Has a prospective student shown interest in your school? Have they shared their contact information to learn about your school’s offers? If yes, then it’s time for you to trigger your recruitment email campaign.
What is recruitment email marketing? It is an integral marketing tactic for engaging prospective students and nurturing their interest in your school. Perhaps you want to provide more information on a program or lead them to register for an upcoming event. An effective email campaign delivers the right messages to people at the right time.
But there are many features to an email campaign, and understanding the impact of each one will help you to reap the results you want. From the tone of the content to deployment and delivery metrics, your school must know how to master the different layers of an email marketing campaign.
To get you started, here is the anatomy of an effective recruitment email campaign that works to nurture prospects along the enrollment journey to convert them into school applicants.
1. Create a Plan for Your Recruitment Email Campaign
Whether you’re looking to develop an email campaign from scratch or boost your current email marketing engagement, it all starts with creating a plan. The worst thing you can do is send out a mass of generic emails without thought to your audience or the information they need. A good plan will help you hone your email marketing efforts to focus on the right messages for suitable candidates.
What does that look like for your school? First and foremost, that means identifying the audience for your emails. This can be done by looking at your email subscribers and creating different student personas with information on their interests, motivations, and concerns surrounding your school. Details like their education, professional status, location, and more will all play a part in their decision to attend your school. You can then segment your email subscribers into lists depending on their candidate persona. Each list will receive relevant emails with unique messaging that speaks to them.
Once you know who you’re targeting, you can think about what you’re trying to achieve with each email and what kind of content will speak to that goal. Spend time planning between four and six emails with specific purposes, such as improving attendance at an event or getting prospects to meet with an advisor. At the same time, consider the enrollment journey and how your emails can target leads at each stage–what kind of information do they need then? For example, if a prospect has registered their interest in an engineering program, they’ll probably want to learn more about the faculty, courses, and facilities first. Then, you can feed information on the other key details, such as financial aid and application deadlines.
By developing a framework for your recruitment email campaign, you can direct your efforts toward achieving more meaningful outcomes.
2. Subject Lines: Catch the Attention of Prospects
First impressions are everything; subject lines are the first thing prospective students will see in an email. Getting prospects to open your school’s email is half the battle; it’s up to the subject line to generate curiosity. According to a study, 33% of recipients open emails because the subject line is catchy. At the same time, 69% of people will report an email as spam based solely on the subject line. So, how can your school hit the mark?
Creating email subject lines is a chance to get creative with your school’s marketing copy. Aim to strike the right balance between intriguing and relevant. You want to address the concerns or interests of your target audience while enticing them to open the email for more information–and do this all in one line.
Example: An email from Boston University uses a question in its subject line to get recipients thinking about current career opportunities and their next step. Questions are a great way to pique a recipient’s curiosity and lead them to open the email looking for answers.
Another approach your school could take is to be even more upfront. As an educational institution, readers will expect clarity and credibility from your emails. While you want to make your email subject lines enticing, you also want to give prospective students the information they’re looking for.
In the example below, the University of Pennsylvania opts for transparency above all else. The subject line tells prospects what’s inside the email while quickly reminding them of an upcoming event.
Personalization is another essential feature of subject lines. For example, including the prospect’s name in the subject line can let them know that the content of the email is targeting them. We’ll discuss the value of personalization and how to perfect it in more detail later.
Whichever approach you take, subject lines should be unique to each email and relevant to the central message. If the email appears general, vague, or without a purpose, prospects are unlikely to feel any necessity to read it.
Another point to remember is your preheader text (above your subject line in HTML emails). Preheaders are the words displayed at the top of emails and are meant to either describe the content or act as a lighthearted extension of the subject line, giving recipients a preview of the email directly from their inbox.
3. Content: Find the Right Voice for Your Emails
The body of your email should equally be concise, relevant, and engaging. While you want to ensure the content speaks to prospects, you must also ensure your emails are consistent with your school’s marketing style. In other words, the tone and voice of your recruitment email campaign should align with your school’s branding.
Consider the style of your school’s website, blog, and other marketing materials. You want your emails to feel familiar to prospects and reinforce the unique selling points of your institution. Take the example below from McGill University. The content adopts a concise, focused approach that sticks to the school’s central branding as a world-class university. With inspiring phrases like “We want you to dream big and achieve great things,” the content appeals to ambitious applicants looking for a school with a solid academic reputation.
Here, you can refer back to your original plan to identify the goals of your emails and the interests of your target audience and ensure the tone of voice remains true to those.
Add a Personal Touch to Your Emails
What you’ll see in many of these emails are personalization elements. A recruitment email campaign is designed to connect with prospective students who have already registered some interest in your school. In that case, you should be making the most of the information they have given you to show an investment in their future.
