When you hear the term “best practice” in email marketing for higher education, your mind whisks away to some magical place for a moment, allowing you to consider what life would be like if you had all of them in place. Then reality hits, and you begin to question if any of those “best practices” are even doable inside your marketing organization.
The truth is that “best practices” are simply guidelines written for the masses in marketing and are sometimes not even relatable to your vertical.
There are fundamental email best practices like not buying lists, permissioning, handling of data, and ensuring that you comply with privacy and spam laws. However, there are no generally accepted practices around frequency, increasing open rates, DOW, timing, or creative that you should adhere to.
We believe these are meant to be organizationally specific and are meant to be changed through testing.
The bottom line is that “best practices” in email marketing are what you and your organization make. There is no blueprint, and the “best practice” for a company that sells shoes should differ from those in higher education.
This post is meant for modern and data-driven marketing in higher education. You won’t find much value if this isn’t you, so kindly find another one of our amazing blog posts that will likely be more appropriate for your vertical.
When researching and ideating for this post, I came across some past posts that you most certainly check out from our colleagues over at Emma and full fabric. Those posts lay the groundwork and provide some good ideas about email marketing and best practices for higher education.
We hope to expand on those ideas, offer up some unique ways, and get you to think a bit more out of the box.
Let’s dive in.
Imagine incorporating human speak into your email communications where you can get the same point across to an audience in a short but very concise way. There are opportunities to invoke a little more fun and curiosity to encourage engagement.
Remember, emotionality and connectedness might differ in a decision to attend or not. Speaking human in email and even your subject lines doesn’t make you any less professional; it just means that you know your audience and want to change what has traditionally been done, and it might put you ahead of your competition.
For example, if you are looking to send a fundraising email to the alumni segment, be sure to test a variety of story-like scenarios that would invoke the reader to remember their time at school and create an emotional connection around making a gift contribution. Story-based emails are great for segmented audiences and make for excellent message-based testing opportunities to learn and implement hyper-focused content.
If you are not telling stories to garner emotion and engagement, start doing it.
I recently received an email from a prominent University that clearly used stock photography in describing their engineering and nursing schools, and it felt awkward.
As often as you can, please use images in your email that are a true representation of your school. Nothing says laziness and impersonal connections, much like using a stock image of people standing in a conference room to describe how your business school prepares its students for the “real world.”
Full fabric mentions the use of eye-catching images in their post, but in my opinion, imagery needs to take on the form of more than just eye-catching.
Lastly, check how the images render on a mobile device using a service like Inbox Monster. (full disclosure: iPost has a partnership with Inbox Monster, which allows our customers to leverage their service)
A prospective student or parent isn’t likely to look at their inbox at 10 am every Thursday about admissions, and the same would hold true of those big donors who only give once a year in August by you sending an email in April. The best practice here is to learn your audience patterns, test timing and conversions, and have a B plan around engagement or non-engagement. If someone has a confirmed open or you sense that they engaged and didn’t take the action you wanted them to take, it's okay to send an email for behavior. Consequently, if you identified that particular recipient had gifted the school every October, set up a series of emails leading up to and past their donation month using personalized content.
Don’t practice timing in the sense of sending emails on a particular day or time; rather, practice it based on what you are sending and who you are sending to, with the ability to maximize the conversion. It’s a fine line to cross and often confusing, but it centers around a fundamental change in defining success in your email program.
Universities need to have one place to protect assets and push down things like templates, logos, and creative to preserve consistency to avoid the dreaded “oops” and have optics into what other departments are sending and to whom.
Save trying to content/copy barf everything into the email; make it simple and to the point.
Give a choice to those that receive your universities emails and, for goodness sake, honor the choice.
Higher education email programs need and can set the standard in this competitive environment. If you don’t have a place for people to choose what they want, let’s chat further about that.
These automated emails are key to creating a more personalized experience which leads to #9.
In our opinion, that is just the start of how Universities can integrate social in email and vice-versa.
It all starts with collaboration of a calendar because, like anything, the social and email channels are fragmented in what they are posting/saying, and nothing says unsynchronization like mixed messaging in two very powerful channels.
To be clear, there doesn’t need to be a complete alignment between the two, but it always helps to work together rather than separately, as the audience is likely the same.
Remember, it's not Social vs. Email; it's social and email. When tested and nearly perfected, it is an amazing and super powerful way for people to make that emotional connection to your University.
As a university, your core is around learning, and what better way to foster that core is through a testing plan? It’s hard to start testing, but once you do, it becomes addictive. Test plans are hard to come up with, which is why at iPost, we have created a test plan blueprint that we are happy to share with you.
Visit our higher education email marketing page and request it, and if you want, we would be happy to walk you through it without strings attached.
Think like a subscriber when you are about to send an email out, and not like a marketer. The best email marketers know their audience, adapt to them, and consistently strive for iterative innovation. It’s not just and email address, or some random targeted audience, its a human with emotions and the power to change the channel.
The student, the alumnus, the donor, the fan, the parent, and even those with a vested interest in seeing your University succeed are in charge of how you run your program. Let them give you signs of what and how to change, and then listen to them.