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Email Marketing Strategies & Tips for Higher Education
The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing in Higher Education
Nicola Vaughan
October 15th, 2024
Email marketing is a highly effective tool for higher education. It allows facilities to stay in touch with current students and marketing to prospective students.
94% of students open emails from a college/university, but did you know that only 20% will remember an email from a particular institution (Ruffalo Noel Levitz)?
Ensuring that emails stand out is vital in securing new applicants. In this guide, we’ll consider the steps for a great email marketing strategy for higher education. We’ll discuss the importance of email marketing for education, building email lists, and content/design, plus tips for measuring results.
Table of Contents
The Role of Email Marketing in Higher Education
In 2023, the current generation of students (Generation Z) has an increased mobile usage of 82% when compared with the previous year (Statista). With screens and mobile devices becoming an ever-important part of day-to-day life, marketing to students via these platforms has never been more crucial.
So how significant is email marketing in engaging prospective students, current students, alumni, and donors?
Importance of Email Marketing for Universities and Colleges
Email marketing allows you to target a range of audiences where they’re already spending a lot of their time – on their phones/laptops.
Here are a few ways you can utilize email marketing for a higher education facility:
Drive enrollments: New students are fundamental to colleges/universities, and email can help you target potential applicants at the click of a button.
Communicate with existing students/staff/donors: Your existing students, staff members, and donors should never be forgotten about when it comes to outgoing communication.
From day-to-day updates to shouting about your recent achievements - whatever you have to say, email is a great way of keeping in touch with those currently engaged with your institution.
Build relationships: If you’re looking to build relationships with other local education facilities, charities, or educators, email marketing is super helpful. You can send out regular emails to a range of mailing lists, keeping in touch and driving engagement.
Maintain alumni support: Keeping previous students updated with the goings on of your college/university can encourage those with a great experience to keep recommending you. A regular email to recent alumni can go a long way in maintaining a good reputation.
Building a Comprehensive Email List for Higher Education
The first step in creating an email marketing strategy for higher education is compiling email lists.
You’ll need separate lists for each audience; let’s delve into collecting emails for prospective students and collecting/maintaining lists for current students/alumni.
Collecting Emails From Prospective Students
Prospective students are a key audience for higher educational facilities. We know that email plays a key role in securing new applicants, so what are the best ways to collect emails from potential students?
Campus tours: Prospective students touring your university may require more information from specific departments depending on their course. Collecting their emails at different points throughout the tour is a great way of communicating with them regarding their chosen course and improving the chances of them choosing your facility.
College fairs: If you’re a college, fairs and open days can be a great source for data capture. You could run competitions/raffles requiring a valid email address to take part or send follow-up information via email after the event.
Website sign-ups: Your website will be a key channel for new email sign-ups. From brochure downloads to financial aid, there are many opportunities here for capturing prospective student email addresses. You could even offer consulting services via email for students looking for extra information on a course!
Social media: Prospective students will likely follow your college/university on social media to see what the culture is like and the day-to-day goings on. Giveaways and competitions on social media are a great way of collecting data -- simply choose an exciting prize and request email addresses in return for taking part.
Engaging Current Students and Alumni
While new student applications are important, you’ll also want to engage with current students and alumni with your email marketing strategy.
Keeping your current audience happy is crucial in improving/maintaining the reputation of your college/university.
It’s also important to ensure that courses and events have good attendance, as well as getting important day-to-day communications out there.
You can collect and maintain email addresses from current students and alumni using the following channels:
Portals: Students and alumni spend a great deal of time using these online portals for their university/college, making them ideal opportunities for data capture. You could request an email address for brochure downloads, for example, or allow students to input an email address to receive regular notifications/updates on their courses.
Events: Student/alumni events can provide extra ways of collecting data. Offering branded freebies such as pens, bags, and notebooks is a good way of requesting email addresses in return for something free. You could also integrate data capture when people sign up for events, providing the opportunity to market to them later.
Alumni networks: Former students often join alumni networks to keep in touch with previous classmates/lecturers and to learn about opportunities that may interest them. Setting up alumni networks that require an email address to join can provide a new stream for collecting alumni emails, while also keeping past students updated with the goings-on of your facility.
