What’s Working Now with E-mail Marketing to Educators by Moira McArdle March 2008 There’s no question about it: email is hot. With email marketing continuing its rapid growth as a primary channel for reaching educators, marketers are increasingly interested to learn how teachers respond to email messages and what strategies are most effective. For the second consecutive year, MDR has analyzed thousands of email campaigns deployed by education businesses in 2007 in a recently published report: Email Trends in the Education Market, A Comprehensive Analysis of the 2006-2007 School Year. The report provides insight to what’s working best for email marketers in education today, from open and click-through rates to creative messaging and what drives response. The report confirms the trends toward making email a core strategy for reaching prospects in the education market, as well as an effective communication channel for reinforcing relationships with current customers. Over 93% of marketers surveyed are using email, and the volume of prospecting campaigns continues to grow, increasing by 74% from 2006 to 2007. So with more and more companies focused on maximizing the e-marketing channel, how is it working for them? Following are some highlights of the report to help you build your email plans. Open rates Using open rates as a measure of success for your campaigns is a key metric for email marketers. The problem with looking at trends for this metric is Microsoft Outlook 2003. When introduced a few years ago, images in this popular email client were suppressed by default as a way to combat viruses, spyware, and spam. Open rates are typically tracked through tiny images imbedded in the html code of the message, so if the images are suppressed, your open rate results are also suppressed. This is a problem affecting all email marketers, making yearover-year open rates hard to validate. What is most important to measure are your open rates from campaign to campaign and how testing different elements of your message can impact increased opens within the same campaign. Also, when you design your message, you need to design for image suppression. You can learn more from our Guide to Working Effectively With Outlook 2003 on MDR’s Web site. MDR’s Email Trends report looked in-depth at open and click-through rates by industry and targeted markets, showing variable results. The highest open rates go to government agencies and college textbook publishers, perhaps because of name recognition and well-defined markets, with fairly consistent average open rates of 14.2% across other education businesses. Click-through rates
The number of emails that prompted a click through to a Web site, form, or customized landing page remained constant from 2006 to 2007, despite significant increases in the total number of campaigns. This is good news for education marketers—it means that even with increasing numbers of prospecting and customer campaigns arriving in educator in-boxes, messages that are being opened are also driving the same level of action to learn more about, sign up for, and try products and services. How marketers are using email to reach educators The report also includes detailed feedback from a representative survey of MDR customers on how email fits into their direct marketing activities. Direct mail still plays a major role, but almost as many respondents were equally engaged in email marketing. All respondents indicated they engaged in multi-channel marketing activities. Verbatim comments from survey participants reinforce the value of email marketing for businesses in education as a highly cost-effective, trackable way to reach and convert sales to new and existing customers. In a world where ROI is increasingly driving marketing investments, email gives education marketers a flexible medium to test and analyze creative, pricing, and product offers. Getting the most from your email message The most important element in getting an email message opened is gaining the trust/confidence of the recipient and helping them see some value or relevance— even before they open the message. In last year’s report, we asked educators what was the greatest influence in opening a message, and respondents confirmed that recognizing your business or relating to the topic was most important. From and Subject Lines Both the “from” field and the “subject” line are your key areas for building trust, and there are a number of ways to use the subject line to improve how you do that:
Build on your brand: Use a friendly “from” line to ensure that the recipient recognizes your company or a product they know is the source of the message. Your “from” name should not be a series of numbers and/or the name of your email deployment tool. Personalize: Create relevance by tailoring your subject line to include the subject the recipient teaches, their name, or a very focused offer that speaks to how it benefits the reader. Keep it short: Keep subject lines short, focused, and to the point. Make sure that your value proposition or promotional enticement is up front in the subject line so that it has a higher chance of being both displayed and read. The report analyses indicated that subject lines with an average of six words had the highest open rates.
Message Content Although the range of messages for MDR customer email deployments is very broad—from brand messages to special offers, free trials, renewals, market research, and more—the length of messages seemed to have no significant impact on open rates. In a recent free MDR webinar, where results of this research were discussed, we shared these tips for message content:
Consider the preview pane. Most people decide if an email is of interest by previewing it. Make your point early in the text. Include your logo. Placing your logo in the top right or left corner of the message ensures it is seen, and lets your brand help a previewed message get opened. Place your call to action above the “fold.” Tell your customer what you’d like them to do before they need to scroll down the page. Otherwise, they may not make the effort to scroll down to see it.
Testing, testing, testing. Direct marketing was built on the principles of testing, and email marketing is no different. Despite the valuable insight provided in Email Trends, how to make your email creative most effective is going to take some testing. This isn’t new advice for direct marketers, but the beauty of email is the cost-effective, trackable, immediate results that help you build even more successful future campaigns. As the medium evolves and more tools evolve, marketers will have new ways to improve their strategies. Tools like MDR’s newly introduced Hot Leads, for example, provide feedback on who is opening and clicking through your messages while the campaign is under way, so you can immediately feed leads to your sales team or get follow-up information to the recipient right away.