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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 enrollments, 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, personalize, and spotlight opportunities for authentic connections.
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Now that you understand the trends, let’s analyze 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 incentivize 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 program 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 analyze interactions and data throughout the enrollment journey. Personalization will play a key role in turning prospective students into enrolled ones.
We live in a personally-curated world. From online ads to our music apps, personalization 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 personalize 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 capitalize 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, enrollment numbers. An email marketing campaign that uses automation and AI can augment personalized 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 personalized 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 advisor.
More than half of Americans spend at least 5 hours a day on their phones, according to Statista. Thus, optimizing 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 analyzing 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 personalized 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 analyze 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.
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