For more ideas on building an email list, check out the beehiiv blog!
Creating Personalized and Relevant Email Content
When it comes to crafting content for your subscribers, you’ll need to ensure that the content is personalized and relevant.
This content may differ depending on whether a subscriber is a current student, prospective student, or alumni member.
Segmenting Your Audience by Academic Interests
Audience segmentation is highly successful in providing relevant content to different subscribers.
Segmentation allows you to separate audiences by attribute to provide different subscribers with more relevant information. For example, you could segment audiences by academic interests and create emails based on different courses to send to relevant subscribers.
You could also segment your subscribers by demographic. For example, you could send all male students information on the male sports associations that are available for them to join.
Developing Content for Different Stages of the Student Journey
Students at different points in their academic journey will expect different communications from their chosen college/university. This can inform the type of content you’ll want to send them via email.
For prospective students, you could send application tips, for example, giving them tips on being successful in their sign-up. Campus news would be useful for current students, and success stories may be of interest to alumni.
Brainstorm what kind of content you’d like to send to particular audiences in order to have content prepared for all subscribers regardless of where they’re at in their journey.
Designing Engaging and Effective Email Campaigns
With students being on top of their game when it comes to the digital age, a great email design can’t be overlooked.
So how do you make sure your email design stands out and performs well?
Best Practices for Higher Education Email Design
When designing your email template, be sure you follow the below best practices:
Responsive design: With mobile devices accounting for 60% of email reads (Tech Report), it’s more important than ever for your email template to have a responsive design. Test your email on multiple devices/screen sizes to ensure that all images, buttons, and templates display correctly.
High-quality campus imagery: Campus imagery is great content to include in your emails, but only if it’s of the very best quality. Consider employing an on-site photographer to enable you to best show off your college/university or give the opportunity to a student, so they can gain some extra experience!
Clear CTAs: Calls to Action (CTAs) are vital in email marketing, and higher education email marketing is no different. CTAs help guide your subscribers to other sources such as your website or social media pages, helping to drive new applications and interest. Make sure that your CTAs are clear to ensure that the conversion rate is as high as possible.
Utilizing Branded Email Templates
Branding is super important when it comes to email design, particularly when emailing from an educational facility. Colleges and universities are usually well-known brands, so emails need to reflect professional branding to uphold those strong reputations.
Using a consistent, branded email template can help ensure that your branding is professional and always adhered to.
Creating a set of brand guidelines can help with brand consistency in email templates. These guidelines should dictate the correct colors, fonts, and typefaces that must be used when creating any marketing material, ensuring that all branding is consistent and professional across different platforms.
Consistent branding will also ensure that your brand is recognized, helping to further bolster your brand awareness and drive new inquiries.
For some recommended email templates for higher education emails, check out the beehiiv blog.
Why Trust Me? I have been working in the digital marketing space for nearly 10 years, predominantly helping brands with their email marketing and online presence. I now specialize in creating great content for beehiiv to help people nail their email strategies!
Leveraging Email Automation for Higher Education
Email automation can save you time and provide extra growth opportunities with your email marketing.
There are many ways that email automation can benefit you if you work in the higher education sector -- from automating a welcome series for new students to automating content such as event invitations and reminders.
Automated Welcome Series for New Students
Welcoming new students to your institution is crucial in making them feel welcome and retaining them for the duration of their course. Setting a great first impression will solidify their choice to study with you, but a welcome series of emails can be time-consuming -- this is where automation comes in.
Email automation can trigger specific emails at set times. This involves setting up a specific mailing list for new students and applying automation with several emails aimed at welcoming them to your university/college.
You could provide important information and resources as part of these emails, giving new students a warm welcome in their first few weeks of study.
Automating Event Invitations and Reminders
Another great use of automation in higher education emails is for event invitations and reminders. If you work in this sector, you’ll know that colleges and universities run many events, and good attendance is crucial.
Design a compelling email advertising your event with a captivating subject line and set up an automation to send it to all relevant students in the months, weeks, and days before an upcoming event. This email could be repurposed for campus events, open houses, and webinars.
