Online communication has revolutionized interaction among friends, family, fellow students, and coworkers. Email enables schools to maintain constant contact with students and their families from initial engagement, to alumni status. As funds become increasingly competitive, email marketing presents one of the most efficient ways for a school to market. Keeping your high school at top-of-mind is becoming more challenging. There are continually more schools for parents to choose from, and these competing schools are willing to put forth more effort to recruit students. Effective email marketing solves this problem by developing valuable relationships with parents and students.

7 Guidelines for a Successful School email Marketing Campaign

1. Provide Targeted Information

The importance of providing targeted, relevant, and valuable information within emails cannot be underestimated. Parents or alumni do not want to be burdened with hoards of solicited emails containing information unrelated to them and sent only for means of delivering a donation request. The emails should include relevant and pertinent information sculpted around their interests. The success of your email campaign will be determined by the extent of the effort spent segmenting recipients based on data pertaining to their interests and involvement with your school. A 3-step plan is provided below.

1. When initially contacting a prospect, it is important to provide some useful information immediately. Use the rest of the email to gather information in order to provide the recipient with more relevant information. Incorporate a detailed list of topics with corresponding checkboxes.
2. Send information up-date emails once a month to keep email content relevant.
3. Purchase an email Marketing Program. Incorporating this type of interface will allow for highly targeted and relevant email messages while eliminating the grueling task of manually uploading data. Email Labs (www.emaillabs.com) provides an excellent email marketing application.

2. Provide Relevant Links

Each email should contain relevant links to areas of the school website, as well as adjacent articles, resources, and sites. For example, a parent with a child involved in football and rodeo may wish to receive links to the football page and rodeo page, as well as third party information on childhood injury prevention. As more data is gathered, emails will become more valuable and recipients will anticipate their arrival.

3. Distribute emails at the Right Time With the Right Frequency

Time - The time of day and the day of the week make a significant difference in the responsiveness to email. Weekends are a horrible time to send emails. This practice should be avoided whenever possible. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are the best days to send emails, with more emphasis on Tuesday and Wednesday. Over 60 percent of emails are opened between Tuesday and Thursday. Roughly 30 percent of emails are sent between 9am and 11am. Seven percent are opened at 11am and 60 percent are opened between 8am and 4pm (www.emaillabs.com). This makes early morning an optimal time to ship new emails.

Frequency - The frequency of email shipments is critical. If too many messages are sent, especially if they include donation requests, your audience will surely be turned off. On the other hand, emails should be sent on a consistent basis. Recipients look forward to receiving regular email newsletters pertaining to a topic of interest. A schedule should be well thought out and effectively implemented. The resources needed to gather relevant information, and write, edit, and publish the newsletter will largely determine frequency.

4. Facilitate Viral Marketing

An “Email This” link should be integrated into the email template. A link should be provided at the top of the email near the headline or title as well as the bottom of the email. The link should include the universal “Email This” icon (the back of an envelope) so that it can be easily identified. Incorporating these elements into every email sent will help recruit potential prospective students, or engage others interested in your high school.

5. Keep it Catchy

The subject line of your emails should be eye catching and memorable. They should be easy to read and capture the interests of the reader. In the body of the email, stay away from clutter and information overload. The layout should be logical and organized.

6. Measuring and Adjusting

Track all statistics relevant to your email campaign. Valid metrics include click through rate, open rate, click to open, bounce rate, referral rate, and unsubscribe rate. Track traffic coming to the website from targeted links within emails to determine campaign effectiveness. This is the beauty of email campaigns, everything can be measured. If you are not satisfied with the performance of your current email campaign, reconsider design and implementation. Start by asking basic questions. Why do they not find it valuable? Does the content need to be more targeted? Etc. Email campaigns are an ongoing process requiring constant attention and direction.

7. Build Trusting Relationships

The idea is to build trusting and ongoing relationships with recipients. Email is just another medium to help facilitate this. Traditional forms of communication should not be forgotten.

Email is an excellent way to encourage communication feedback, donations, recruitment, and promotion of school events. Incorporating the above elements into your high school’s email marketing campaign will surely accelerate results.

Article courtesy of Lance Trebesch and Colt Lapham of TicketPrinting.com