintain and grow their engagement with families. In this post we’re sharing 6 helpful school email marketing trends for 2022, to help you keep up with the competition and stay connected with your families.
Open rates have always been one of the most important metrics for email marketing, but the attention is slowly shifting away from it as a KPI. While still important, click rates and overall engagement are taking the lead now and are what you should be keeping your eye on. In 2021 Apple instituted changes to their email privacy policies, which effectively blocked tracking of open rates, which has led to open rates being an unreliable metric to measure.
All marketers are aware of the mistrust people have towards certain types of marketing, which can be frustrating when you genuinely have a product or service that is valuable and you know your audience will be happy with if. One of the best ways to get around this problem is through social proof. Testimonials, reviews, and quotes are great promotional tools for building social proof, especially when coming from trusted figures in the industry or known contemporaries of your target audience.
With all the marketing messages people are exposed to every day, personalisation is becoming more important than ever. Saturation is an ever present threat, so your messages really need to stand out and grab your target market’s interest. Personalisation goes beyond just using a contact’s first name. To truly engage your reader, they should feel like you “get them”. Think of segmenting your email list by interest (like a specific sport or cultural activity at your school), and make sure your copy feels authentically written for the recipient. Personalisation allows you to cut straight through to the interests of your audience to maximise your chances of capturing their attention.
In 2022, 79.9% of Australians use smartphones, and that’s projected to rise in the coming years. Furthermore, statistics show that 47% of people check their emails on their smartphones, compared to 26.9% for desktop. So it’s clear that we need to optimise our emails for mobile phones. Just paying attention to the little things can make a huge difference, such as the length of your subject line, your font size and readability, your image placement, and the email’s overall spacing and layout. Because so many email builders by default build for desktop, it’s easy to overlook mobile optimisation. But by paying attention to it, you’ll be optimising your marketing for a massive chunk of your audience.
If your email is your bait, then your landing page is your hook, line, and sink for converting a prospective parent. In 2022, marketers will be focusing more on improving the quality of their landing pages, which are ultimately the place where minds are made up. After all, you can have the juiciest worm on the end of your hook, but if your fishing rod is a reed pole, you aren’t going to reel in a big catch. Links to your website are crucial here, and can drive traffic to all the right places. Use links to control the flow of traffic and aim it towards your landing page.
Interactivity is another factor that marketers will be focusing on moving forward to boost engagement amongst their recipients. By placing links, calls to action (CTAs), surveys, and other interactive elements in your emails, recipients will be more likely to engage and take action. An email with something more than just plain text is more interesting, and has more to offer when it comes to grabbing attention.
If you want to maintain and grow your email engagement, keeping up with current trends is crucial. By staying up to date and always being willing to learn, you’re ensuring the efficiency of your school’s email marketing, and your overall marketing success.