Email Marketing Strategies for Higher Education Prospects

Are you aiming to increase brand awareness for your higher education institution? According to a recent report on high school students, email is the preferred communication method for students, resulting in 97% of students being willing to share their email addresses. Therefore, email marketing can boost your institution’s recruiting efforts and enrollment rates by increasing awareness and engagement. Here are email marketing best practices and strategies to reach and engage higher education prospects.

1. Optimize email communications for mobile.

When students around the globe were forced to continue their studies remotely, students learned to rely on their mobiles more than ever to complete course-related activities such as checking schedules, due dates, announcements, and grades. Ensure that your email marketing campaigns are optimized for mobile and that your content management system supports mobile responsiveness.

2. Segment lists with demographic data.

Remember that senior high school students have different goals and interests than juniors and sophomores. By segmenting your mailing list, you ensure that you’re tailoring relevant content and reaching the right students depending on their stage of the college search journey. A senior, for example, is already looking for what a specific college can offer them and is at a consideration stage and nearing decision-making. On the other hand, a junior or sophomore is just beginning to research. Some additional demographic data that can help you design the right content and target the right audience may include extracurricular interests that apply to certain programs or majors you offer.

3. Leverage parent interest.

Most senior students say their parents are involved in their college search. Therefore, your email marketing efforts shouldn’t only be focused on graduating high school students but also on the parents of seniors, juniors, and even sophomores. Segment your mailing list to reach parents of high school students to build brand awareness and influence.

4. Create personalized experiences.

Personalization in email marketing should go beyond addressing the recipient by their first name. Create memorable experiences by personalizing emails with resources and images that reflect the prospect’s demographic or specific program of interest.

5. Increase brand awareness and recognition.

When designing email marketing campaigns, be consistent about branding. Be consistent about elements like school colors, logos, style, tone, and design elements. By emphasizing these elements consistently, you raise brand recognition, which helps email recipients not only recognize you but remember you.

6. Create personalized, interactive, and dynamic content.

Tailor to students’ interests and requests for information with personalized videos and dynamic presentations sent via email. Include compelling videos and images such as campus tours, brand stories, 3D tours of facilities, student testimonials, and clips of lectures. These types of emails are engaging and, therefore, increase attention, retention, and conversion rates.

7. Maintain a clean student contact database.

CLEAN-Student is the solution for dealing with all of your student contact data throughout the various stages of a student’s life cycle – from recruiting to graduation. CLEAN_Student integrates seamlessly into most Student Information Systems with no change in user experience.

RunnerEDQ not only helps ensure that your student contact data is clean, but our solutions can boost your data with valuable demographic information and improve your email marketing strategies.