Email Marketing Best Practices: 5 Effective Email Marketing Tips for the Education Market

Email marketing is a very important aspect of a business. A successful email marketing campaign can extend your reach, generate leads, make you money, and demonstrate your company’s thought leadership. The following tips can help you create and implement an email marketing campaign that produces results.

Tip 1: Know the best time of day for your recipients

The best way to find out the right time of day to send your email is to experiment. Rather than sending an email to a large number of people all at once, send the email out in batches over the course of the day (segmenting by time zone) and gauge open rates. It should take you a week or less to figure out the perfect time. You can also employ this method in identifying the best day of the week.

Tip 2: Don’t exhaust your recipients

To avoid “email fatigue,” keep these principles in mind:

•      Never send an email “just because”
•      Ask yourself, “What’s in it for them?”
•      If there isn’t a “call to action” with your message, it might not be worth sending

Sending too many emails can be counterproductive. Be sure to keep an eye on your unsubscribe rate—is it going up? If so, adjust your sending frequency accordingly.

Tip 3: A/B testing

A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a method of testing two variants to see which one works better. Testing different content in your subject line is the most popular route to go, to see how your open and click rates are affected. When using A/B testing, test only one thing in your email message at a time. Using too many variables makes it difficult to know where to attribute the outcome(s). Finally, perform your A/B testing on a small group first, then select the higher performing variant to use with the rest of your group.

Tip 4: Carefully craft your subject line

Your subject line can make or break you. Check out the following subject line word tips:

•      Words you should consider using: you, your, exclusive, today, private, top, preview, limited, select.
•      Words you should avoid: we, our, hurry, meeting, chat, quick, reminder, might, featured.

Tip 5: Focus on function over form

Be careful with how you use images. Having a “pretty” email is not the most important thing—having an email that helps you reach your goals is. A ratio of 80% text to 20% images is recommended. Most email programs block the automatic download of images by default, which could cause your recipients to delete your email or mark it as spam. As a general guideline, use images sparingly and keep your text separate from your images—that way, if the image won’t download, at least the important text will be there.

These five tips can help make your next email marketing campaign more effective. Once your campaign is up and running, it will be an invaluable revenue-generating asset. For four decades, MMS Education has been helping companies like yours market, sell, launch, and manage free products and programs to schools and can help you do the same. Call us today at 866-382-6116 or fill out this form to see how MMS Education can help you reach, engage, and measure impact in the pre-K–12 education market.