A Guide to Higher Ed Email Marketing
Learn how to connect with prospective students with these university email marketing strategies.
Learn how to connect with prospective students with these university email marketing strategies.
With an ever-shrinking pool of new enrolments, colleges and universities must stand out from the crowd to attract the right students in their recruitment efforts. Higher education marketing is more important than ever. But what tactics work the best?
One which stands the test of time is email. According to Salesforce’s Eighth State of Marketing report, outbound email increased 15% between 2021 and 2022, remaining the preferred channel for consumers to interact with brands. To best reach prospects, institutions should use higher education marketing software to streamline the process of email outreach.
With so much of today’s communication happening digitally, it might seem challenging to connect with prospective students on a personal level. But some recent trends in email marketing for higher education combine technology with in-person interactions — through data and insights — to segment, personalise and spotlight opportunities for authentic connections.
Now that you understand the trends, let’s analyse how to incorporate them into your university email marketing efforts.
Before you can create a winning higher ed email marketing campaign, you need email addresses — and a lot of them.
Traditional tactics include collecting emails at college fairs, in-person campus visits, or from a prospect signing up for a newsletter. Be sure you gain permission to add student names to your lists, not only for legal reasons but also to better target prospects who are actually interested in learning about your school.
You can also incentivise students to boost the number of emails collected by:
When you send that first email, be sure to include a drop-down field where prospects can select what they’re most interested in learning more about. Perhaps a sports programme is at the top of their list, or the journalism department piques their interest. This information can help you segment prospects further into future email nurture campaigns.
Segmenting your audience is one of the golden rules of email marketing best practices. Segmentation is essentially splitting your email list into targeted audience groups or personas. Examples of these personas for higher education include:
The best way to segment is by using a customer relationship management system (CRM) for schools that can automatically build and segment lists for you. Take it further by pairing your CRM with marketing software to manage and analyse interactions and data throughout the enrolment journey. Personalisation will play a key role in turning prospective students into enrolled ones.
We live in a personally-curated world. From online adverts to our music apps, personalisation is no longer a nice feature — it’s an expectation from consumers. University email marketing is no different.
Four out of five recently-enrolled students felt their selected college was either “not at all” or only “a little” interested in learning about their recruiting experience for the purpose of improvement, according to Salesforce’s A Student-Centric Approach to Higher Ed Marketing report. Institutions can send an automatic survey to recently-enrolled students to create better email marketing campaigns without much effort.
To be able to personalise emails like this, however, you need to start with accurate user journey data. User journeys map the timeline and key decision points for prospective students. At each of those points, you want to identify the student’s needs and deliver key messages to address them. Doing so can turn a potential student into an enrolled one. Prospect needs may include:
But it’s not enough just to understand your prospects’ needs. You must capitalise on the appropriate time to deliver messaging around those needs. A CRM that captures holistic information is the best tool to accomplish this.
Look for a CRM that:
Showcasing the value of your school through graduation completion and average future-income stats can be effective in email marketing. This can be done by sharing first-person accounts from current students and alums to build authentic connections with your prospects. You could lead emails with:
In today’s highly competitive education climate, everyone is looking for ways to reduce costs while improving sales — in this case, enrolment numbers. An email marketing campaign that uses automation and AI can augment personalised email campaigns through data-driven insights. This could relieve admissions officers of administrative work and give them more time to focus on nurturing end-of-funnel prospects. It’s no wonder more than 60% of marketers are investing in AI to meet the demand for personalised experiences.
Some automation capabilities that are useful for institutions include:
Data from AI chatbot interactions can automatically be recorded to your CRM so your integrated marketing platform can gauge the next best steps in user journeys. For example, let’s say a prospect is curious about the affordability of your university and a chatbot provides a breakdown of how much they would likely pay out-of-pocket. With this information recorded, a trigger could be set in your marketing platform to send a follow-up email with scholarship opportunities that the prospect is qualified for, along with a call to action (CTA) to schedule a call with a financial adviser.
More than half of Americans spend at least 5 hours a day on their phones, according to Statista . Thus, optimising your email content and design for mobile, desktop, and tablet is a necessity. You can make your emails even more mobile-friendly by:
When prospects can seamlessly open and interact with your emails on any desktop or mobile device, they’re more likely to keep engaging with them during the recruitment process.
Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) is vital to creating a great email campaign. Some important KPIs for email include unsubscribe rates and click-through rates. Are your Gen Z prospects opening video-based or social media-based emails at a higher rate? What kind of CTAs work better for prospects who are parents?
Automated A/B testing is another powerful analytics tool to help you determine a winning email marketing formula. Essentially, two versions of an email get sent to prospects. Elements that may differ between the two include subject lines, preheader text, CTA, design, or delivery timing. Tracking and analysing the KPIs from automated A/B tests allow you to adjust tactics as needed to create data-driven email campaigns that deliver results without building a new campaign from the ground up.
At the heart of great higher education email marketing is the ability to target prospects who align with the unique identity and offerings of your school. Finding the right students requires the right technology. You need tools that can help you collect data to create personas, track user journeys, and create personalised email marketing content.
Salesforce for Higher Education can help by giving you a 360-degree view of current students and prospects. When you can track and analyse your tailored email campaigns and use insights to adjust tactics along the way, you will be able to do more with less while still making a major impact.
Higher education email marketing is a digital strategy used by universities and colleges to attract and retain students. It involves using personalised, data-driven email messages to engage with prospective students and guide them through the enrolment journey.
The benefits of higher education email marketing include its ability to reach prospective students through a channel they prefer. It allows for the segmentation of email lists and the use of personalised messaging, which is crucial for standing out in a competitive higher education landscape.
Personalisation is important in higher education email marketing because prospective students, much like consumers, expect tailored communication. Using accurate user journey data from a CRM system allows institutions to identify student needs and address them at key decision points.
A key trend in higher education email marketing is the combination of technology with in-person interactions. This approach helps to segment and personalise communication, allowing institutions to build stronger relationships with prospective students based on their unique interests and needs.
Institutions can build a strong email list by gaining permission from prospective students to send them emails. They can also incentivise sign-ups by offering valuable content, such as downloadable guides, or providing access to automated scheduling tools.
List segmentation is crucial for email marketing because it allows institutions to split their email lists into targeted groups. This can be done based on academic interests, demographics, location, and a student’s stage in the enrolment journey, which helps to ensure the messages are relevant and effective.
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