By automating this process, you can ensure that all students are aware of the upcoming events at your college/university to ensure that attendance numbers are tip-top.
beehiiv specializes in automation to save you time on your email marketing campaigns. See how we can help with automating your email strategy here.
Measuring the Success of Email Campaigns
The last step in a successful email campaign for higher education is measuring results.
By tracking how well your email marketing performs, you can make decisions on future content based on what has worked in the past and what needs improvement.
Check out the sections below for key metrics you should be tracking and how you can use A/B testing to optimize performance.
Key Metrics for Higher Education Email Marketing
Here are some key metrics that you should be tracking for your email marketing campaigns:
Open rates: Open rate dictates the percentage of your subscribers that have opened one of your emails. Aim for an open rate of between 25% - 35%. Open rate varies in different industries, but this is a great place to start.
Click-through rates: Click-through rate is the percentage of users that have clicked on a link in one of your emails. This indicates how engaging your emails are by tracking how many subscribers are inclined to click through to your website or social media channels.
Conversion rates: The conversion rate determines how many subscribers complete a conversion/action via email. This could be completing a transaction on your website, for example. If your click-through rate is low, you may need to work on improving some of the CTAs in your email to ensure that your subscribers are drawn to completing a conversion.
Event attendance: Event attendance can indicate how successful your emails advertising your event are. If your events aren’t attracting many people, try sending more updates and reminders of your latest college/university events via email to ensure that your subscribers know about your latest events.
Using A/B Testing To Optimize Performance
A/B Testing is highly effective in establishing which elements of your email marketing strategy perform well as well as those that could use some improvement.
This technique involves sending out the same emails multiple times with slight variations to see how a particular feature performs. An example of this would be sending out the same email with differing subject lines to see which subject line leads to the best open rate.
You could also use A/B testing to test out different content in your emails. You could switch up the order in which you show content or include different content blocks in your email to see which has the best click-through rate/conversion rate.
A/B testing can also be used to establish the best times for sending emails. Try sending out the same content at different times of the day/days of the week to see which emails are more successful.
Conclusion
We hope that you now have a good understanding of email marketing strategy for higher education. Now it’s time to get started!
To summarize, make sure you collect a great set of mailing lists for your email marketing campaigns with students, new applicants, staff, and alumni making up your subscribers. Focus on relevant, engaging content with a slick design that is responsive and stands out, and don’t forget to try out automation and A/B testing to improve your results.
With these steps and the right email marketing tools, you’ll enhance engagement, increase new enrollments, and strengthen your relationships with others in your community.
If you’re looking for an email marketing platform to create newsletters for your college/university, look no further than beehiiv. beehiiv offers a user-friendly interface to design beautiful email newsletters, as well as advanced functionality such as A/B testing, automation, segmentation, and an in-depth reporting dashboard.
Start your free, 30-day trial with beehiiv today and get started!
Frequently Asked Questions
Take a look at these frequently asked questions about email marketing in higher education to learn more.
Can email marketing also be used to build relationships with your audience?
Email marketing is a highly successful way of building relationships with your audience.
Sending subscribers regular emails ensures that your brand is always present in their thoughts. Giving your emails a personalized twist can further enhance this, helping to improve customer loyalty and retention.
What are the advantages of email in education?
There are many advantages of email in the education sector.
Email helps colleges/universities keep in touch with current students, staff, and alumni, while also conducting outreach campaigns to onboard prospective students.
It is also useful in streamlining communication and ensuring that students have access to the latest resources needed for their course.
Do you need permission to send marketing emails?
It is very important to have permission from all subscribers before sending out marketing emails. This is to ensure that you are complying with the latest GDPR, which protects users from receiving unwanted emails.
However, it is worth bearing in mind that if users have previously shown interest in your services, it could be considered to be ‘implied consent’. This means that while they haven’t directly subscribed to your mailing list, they would likely be happy to receive emails from you, as they are aware of your brand, having shown interest in it previously.
Do people prefer email marketing?
There is some evidence to suggest that people prefer email marketing over other marketing channels.
In 2023, a study showed that 55% of consumers chose email as their preferred channel for business communication (Constant Contact). This may be because email is quick, efficient, and can reach many people in a relatively cost-effective way.
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