Higher Education Email Marketing Must-Knows

Email marketing for higher ed is stressful. There's nothing quite like the anxiety of pressing "send" on an email for thousands of people.

I've felt that ping of anxiety hundreds (yikes!) of times myself. I've made my fair share of email marketing mishaps, so I'm writing down some of my top tips and the latest in email marketing news so you don't have to make the same mistakes I did.

Keep in mind that email marketing effectiveness has been declining for students for a while now. However, if you're going to utilize email marketing, there are some things to remember.

Let's dive into the latest on higher education email marketing, explore key ways to protect your email domain health, and reflect on some best practices for college email marketing.

• What Email Marketers Are Talking About Right Now
  • The Promotions Tab
  • Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP)
  • Spam Filters
  • CAN-SPAM Act and GDPR
• Key Ways to Protect Your Email Domain Health
  • Build Your Email Lists Organically
  • Clean Your Email Lists
  • Segment Your Emails
• Email Marketing Best Practices to Boost ROI and Engagement
  • Best Practices for Emailing High School Students
  • Best Practices for Emailing Parents/Guardians
• A Higher Ed Email Marketing Alternative to Consider

What Email Marketers Are Talking About Right Now

Here's the newest higher education email marketing info you need to know (plus some tidbits to keep in mind along the way). 

The Promotions Tab

Gmail is the most popular email client (with 29.5% of the global market share).

If you hop into your Gmail inbox, you may notice folders on the left-hand side of your screen, including "Promotions."

This is where marketing emails go to die.

If your marketing emails fall into the Promotions tab in Gmail, that means Gmail has categorized your email as marketing-forward. While the Promotions tab isn't a death sentence per se, folks are much less likely to open emails that fall into the Promotions tab than emails that go to the Primary inbox.

There are a couple of ways you can find out if your marketing emails are going in the dreaded Promotions tab:

• Create a brand new personal Gmail account for testing purposes. Send one of your emails to this account, and see where it lands. For this to reliably work, you must never open any emails sent to this address; simply send and observe
• Ask your students and parents/guardians where your emails are landing in their inbox. You could call your customers yourself or have Customer Success reach out

If you find your emails are going to the Promotions tab (or want to prevent that from happening), consider a few approaches:

• Ask your subscribers to move your emails to the Primary tab (out of the Promotions tab)
• A/B test sending your emails using a person's name vs. your institution's name and see if one version has a higher open rate. Go with whatever leads to a higher open rate (Brand recognition is important, but your audience may surprise you. Emails sent by a person may have a higher open rate.)
• Focus on being helpful in your marketing emails to build trust with your audience. Share content that parents/guardians and students look forward to reading!

Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP)

While the new (as of September 2021) Apple MPP situation doesn't necessarily impact higher education email marketing strategy, it's an important thing to keep in mind.

Essentially, Apple's MPP allows Apple Mail users to hide if (and when) they open emails. Any Apple Mail users with iOS 15 or higher can opt into this.

Apple has not shared how many users have opted in, so it's going to be really hard (if not impossible) to know how many of your contacts have opted into Apple MPP.

Constant Contact has a great article explaining Apple MPP in more detail.

The key takeaway here is that your email marketing reporting (especially open rate reporting) is likely not as reliable as it used to be. So if a large proportion of your email lists are using Apple Mail and you've found that your average open rate has dropped since September 2021, that may be a contributing factor.

I'd recommend checking how many of your contacts are using Apple Mail, just for context as you're analyzing your email reports and evaluating email performance.

Spam Filters

Here are things that may be a red flag to email clients:

• Veering away from including video and PDF links in emails
• Adding attachments to your emails
• Not including an easily findable unsubscribe link in your email
• Using lots of exclamation points, all caps, and/or urgent language (like "buy now" or "free")
• Using a ton of images (When you use images, be sure to compress them. I've been using TinyPNG for years.)

Here are things that you can do to prevent your emails from going to spam (some of which I share more about later in this article):

• Build your email lists organically instead of sending emails to contacts who have not opted into your email communications directly
• Use double opt-in
• Ensure your email domain has DMARC, SPF, DKIM, and BIMI set up for authentication purposes. Your tech team can likely help you with this
• Regularly clean your email lists (remove bounced contacts, etc.)
• Segment your lists and use suppression lists
• Determine when contacts will be deemed "unengaged" and create a plan to re-engage them or have them fall off your email lists
• Comply with CAN-SPAM and GDPR (more on that next)

HubSpot has a great article with a bunch of other ways to avoid your emails ending up in spam.

