A new school year means a new schedule to promote. There will be practices and tests and conferences and workshops, and the list goes on and on. The best way to keep everyone up to date with the latest school happenings is with email marketing. After all, schools need marketing, too!
In the United States, 92% of the population uses email to communicate. That means it’s almost certain that everyone from teachers and students to parents and administrators can be reached by a well-written email. And if you want a little encouragement to get started, here are six tips to help you promote your school events effectively with email marketing.
Use event promotion email templates
Your emails are a representation of your event. Boring text-only emails don’t encourage people to attend. If you want people to show up to your school event, make the layout interesting and exciting with event promotion email templates.
You’re busy keeping a school running. You likely don’t have time to design incredible email layouts from scratch. Luckily, there are hundreds of free event promotion email templates available from websites like PosterMyWall. Without taking much time from your busy schedule, you can choose a template that best fits your school event, customize the information in the editor, and you’re ready to send.
Custom emails don’t have to be a time-consuming chore. Templates make it much easier to send high-quality emails without needing high-quality design skills or lots of free time.
Build your email list
Obviously, if you want to promote your school events with email marketing, you need email addresses to send your messaging to. Building your email contact list is essential to an effective marketing campaign.
Schools typically collect email addresses from parents to help them keep up with school events, and students and teachers are usually given an email address through the school. So you’re already a few steps ahead when it comes to building out your contact list! But even with your already-stacked database, it never hurts to continuously grow your email contact list.
Continuously think of ways to add new email addresses to your contact list. For example, you could add a data collection form on your website asking people to sign up for your newsletter and event update emails. You could even promote that signup form on social media to get even more contacts.
The more emails you send, the more successful your school event email marketing campaigns will be. That’s just statistics!
Segment your contacts
Everyone has different interests, and it’s important to take that into consideration when designing your email marketing campaign. For example, the parent of a third grader likely wouldn’t be interested in an eighth-grade graduation ceremony. Sending them an email would just be annoying and fill up their inbox.
Breakdown your contact list into different segments to send more personalized emails based on the contacts’ interests. Here are a few of the email marketing segments schools could use to divide up their contact lists:
- Grade level
- Districts or schools
- Interests (sports, band, academics, clubs, etc.)
- Status (teacher, student, parent, donors, etc.)
With your contacts all nice and divided up, you can customize the emails for each audience. For example, teachers can get more behind-the-scenes updates and schedules for the events they’ll likely have to manage, while students and parents could get more basic and fun information about the events to encourage attendance.
It might mean you have to design a few more emails for each event, but segmentation is one of the best ways to boost your email success rates and promote your events.
Write an attention-grabbing subject line
The subject line is the first thing people see when they get your email. And according to studies, 33% of recipients will decide whether or not to open the email based solely on the subject line. That means it has to be good!
Keep your subject lines short and sweet. Longer subject lines tend to get cut off, leaving all your amazing writing hidden by three little dots… The best email subject lines are between six and ten words long.
You should also put the value statement toward the front of the subject line. The value statement is what the reader will get if they open your email. In the case of school events, it’s usually the event’s name.
For example, if you want to remind everyone about the upcoming school sports day, don’t make your subject line “Coming up, we have a full-day event to play sports.” Many email recipients might only see “Coming up, we have…” which isn’t very exciting and doesn’t provide any information.
Rather, put the value up front: “School sports day! Come have fun September 17th!” No matter how the email platform cuts off your subject line, everyone will know the email is about the very exciting school sports day — shown by the exclamation points.
Include a call to action
Every email should have a purpose, and a call to action (CTA) is the final push to get the reader to do what you want them to do toward that purpose. It’s like a stepping stone to take them from the email toward a specific action.
In the case of school events, you probably want readers to add whatever event you’re promoting to their calendar. Your CTA could be a button that says “Add to calendar” which links them to their email platform’s calendar feature. You could also opt for the ever-popular “Learn More” which could link to a page on your website outlining all the event details.
Think about what you want the reader to do after seeing your email and give them a very obvious clue about where to go next at the bottom. Otherwise, they might just read your email, enjoy your lovely message, and click out, never to take action toward remembering or attending your school event.
Track the results
Your email marketing campaign doesn’t end once you hit the send button. It’s important to continue to track analytics to determine the success of your campaign and what elements you can improve for future sends.
Most email marketing platforms allow you to track the major key performance indicators (KPI) for each of your sends. Here are the main email marketing KPI you should always keep an eye on:
- Clickthrough rate
- Open rate
- Forwarding rate
- Conversion rate
- Unsubscribe rate
You can use these KPI to improve future campaigns. For example, if you add a fun video of the kids having fun at last year’s event and your conversion rate goes through the roof, you know your recipients like to see fun videos in your emails. You should do that more often!
Over time, you can use your analytics knowledge to design the most effective email marketing campaigns possible to promote your school events.
Promote your school events with the power of email marketing
It’s the 21st Century; everyone has an email address! And by sending some well-designed and well-written emails, you can effectively promote your school’s event calendar to anyone who needs to know about it.
When designing your school email marketing campaign, it’s always best to use high-quality event promotion templates, build out your email contact list, segment your contacts, write a great subject line, include a killer CTA, and always track the results. With a great email marketing campaign, there’s no way anyone will miss your future school events ever again!
