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.

At every opportunity, we urge higher education enrollment managers to take heed regarding their email behavior. Yet, our DemandEngine email inbox is filled with messages forwarded to us by high school students … most of it an array of poorly conceived and executed messages.

Consider the new Auto-Unsubscribe function (and policy) now available to Gmail users.

We don’t think you should be burdened with managing messages you don’t want to receive. We do our best to put messages in Spam when we’re pretty sure you won’t want or need them. But everyone has different preferences about the mail they want to see. You may not want to read any messages sent by a certain company or mailing list, while another Gmail user finds these same messages to be valuable.

To help solve this problem, we’re providing you with an unsubscribe tool for some messages. You’ll see the unsubscribe tool when you mark a message from particular types of mailing lists as spam. If the particular message is a misuse of a mailing list you like to receive, you can Report spam as usual. But if you never want to receive another message or newsletter from that list again, click Unsubscribe instead. We’ll send a request to the sender that your email address be removed from the list. It’s that simple!

Keep in mind that mailing lists may take up to three days to process your unsubscription request, so it may take a few days for you to stop receiving mail from the list. Also, please note that we are unable to provide the Unsubscribe option for all mailing lists.

For your protection, Gmail won’t display Unsubscribe for lists that are known to be owned by spammers. When you don’t see the unsubscribe tool for a particular newsletter or mailing list that you trust, check the actual message for unsubscribe options, or try contacting the list owner about removal (you should only do this if the list owner is trustworthy and not a spammer).

Email marketing sits at the top of the food chain as a preferred method of communication by adult learners. Yet, many continuing education units take a lazy approach to their email efforts, batching and blasting an endless stream of ‘apply-now’ or ‘register-now’ messaging.

Providers are ramping up their intelligence in an effort to shield their customers from irrelevant and irresponsible email messages.  Cranky student recipients become a ‘communication attrition’ risk, thus potentially closing a valuable channel for enrollment dialogue.

In this 2011 OCHEA presentation, discover a five-step process to creating a winning email marketing plan that engages prospective students and cultivates their interest through to enrollment.

There’s a subtlety to higher education email marketing that is quite often lost in the ‘batch a list and fire away’ approach many colleges and universities take today.

It’s the little things however that build trust and create value in your email marketing efforts. The marketing team for Georgia Tech’s Distance Learning and Professional Education unit understands this.

The team has a standing practice of providing whitelisting guidelines with their email marketing messages. Through an ‘above the fold’ link in their messages, they post extensive instructions for the subscriber to do this.

Because the instructions are actually hosted on their web site, it adds credibility and increases trust.

Little things

At DemandEngine, we have long been proponents of using email as a dialogue channel for higher education enrollment marketing. As any relationship, trust builds when there is an equitable exchange.

Internet Service Providers are launching more ways to gauge the strength of your email marketing relationships. Google’ Priority Inbox, a new feature of Gmail, is designed to help its customers manage email overload:

“Gmail’s servers look at several types of information to identify the email that’s important to you, including who you email and chat with most, how often you email with these people, and which keywords appear frequently in the emails you read.”

As email messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you. You can help it get better by clicking the or buttons at the top of the inbox to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important. (You can even set up filters to always mark certain things important or unimportant, or rearrange and customize the three inbox sections.)

What does this mean for higher education marketers?

• Email with information that helps prospective students during their decision cycle.
• Remind prospective students why they are receiving your message and send them info they are expecting.
• Focus on relevance – an essential component of email communication.

It’s time to get serious with email marketing.

Google, the world’s largest search engine recently announced a new way for U.S.-based Web users to make calls directly from it’s popular email service, Gmail. The new service offers free direct calls to the U.S. and Canada and represents the company’s latest foray into the world of telecommunications. The move helps drive users to Gmail, an email service actively used by more than 200 million people.

In a bid to combat the growing use of social networks, Google announced today that it is making it easier to socialize on its e-mail service, unveiling a new “Google Buzz” feature. Gmail users will be able to create status updates on Google Buzz and read and comment on the updates posted by their friends.

Other tools turn Gmail into a showcase for sharing video, pictures and Web links to interesting stories, just as users can on Facebook and Twitter.

According to the Associated Press, Facebook now has more than 400 million worldwide users, many of whom post information that can’t be indexed by Google’s search engine. Facebook’s large audience also threatens to siphon away some of Google’s advertising sales.

Shortly after the announcement, Microsoft and Yahoo responded by taking shots at their rival, claiming they’ve been running a similar service for years.

Do you know that sometimes your prospective students complain about your email?  I know … it’s hard to believe, right? :)

Prospective students receive a lot of unfocused email marketing messages from colleges and universities. While email costs a fraction of your print marketing collateral, there are real costs to the email batch-and-blast approach that many enrollment managers and marketers take. That cost? Deliverability.

The ISP Feedback Loop

When you think about complaints, it’s not simply the ‘unsubscribes’ you receive directly. It can happen another way and it’s worse.  Email clients such as Yahoo!, Gmail, or Hotmail, offer easy ways for your contacts to report unwanted messages. Most offer a simply button to click … a “Spam” or “Unsubscribe” button in their email client.

Read more… »

Email marketing is top-of-mind for many college and university marketers …

as evidenced by our UCEA-sponsored webinar today, Creating an Email Marketing Plan.

For those that missed today’s presentation, we will have it online within a couple of days.

In the meantime, download a copy of our email marketing comparison checklist. Compare your current email marketing technology or one you are considering against our feature set.

Asked by a college administrator last year during a SunGard Higher Education technology demonstration, it’s a common question raised by those using promotional email marketing for enrollment.

The answer (in this instance) included a lengthy description of the technical considerations taken into account to prevent this from happening.

The problem with technology-centric view  is that it represents only one part of the answer. Unlike the postal service – which is under charter to delivery every piece of stamped mail you can send – the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have no such obligation.

In another example, we recently had an enrollment marketing practitioner ask, “How can I make the ISPs take my messages?” It doesn’t work that way.

Simply focusing on the email marketing delivery system is not the answer. Keeping out of the SPAM folder has a whole lot less to do with your software and everything to with your email marketing program. Read more… »