December is crunch time for new student enrollment season. Students are submitting their final applications and working to meet enrollment deadlines. Because of this, it is critical to create compelling marketing during that time of the year that connects with students. This will help push them over the edge to apply to your university. At FrescoData, we have carefully compiled five of the best practices for higher education to reach their targeted email address lists during this critical time.
Develop Compelling Subject Lines
In order to gain student interest, it is critical to grab their attention the moment they encounter your email campaigns. They have a variety of higher education emails landing in their inbox, so yours must stand out in order for them to open it. This is why creating attention-grabbing subject lines is so important. We suggest taking the time to carefully craft subject lines that will resonate deeply with your audience. This will help improve the open rates for your campaigns.
Your Email Sender Matters
Most email clients organize inboxes with the sender name on the left, followed by the subject line and finally by the preheader text. People who speak English will read left to right, meaning that they will start scanning their inboxes by reading the sender name first. This means choosing a sender name is of critical importance in order to produce higher open rates for your campaigns. Choose senders who names are recognizable. This will help personalize your email campaigns to your targeted email address list. If this is not possible, then you should switch to your organizations name. The goal is to have your audience resonate with your emails and ultimately open them. Take the time to think through your strategy and choose an email sender that works best for your campaigns.
Branding that Stands Out
When sending out email campaigns, it is crucial that you think through the email templates you use in your campaigns. Not only do they need to be consistent with university branding, but they should work with the content within the email. The way your content is laid out within your emails can drive certain actions from your audience. This can lead to higher click-through rates in your campaigns. Taking the time to create a well-crated campaign can play a huge role in your email’s success.
It’s Important to Personalize
Do you have a database with information about your target students? It is critical that you take that information and use it to segment your audience. This will help you personalize your campaigns for these audience segments. Audience segmentation is important because it will help your university properly target its potential students. Student A might have the same interests as Student B, but they might be totally different than the interests of Student C and D. By segmenting your audience into likeminded groups, you can ensure that the messages you send out will resonate with all your audience members. This increases the chances of your university building brand awareness among students and increasing admissions.
Time Your Emails Correctly
Is your university sending out emails at 8AM every time they send out a campaign? This may be detrimental to the success of your email marketing. It is important to take notice of your audience. If sending emails to students, do it either before 7 AM or after 3 PM. Why? Because these are the times they are not at school. It is critical that you put yourself in your audience’s shoes. This will help you determine the right time of the day to send out your email campaigns and have the most people engage with it.
Bonus: Use a Targeted Email Address List
The foundation of any solid email marketing plan is a database of valid email address. FrescoData offers targeted email address lists for students that are valid and up-to-date. We are able to take our robust lists of valid email addresses and combine it with other data for enhanced data intelligence. This will give your university the security of knowing it is marketing to the right target students the first time and not wasting its marketing budget on unsuccessful campaigns.
