Email Marketing Basics for Higher Education Marketing

While email marketing isn’t as fun these days to talk about as say Facebook and Twitter, it remains a preferred channel of communication across all age groups. This fall we will be releasing some new communication preference data for high school students and adult learners. Unfortunately, higher education enrollment managers and marketers have not upped their email marketing games to compete for attention across online channels.

What’s missing ? A focus on email marketing basics. To move forward, focus on a new training regimen including these seven email marketing exercises:

1. CAN-SPAM Compliance – are you including a physical mailing address and a clear way for recipients to opt-out from your messages?

2. Anonymous Senders – reviewing hundreds of promotional email marketing messages from across the country it’s interesting to note how a majority are sent from anonymous campus employees such as admissions@, or info@.

3. Compelling Subject Lines – are you writing and testing subject lines to optimize open and engagement metrics? As a rule of thumb, key your subject lines between 45 & 60 characters in order to make the preview screen of most email applications.

4. Reminders – do you remind prospective students why they are receiving your email messages? You can do this by using subject lines such as “The information you requested” or by including the information in the message footer.

5. Control – are you providing email recipients the opportunity  to control the type of content and delivery frequency they want?

6. Engaging Content – can you move beyond an endless stream of application, visitation, or registration pushes to create compelling content?

7. Sharing – with engaging content, are you encouraging users to share emails through forwards and social sharing?

Email marketing remains a powerful communications channel for higher education enrollment and marketing professionals. Move to a higher level of performance by changing your approach from email as a monlogue to email dialogue.