Mass emails that feel like mass emails are far more likely to end up in a user’s non-primary or spam folder. According to HubSpot, message personalization is the #1 tactic used by email marketers to increase engagement rates. Something as simple as including a recipient’s name in the subject line of the body of the email can make your content seem more targeted.
The example below from the University of Waterloo serves to welcome new subscribers to its mailing list. Along with the recipient’s name in the subject line, the email also allows prospects to register their interests. Moving forward, prospects can rest assured that they will receive information that is relevant to them.
Your school’s information can also help segment your audience for more targeted messaging.
Another way to personalize your school’s emails is by showcasing the experiences of real students. This tactic can help bring your school to life and distinguish its community from others. Prospects want to feel a meaningful connection with your brand and be able to envision what their own experience at your school will be like. Student testimonials–particularly videos–can add a personal touch to email marketing for colleges.
Example: An email from McMaster University included a video featuring two of its Engineering students. This email is personalized to potential Engineering applicants, intending to educate those prospects and connect them with the community.
Potential applicants who register their interest in the engineering program can hear from those who have been in their positions and can receive more relatable information.
4. CTAs: Lay Out the Next Step for Prospects
A Call to Action (CTA) is where the magic happens. As a part of your school’s more comprehensive marketing strategy, an email campaign must have a purpose–to incite a specific action. CTAs should reflect the original goals of your recruitment email campaign. Ask what your school hopes to achieve with each email, and you’ll have the CTA. That could be anything from booking a first consultation with an advisor to completing the final stage of an application. It all depends on which phase of the enrollment process a prospect is in.
Example: The University of Edinburgh includes two different CTA buttons in an email promoting its upcoming Open Days. Each CTA indicates where users should click to register for a specific event, with colours that correspond to the relevant text.
However, it’s essential to avoid confusing emails with too many CTAs. Research from Wordstream showed that emails with a single call-to-action increased clicks by 371%. Getting people to complete one action is better than asking them to do too much. Signing off each email with a strong CTA–one aligned with the content of your email and the stage of the enrollment process–will leave prospects with a clear idea of the next step they should take.
Example: Cumberland College offers two options – apply online or book your info session.
Source: Cumberland College
5. Delivery: Choose the Right Time to Send Emails
Once you’ve got the body of your emails down, the next step of your recruiting email campaign is feeding that content to prospects at the right time. The challenge is keeping your subscribers engaged while avoiding the spam effect. Careful delivery will help nurture the interest of leads and keep your school front of mind.
If you’re wondering when the best time to send emails is, you can start by thinking about key events around your school and time your emails to market those events. These could include open houses, webinars, high school graduations, or application deadlines. While there’s no set time to send those emails, some studies suggest that Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best days to get your marketing content out there.
The frequency of those emails is another thing to consider. As a general guideline, you should send two to four emails monthly, starting with twice a month and then upping it to weekly. Increasing the pace of your emails will help to encourage engagement from leads, giving them more actions to take as they get closer to the conversion stage.
Two examples from the University of San Diego were sent one week apart. The first email is sent as a reminder of its upcoming application deadline, with the subject line “Mark Your Calendars!” to add a sense of urgency to the email’s delivery.
One week later, the following email was sent to inform prospective students that applications were now open. Each email promptly builds upon the next to remind users of the actions they should be taking.
Don’t be afraid to try out some different schedules for your school’s email campaign to see what works best. Here, marketing automation services can help organize your email campaign delivery. Many schools will seek to reach local and international applicants optimally. Using software like Mautic by HEM, is particularly helpful because it allows you to schedule emails for different contacts based on their time zone. Those schools can segment contacts by admissions stage, program, location, and other criteria to ensure each prospect gets the right message at the right time.
Metrics: Review the Success of Your Email Campaign – Follow-Up
Marketing automation software is also an excellent tool for monitoring and reporting on the success of your efforts. Delivery metrics are the finishing touches of your email marketing campaign, so it’s important to know what you should be tracking and how to interpret the results.
The image below shows a preview of a school email campaign. In the “Email Campaign Performance” section, you can see the total delivery rate, open rate, click-through rate, and more. It also shows how each CTA performed–the number of views and clicks they got. As you can see, the CTA “Download Brochure” received the most clicks for this email campaign at 126.
You can get even more specific with these reviews by getting metrics on how each email performed.
Different metrics will reveal different strengths or weaknesses in your email campaign. Click-through rates, or CTRs, are among the most important metrics to consider, as they refer to the percentage of email recipients who clicked on one or more links in a given email. This gives your school a direct insight into how many subscribers engage with your email’s content. It speaks to the relevance and quality of your content. Likewise, conversion rates indicate the percentage of subscribers who acted, thereby meeting the overall goal of your email.
Getting to grips with the many different components of a recruitment email campaign is half the battle. You need to understand the finer details and visualize an email as a chain of events, each bringing a prospect one step closer to enrollment. With these effective email marketing strategies, your school can begin designing a complete campaign that succeeds in converting leads into applicants.
