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 forms the foundation of your marketing and can play a key role in the success of your campaigns.
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 to help you get started with your schools mailing list:
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.
A successful email marketing campaign takes planning. Before thinking about the specific details of your campaign, you should think carefully about what the purpose of your marketing activity is and what you want to achieve.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself:
- What is the overall aim of my campaign?
- How will schools and teachers benefit from what I’m offering?
- What do I want the teachers and decision makers to do?
- What are the specific goals I want to achieve?
Need some inspiration? Take a look at our blog post: Selling to schools in 7 easy steps.
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, when it comes to email marketing, first impressions really do count!
You should carefully plan and create campaign content that will capture teachers’ attention, engage decision makers, and prompt them to take action. When creating your email content, remember to look back at your objectives to decide what to include in your email and what action you want teachers to take.
Buzz’s Top Tip!
Don’t underestimate the importance of your subject line!
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
If you’re looking to coordinate your own marketing to schools, you’ll find that most GDPR compliant data suppliers can give you access to an education database that includes the general email addresses for your target schools. These are usually email addresses such as info@ or office@.
You can often enhance your schools mailing list by adding the names of your target teachers and decision makers. We recommend choosing this option as you’ll be able to use this additional information to your advantage.
Including named decision makers or job roles in your schools mailing lists means you can personalise your emails to your target teachers or decision makers. You could personalise your subject lines, the main content of your emails or both!
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%!
We know that some clients worry that sending marketing campaigns to general school email addresses could mean their emails won’t reach their intended target and will either get lost, ignored or simply deleted by the school administration staff. However, our 2023 Schools Surveys tell us that:
- 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 would 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 1 stand-alone email. So 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.
Did you know?
We offer 12 months’ unlimited access to our education database, plus our data is live and constantly updated, so you can be confident you’re using the most accurate data available throughout your subscription.
Meet the businesses who use our education data for their long-term marketing.
5. Find what works best for you
It’s important to remember that every marketing campaign is different. What works well for one organisation and marketing campaign might not work so well for another.
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 another way to discover what works best. Don’t worry though, it’s not as scary as it sounds, and it can be really insightful!
Here’s an idea:
- Come up with 2 subject lines for your next email campaign. Make sure they’re quite different. You could try a straightforward, obvious subject line (e.g. Free science resources for your class) and a more fun one (e.g. Inspire your budding Einsteins).
- Send the email with the first subject line to half of your schools mailing list and send the second subject line to the other half.
- Then analyse the results. You’ll find that some teachers and decision makers engage more with the fun, intriguing subject line and some will prefer the more obvious one. You can use your findings to develop the rest of your marketing content and use it to determine the tone of voice you use in future.
You can test everything from the time you send your campaigns to the length of your email subject lines, the wording of your content and 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.
I hope you find these 5 tips a good starting point to getting the most of your schools mailing list.
Feel free to browse our resources and blog for more useful advice.
And if you’d like any help creating your schools mailing list or developing your marketing to education strategy, please get in touch. You can call us on 01256 460036 or email info@buzz-education.com.