5 tips to get the most out of your schools mailing list
Your schools mailing list is arguably the most important element of your marketing campaigns to education establishments and teachers.
It’s not only important to find an education data supplier who can provide accurate, GDPR compliant schools data, but it’s also important to know how to effectively use it to achieve a great return on your investment.
Once, you’ve found the right education data supplier and built your tailored school mailing list, you need to think about how you’re actually going to use it to develop a marketing to education strategy that gets results.
If you’re looking to build your schools mailing list, make sure you know the key questions to ask your education data supplier.
Here are my 5 top tips:
1. Make a clear plan
Firing out email after email to every single email address on your list might seem like a good idea, but trust me – it’s not. Think carefully about what the purpose of your marketing activity is and what you want to achieve. Ask yourself these questions:
- What is the main goal of my campaign?
- How will schools and teachers benefit from what I’m offering?
- What do I want teachers and decision makers to do?
Want to see a marketing plan in action? Check out this case study.
2. Make teachers want to read your email
According to Litmus, in 2022 the average time people spent looking at an email was 9 seconds. So first impressions do count. Carefully plan and create campaign content that will capture teachers’ attention, engage decision makers, and prompt them to take action. Remember to look back at your objectives to decide what to include in your email and what action you want teachers to take.
We know that teachers and education staff are busy people, so you need your campaigns to stand out in their inbox and make them want to open your email. Here are our top tips for creating a great subject line:
- Aim for 6 – 8 words.
- Use key words such as ‘Free’, ‘Support ‘, and ‘Opportunity’.
- Personalise it with names and job titles.
- Include preview text.
3. Personalise your marketing
Enhance your schools mailing list by adding the names of your target teachers and decision makers. This will help you to personalise your email content and subject lines to your target teachers or decision makers.
In fact, our analysis tells us that personalising emails with the name or job role of your target decision makers can boost your engagement rates by up to 46%! If you’re using general email addresses to contact schools (e.g. info@stannes.co.uk’), here are some useful insights….
- School office staff will forward 84% of emails where the subject line says ‘FAO (for the attention of) teacher’s name’ to the named person.
- They’ll also forward 75% of emails marked ‘FAO job title’ to the relevant teacher or decision maker.
The simple answer to making sure your emails reach their targets is to make it clear who it’s for. If you’d prefer to send your email campaigns to the direct inboxes of your chosen teachers and decision makers, our managed email marketing service might be a better option for you.
4. Plan for the long-term
We hear many stories of businesses who use their schools mailing list once and when they don’t get the immediate response they were hoping for, they give up.
But that’s not how marketing works. Marketing to education is all about building your brand awareness over time, creating trust, establishing relationships with schools, and keeping yourself at the top of their minds so they remember you when they’re ready to go ahead. And this can’t be achieved in just one stand-alone email. You need to use your schools mailing list over and over again.
It’s also important to remember that some products or services need a longer decision-making process or higher investment, so purchases won’t happen immediately. That’s why planning a series of email campaigns on a long-term basis is the best approach to marketing to schools.
5. Find what works best for you
Email engagement rates can vary depending on the time you send it, your subject line, the content of your email, and even the colours you choose. So it’s important to figure out what works best for you. You can do this by sending campaigns at different times, on different days and with different content, and then reviewing and analysing all the stats to identify any trends in engagement rates.
A/B testing is an effective way to discover what works best. This is where you send out two of the same email, but tweak one element to test what works best e.g. two different subject lines (e.g. Free science resources for your class vs. Inspire your budding Einsteins). You could even test different main body content or the colours of your call to action buttons.
You should continue testing email content and designs to build up a clear picture of what your target teachers and decision makers respond best to. Then you can use these insights to develop email campaigns that achieve the optimum engagement rates.
Use these 5 tips to get the most of your schools mailing list.
Need help creating your schools mailing list or developing your marketing to education strategy? Get in touch! We’ll help you generate more leads in schools in no time. You can call us on 01256 460036 or email info@buzz-education.com.