Email
Frequently Asked Questions
With summer underway and schools making plans for the upcoming
year, now is a good time to answer some typical questions
we have received from our more experienced as well as our
novice readers.
How many fields or questions should I have on my email signup
form or survey?
When creating your email signup form or survey, remember what
your goal is. If you are only going to use this data to publish
an email newsletter, than it's probably best to only collect
the minimum to get maximum registrations: email address, first
name, high school, street address, graduation year and zip
code. If you are specifically targeting a certain type of
student, then additional demographic and behavioral questions
are imperative. You can also test mandatory and optional fields
by dividing your list into a test sample of your database.
Consider making some questions optional and throw in an incentive
for the subscriber to complete all fields.
 What’s
the key to obtaining a high
open rate?
Email is a relationship-building medium which means that your
captured audience will inevitably open at a higher rate. Captured
audiences – meaning audiences that have expressed interest
in receiving information from your school, applicants or audiences
that are stake-holders in the college or university such as
alumni, current students and parents – will open at
a high rate of 30-45%. Following email marketing “best
practices” techniques and offering compelling content
can push these messages into the 50% plus range, while sending
an additional message to those who opened initial emails leads
to a 40-60% open rate. Mailings that are sent to non-captured
audiences – purchased lists of high school students
who have expressed general interest in receiving general college
information – the open rates will be much lower than
those of the more interested constituents outlined above.
With a well thought out message incorporating a provocative
subject line and strong HTML content, these messages can expect
8-12% open rates. Sending an additional message to the same
mailing list tends to yield an additional 5% in opens from
recipients who did not open the first message.
 What's
the key to analyzing and utilizing campaign metrics?
Every piece of reporting you analyze needs to be viewed based
on your initial goals. Then you can dive deeper into the more
specific campaign reporting. The percentage of click-throughs
is more often than not, more powerful and revealing than overall
opens. This means that of all of the recipients who opened
your email, those who clicked on a link are your target audience.
This is a genuine indicator of recipients who were interested
in the email and then clicked on a link. Multi-opens are also
strong indicators of interest. Sending a subsequent email
to those who click-through or multi-open an email yields opens
in the 40-60% open range. Email campaigns usually get the
majority of their response in the first 72 hours, but with
the immediacy of real-time metrics, a regular pattern of monitoring
and pulling data should be established, and don't rule out
later open patterns. Teenagers have a tendancy to save certain
emails to open over the weekend.
What is the most significant and underutilized
area in
email marketing?
Schools spend thousands of dollars on using lead generation
data from areas like telemarketing and direct mail, but for
email campaigns it is often left alone to rot in spreadsheet
purgatory. Since almost every email deployment platform provides
the email addresses and information of who clicked on a link,
you should use this information for future email campaigns.
Don't forget the power of email in addition to the relationship
marketing portion of the program. Email affords the opportunity
to collect immediate results so that you can apply your metrics
to your user's behavior. Applying knowledge gained from what
a user clicks on can tell you a lot about their behavior and
possibly turn a chronic browser into a future student.
If you have any questions, please contact Lisa Munns at lmunns@studenthorizons.com.
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