3 Reasons Why Your Institution Needs Email Marketing

Email campaigns are indispensable to your university or business school's marketing strategy.

This study shows that each year since 1997 – varying between 64% to 78% – colleges reported increases in applications over the previous year as a result of email marketing.

They are so important for maintaining and strengthening relationships with existing subscribers and helpful with attaining new ones.

Are suggestions email marketing has become outdated accurate? This evidence suggests otherwise.

We have put together 3 key reasons why email marketing is still the best way to communicate with students.

1. Better reach from emails compared with social media

This argument represents old-school marketing techniques against the modern day marketing avenues that social media has opened up. It may be a surprise to some, that despite the prominence of social media in an ever developing online landscape, there are 3x times the number of email accounts than Facebook and Twitter combined.This represents a huge difference in your potential reach.

People are increasingly likely to check their emails more frequently than social media accounts. An incredible 58% of online consumers check their email first thing in the morning. compared with just 11% for Facebook.

2. Easy to personalize for different groups & campaigns

Personalizing your emails to segments of your audience will increase conversations and generate more engagement. In fact, even a personalized subject line is 26% more likely to be opened.

Although your student subscribers may share a broad common objective, it is important to note that their interests and preferences will differ.

Some brands recorded 8x improvement on click-through rates with a personalized video compared with their previous, standard outbound email campaigns.

Consumers are quite simply more engaged by original content. Email campaigns provide a platform to avoid generic, and in some cases irrelevant, cross-posting.

3. Be sure of delivery

Whether it's physical advertisement or through social media, how can you be sure that prospects will see your content? We can't be assured of delivery quite frankly, especially when you consider social media platforms and search engines have algorithms that filter out content according to particular metrics.

It can be the case that you spend much of your time integrating an SEO strategy or social media marketing to gain online leverage but email marketing skips the middle man.

The above infographic makes for interesting reading. Based on our evidence on SM algorithms and effectiveness, you could use an email campaign to gain leverage over competitors prioritizing social media.

Although it is important to adapt to marketing consumerism and move with the times, this is by no means an 'out with the old and in with the new' scenario. Email campaigns should remain a part of your institution's marketing furniture.

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