How Your University Can Get an A+ in Email Marketing

Let’s talk a little bit about email marketing versus email nurturing for your college or university. The main thing I want you to remember is email marketing done right IS email nurturing. I think one of the main differences is reach.

What Is Email Marketing & Email Nurturing?

Email marketing is a one to many style of communication. You are sending the same message to a huge list of people with no regard for their audience, where they are in the buying cycle, or your previous engagement with them.

The reach of email nurturing is much more limited because it is a one-to-one. You want to send a customized message to an applicant versus a student, versus a donor. Demandgen.com ran a report that shows email nurturing gets four to ten times the response rate over standalone email blasts.

Marketing vs. Nurturing

Email marketing is broad. You are sending the same message to everyone. Email nurturing is very personalized. You are sending that message to the right person based on all the information you should have gathered about them. Segmentation is crucial here. If you are not segmenting your list, then you are setting yourself up for failure. You need to know what email address belongs to all those various audiences if you are going to be able to tailor the message to them.

Obviously this kind of email marketing, this nurturing email, is much more time consuming but the statistics don’t lie. It’s also much more effective and converts at a much higher rate. Another great stat for you: Personalized, relevant email drives 18 times the revenue. When you are in a fairly high touch offerings such as an undergraduate degree in MBA, a graduate degree or whatever the case may be, you need to be as targeted as you possibly can when you are communicating with those audiences. You want to nurture them through the sales cycle and ultimately have them take whatever action it is you want them to take.

Forming a Strategy

I think the third main difference is email marketing is often times very sporadic. When you have something to say, you are blasting the message out. Email nurturing is extremely strategic. You have got to take the time to sit down and:

  • Define each audience
  • Define the messages going to each
  • Develop the content
  • Schedule your messages

This strategy is absolutely crucial because you need to think through what info is going to be most relevant to each of those audiences. We know 53% of buyers stop engaging if they receive irrelevant content. Think about the emails you receive in your inbox, the lists you unsubscribe from, the messages you automatically delete when you are in your frenzy of deleting emails and trying to clear out your inbox using your iPhone on your way to work. Your targets are no different, so you have got to keep that in mind.

Considering email marketing as a whole has about a 4000% return on investment, now is the time to double-down on email marketing for your college or university because it works.

Stay tuned. This month we are going to be talking about a lot of various email marketing strategies and we have some good stuff coming up soon.

Email Marketing vs. Email Nurturing infographic