It’s not only important to find the right mailing list to meet your campaign aims, you need to be able to make the most of it to get a great return on your investment.

Once you’ve found the perfect data supplier (hint… you’ve already found us!), you need to think about how you’re going to manage your schools mailing list to build a great marketing to education strategy.

Here are a few quick tips to help you make your schools mailing list work harder for you:

Firing out emails to every single email address on your list might seem like a good idea, but trust us when we tell you that it’s not the answer.

A good email marketing campaign takes planning. Think carefully about what you’re trying to achieve.

What is the ultimate aim of your campaign?

What do you want the teacher or decision maker to do?

Make sure this is clear in both your plans, and in the content of your marketing campaigns.

And again! We offer 12 months live access to our database and you can use it as many times as you want during this time.

Let’s face it, we know that not all teachers will read the first email you send to them – they might delete it, they might just forget about it, or they might just not have time to read it. But this doesn’t mean they’re not interested. So many marketers fall into the trap of assuming their marketing has failed just because not everyone has opened or engaged with their email immediately.

Marketing to schools is all about building relationships, making your brand instantly recognisable to teachers and decision makers, and keeping yourself at the top of their minds so they think of you when they’re ready to make a purchase.

You’ll find that GDPR compliant data suppliers can only provide you with the generic email address for the school, for example info@, admin@, office@.

This does sometimes worry our clients – they worry that their marketing won’t reach its intended target and will either get lost, ignored or simply deleted by the school administration staff.

We wanted to address this concern, so we did some research into how staff deal with emails they receive into the generic school inbox…

Firstly, remember that you can include the names and job titles of as many teachers and decision makers as you’d like on your schools mailing list, and you can use this to your advantage…

The simple answer to making sure your email reaches its target is to make it clear who it’s for.

If you’d prefer to send your email campaigns to the direct inbox of your chosen teachers and decision makers, our managed email marketing service might be for you.

We know that every marketing campaign is different. What works well for one campaign may not work so well for another. Email engagement rates can vary depending on the time you send it, the subject line you use, and even the colours in your email.

It’s important to figure out what works best for you.

But to truly understand what works best with your audience, you need to do some testing.

A/B testing is the only way to know for sure what will work. Don’t worry though, it’s not as scary as it sounds and it’s so very useful!

Here’s an idea…

✔ Come up with two subject lines for your first email campaign – make sure they’re quite different. Perhaps try one straightforward, obvious subject line (e.g. Free science resources for your class) and one more fun, quirky one (e.g. Inspire your budding Einsteins).

✔ Send the email with one subject line to half of your schools mailing list and the second subject line to the other half.

✔ And then analyse the results – you’ll find that some teachers and decision makers engage more with the fun, intriguing subject lines and some will prefer the more obvious ones. The results of this test can be used to develop the rest of your marketing campaign and the tone of voice you might wish to take.

You can test everything from the time you send your emails, to email subject lines, to the content and colours of the calls to action. Never stop testing and developing your design and content to become a marketing to education expert!