Volume 1 - Issue 8   E-News: E-mail Marketing Best Practices Lisa Munns, E-News Editor       June 21, 2006 Email Frequently Asked Questions With summer underway and schools making plans for the upcoming year, now is a good time to answer some typical questions we have received from our more experienced as well as our novice readers. How many fields or questions should I have on my email signup form or survey? When creating your email signup form or survey, remember what your goal is. If you are only going to use this data to publish an email newsletter, than it's probably best to only collect the minimum to get maximum registrations: email address, first name, high school, street address, graduation year and zip code. If you are specifically targeting a certain type of student, then additional demographic and behavioral questions are imperative. You can also test mandatory and optional fields by dividing your list into a test sample of your database. Consider making some questions optional and throw in an incentive for the subscriber to complete all fields. What’s the key to obtaining a high open rate? Email is a relationship-building medium which means that your captured audience will inevitably open at a higher rate. Captured audiences – meaning audiences that have expressed interest in receiving information from your school, applicants or audiences that are stake-holders in the college or university such as alumni, current students and parents – will open at a high rate of 30-45%. Following email marketing “best practices” techniques and offering compelling content can push these messages into the 50% plus range, while sending an additional message to those who opened initial emails leads to a 40-60% open rate. Mailings that are sent to non-captured audiences – purchased lists of high school students who have expressed general interest in receiving general college information – the open rates will be much lower than those of the more interested constituents outlined above. With a well thought out message incorporating a provocative subject line and strong HTML content, these messages can expect 8-12% open rates. Sending an additional message to the same mailing list tends to yield an additional 5% in opens from recipients who did not open the first message. What's the key to analyzing and utilizing campaign metrics? Every piece of reporting you analyze needs to be viewed based on your initial goals. Then you can dive deeper into the more specific campaign reporting. The percentage of click-throughs is more often than not, more powerful and revealing than overall opens. This means that of all of the recipients who opened your email, those who clicked on a link are your target audience. This is a genuine indicator of recipients who were interested in the email and then clicked on a link. Multi-opens are also strong indicators of interest. Sending a subsequent email to those who click-through or multi-open an email yields opens in the 40-60% open range. Email campaigns usually get the majority of their response in the first 72 hours, but with the immediacy of real-time metrics, a regular pattern of monitoring and pulling data should be established, and don't rule out later open patterns. Teenagers have a tendancy to save certain emails to open over the weekend. What is the most significant and underutilized area in email marketing? Schools spend thousands of dollars on using lead generation data from areas like telemarketing and direct mail, but for email campaigns it is often left alone to rot in spreadsheet purgatory. Since almost every email deployment platform provides the email addresses and information of who clicked on a link, you should use this information for future email campaigns. Don't forget the power of email in addition to the relationship marketing portion of the program. Email affords the opportunity to collect immediate results so that you can apply your metrics to your user's behavior. Applying knowledge gained from what a user clicks on can tell you a lot about their behavior and possibly turn a chronic browser into a future student. If you have any questions, please contact Lisa Munns at lmunns@studenthorizons.com. back student horizons, inc. 4903 auburn avenue bethesda, md 20814 301/951-7101 - phone 301/951-7104 - fax   Your email: Send to a friend: Sign up for more newsletters