CAN-SPAM Act and GDPR

Check-in with your legal team to ensure you comply with these laws. Make sure to read up on the latest news on the laws and potential future legislation.

Below are the basics of these regulations. Please consult your legal team and/or a legal advisor for more details. Scoir does not provide legal advice or consul.

CAN-SPAM

Who it applies to: All companies sending emails to U.S. citizens

High-level requirements: To make an unsubscribe link easily accessible in your emails

GDPR

Who it applies to: All companies who send emails to/from citizens of the EU

High-level requirements: To gain informed consent before sending an email, and allow people to revoke their consent at any time

Key Ways to Protect Your Email Domain Health

In addition to the tips already mentioned, here are some additional email health best practices to remember.

Build Your Email Lists Organically

This is the best way to simultaneously achieve a high ROI from your higher education email marketing, comply with GDPR, and be the most helpful for your audience.

Optimize your website and make it easy for students and parents/guardians to sign up for your mailing list. Consider starting a newsletter with helpful college and career discovery tips, sharing student stories, providing information on financial aid, etc.

The Potential Impact of Sending Emails to Purchased Lists

While we're on the topic of list building, here are some risks of sending emails to purchased lists:

• Risk of a high bounce rate
• Potential non-compliance with GDPR and other regulations
• Low ROI compared to organically building your email list

Plus, with the search cliff, fewer student names will be available for purchase. The time to start building your email list organically is asap!

Clean Your Email Lists

Have a system for regularly cleaning your email lists (and make sure you document it!).

Your email marketing tool may help you achieve this by marking contacts as unengaged or bounced, and automatically suppressing them from your email communications. I'd double-check that this is indeed happening. Otherwise, you'd need to create those suppression lists yourself in your CRM/marketing automation tool.

There are also many tools out there that can clean your email lists for you and detect emails that are no longer valid (aka, email inboxes that have closed or have too many emails in them to receive any more mail).

In addition to this, be sure to spot-check your email lists occasionally for anything unusual. For instance, role-based emails like counseling@school.com typically have a low open rate and high bounce rate, and you may want to consider suppressing them from your marketing emails.

Segment Your Emails

Take some time to reevaluate your email lists. Consider:

• What topics do we currently share in our marketing emails, and what do we want to start sharing?
• What types of people will like this content the most?
• What are some key indicators in our CRM that we can use to segment our lists (beyond class year)?

While you're at it, revisit (or create) email automatic nurture paths to nurture your audience through the funnel. Even better, A/B test each email.

Email Marketing Best Practices to Boost ROI and Engagement

Best Practices for Emailing High School Students

When a typical high school student's inbox looks like this, you need to consider how you're going to stand out amidst the noise.

Here are some ways you can achieve that:

• Speak their language
• Meet them where they're at
• Email in moderation
• Keep it brief
• Keep it helpful
• Be authentic

Scoir held an event What Students Really Want to Hear From Colleges that has a lot more helpful tips on emailing students. Here is a blog post recap of the event to check out as well.

I also wrote a blog post on Content Topics to Consider for Each Enrollment Funnel Stage if you're looking for content ideas for your email marketing!

Best Practices for Emailing Parents/Guardians

Many parents and guardians are going through an emotional roller coaster when you're just starting to interact with them.

You have an incredible opportunity to be helpful to them.

Here are some things to consider when emailing parents and guardians:

• Be professional and friendly
• Be authentic to your school's voice and culture
• Make their job as easy as possible; give them all the info they need for each stage of the process
• Share what makes your institution unique and what's in it for them (and their student)

A Higher Ed Email Marketing Alternative to Consider

If you made it this far, you rock.

Not sure what Scoir is? Let me introduce us: We're the ultimate destination for student-centered college and career search and discovery and a powerful CRM for high schools. Colleges are on Scoir too, and they use the network to engage and nurture these high-intent and high-yield students and their parents/guardians.

Scoir partner colleges find that 52-90% of their Scoir prospects are stealth and were previously unreachable through email marketing or other higher education marketing methods.

About 1 million students use Scoir as their required college and career readiness platform by their high schools. When students share their college preferences on Scoir, the student gets a more dynamic experience, so they can see how your institution aligns with their college preferences.

With Scoir Messaging, you can reach Scoir students where they're already doing all things college search and discovery. Plus, depending on your subscription with us, we can craft your messages for your team.

Want to learn more? Book a consultation to meet with us. We're here to help you!

Want to learn more about college admissions marketing? Here are a couple more articles to read:

• Inbound Marketing for Higher Education Guide
• 7 College Enrollment Marketing Tools for Your 2024-2025 Strategy