Email marketing is a powerful tool in the hands of K-12 educators. By targeting parents and guardians, you can promote upcoming events, sell school merchandise and apparel, drive enrollment, build brand awareness and more. Keep these tips in mind as you embark on your email marketing journey:
- DO: Use personalization tokens:
Personalization tokens let you personalize your subscriber’s experience based on their behavior and interests. For example, if a subscriber has recently purchased a product from your company, their next email might include a link to download that product again at no cost. If another customer has never made a purchase, but has opened several emails from the company in the past, an automated follow up email could be sent to them offering to send them coupons or other promotions.
The first step is to create personalized content for your subscribers by gathering data about their interests and preferences. This can be done in two ways:
A. Collecting information when they sign up for your campaign (e.g., name)
B. Tracking what they do once they click through (e.g., clicking on links or watching videos)
DON’T: Use of Too Much Email Templates
Your email template should be a creative starting point, not a rigid blueprint. Avoid following it too closely as you will end up sending out emails that look and feel just like each other. Remember that every time you send an email prospecting for new business, you’re trying to stand out from the crowd by making a personal connection with your audience.
A popular cold email template may have been used thousands of times, and your audience will recognize this right away. Instead of focusing on writing about a buyer’s pain point (i.e., what they want), focus on writing about how their buying situation has changed due to something in their environment today or yesterday (i.e., what they need). Quickly identify the key selling features of your offer, and how it benefits the reader in a very specific way – not just generically “improving their business performance” but by helping them solve specific problems such as reducing churn rates or increasing sales conversion rates
- DO: Keep it personal:
Personalization is key to successful email marketing. To keep your emails from being deleted or marked as spam, use first and last name in the subject line of each message. Additionally, personalize your greeting with the recipient’s name. Make sure you also sign off with a personalized signature so that recipients know who sent them the message.
To make it easy for them to take action on your call-to-action (CTA), keep it simple and clear by providing only one CTA per email. Avoid complex messages or promotions that require multiple clicks through links or buttons. You want to engage your audience immediately when they open an email so that there isn’t any confusion over what you want them to do next!
DON’T: Overcomplicate your message
You want to avoid overcomplicating your message. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of a new campaign, but this can be a huge mistake. While it’s important to grab the reader’s attention with a clear message about what you’re offering, you don’t want to overwhelm them with too much information or jargon that they can’t understand.
A good rule of thumb when crafting email content is: if an 8th grader couldn’t understand your email and still appreciate its value or urgency, then you need to simplify it further.
- DO: Get your email on mobile:
It’s important that your emails look good on mobile. According to the Email Marketing Report of 2017 only 9% of email marketing professionals believe their emails perform well on mobile devices.
The good news is you can get your email on mobile by following these tips:
A. Make sure your content is readable and easy to consume from a small screen. Your customers should have no trouble with navigation or reading text in your emails regardless of whether they’re viewing them on an iPhone or Android phone or tablet.
B. Be sure not to put too much information in one email; instead, break up related content into smaller emails so that users don’t have a hard time digesting everything at once. Don’t send long emails with multiple pages—they can be difficult for readers to navigate through. Avoid using tables as much as possible because they’re often not formatted correctly when viewed on mobile devices and can cause formatting issues within other elements on the page.
DON’T: Ignore unsubscribe requests
When you send an email to your subscribers, it’s likely that some of them will have questions or concerns about the content and subject matter of your emails. If they are not getting any benefit from reading your emails, they will opt out of receiving them. Don’t ignore these unsubscribe requests—they are very important!
If you don’t respect users’ unsubscribe requests, you could be in trouble with the law. The CAN-SPAM Act requires businesses sending commercial messages through email to honor all unsubscribe requests within 10 days after receipt (or immediately if there is an emergency). Failure to do so can result in substantial fines imposed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
- DO: Send regular, relevant emails:
Email is an easy way to stay in touch with your audience—and it’s a great way to increase brand loyalty and customer retention. But while an email newsletter may be the best way to keep customers informed of new products or services, it’s important to remember that the quality of your emails is just as important as the frequency with which you send them.
In other words: sending out irrelevant emails will only annoy your readers and hurt both your reputation and open rates. So make sure every newsletter you send has something valuable for recipients!
DON’T: Forget the call-to-action
A. Don’t forget the call-to-action: The most important part of your email is the call-to-action, which is usually a link to a landing page where you can collect data from your audience. The CTA should be clear and concise, and it should direct viewers to take a specific action (for example, “Fill out this form for free shipping” or “Read more about our new product line”).
Don’t send generic messages: Generate personalization by using customer data pulled from previous campaigns and current purchases or by asking people who subscribe to your newsletters what they’d like to see in future emails, then use that information when crafting new messages!
- DO: Gather list segmentation data:
Email marketing is a powerful tool for reaching your target audience, but it’s important to remember that there’s no one-size-fits-all email strategy. To get the most out of your email marketing efforts, you need to tailor each campaign to the needs and preferences of your target audience.
A. You can do this by gathering segmentation data from previous campaigns (or even just asking them directly) so you know what kind of content they want in their inboxes. Do they prefer long articles or short blurbs? Large images or small ones? These factors will help inform how you craft future emails and make them more likely to engage with your brand.
B. You can also use this data as part of a larger strategy for improving upon past campaigns: For example, if reading level analysis shows that an overabundance of industry jargon or technical language has turned off some readers in the past, reworking those sections could be an effective way forward!
DON’T: Let your email go stale
An important part of sending relevant emails is sending them at the right time. You want to send emails when they are most likely to make a difference in how people interact with your brand, but also minimize the risk of annoying your audience or turning them off from ever opening an email from you again. As such, there’s a sweet spot between sending too many emails and not enough that should be considered when planning out your schedule for monthly campaigns:
A. Too many: If you’re sending too many emails, it could be perceived as spamming by recipients who might feel like an undue burden on their time and energy—and this perception may lead them to unsubscribe from future messages or mark them as spam/junk mail instead of reading what you have to say.
B. Too few: If this happens often enough, these users may start answering messages with automated responses like “I don’t read my unread emails until after 5 pm every night so please stop bothering me!” (There’s even a Twitter account dedicated entirely towards mocking these kinds of responses.) Furthermore, if users don’t open anything because they’re never sure whether there’s something important in each one (or else they just feel overwhelmed), then there won’t be any reason for them to stick around either later on down the road.”
Conclusion:
All in all, K-12 email marketing is a great way to engage your audience and build loyalty. We hope this article has given you some insight into what works best when it comes to reaching out to parents and students. But remember, it’s not just about sending out emails—you have to make sure that you’re keeping track of all the data and metrics that come with them. This will help you better understand your audience, which in turn will help you create more effective email campaigns in the future. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out.
