Getting higher response rates through emailing schools

Three years ago hardly anyone emailed schools.  Now email is the fastest growing type of educational marketing.  But not everyone is getting acceptable response rates.

My aim here is to outline the different types of email services available, give an idea of the sort of response rates you can get, and set out how much email marketing will cost.

There are two main services available: emailing schools and emailing teachers.  Each has its own unique benefits.

If you email schools, you should be able to get a list of virtually every school.  The addresses will be of the school administrator for the most part, and so it is important to write Attn: The Head of Maths (or whoever you want to reach) in the subject line.  

A typical mailing (including guidance on how the email should be written, supply of the list and the transmission of the mailing) will cost around 5p per school.

The best response rate I’ve had in selling a product costing £20 via email to teachers is 1.2%.  But I would add here that we had to experiment several times in order to get this – the way the advert is written really does affect the response rate.

I have seen other people talk of higher response rates and lower costs, but generally these seem to me to be for different scenarios – for example on emails aimed direct at teachers or previous buyers (as opposed to all schools), or for free items. 

The two central problems with emails sent in this way are that school email addresses do change a lot and it is often the case that email addresses given on school web sites are (rather curiously) not always accurate.  (Call me if you’d like to know why).  However we are currently working on accuracy rates approaching 95% for our email lists, and this figure is edging upwards all the time.

Emailing teachers is a different matter.  When you email schools you get to almost every school, but you are dependent on the administrator passing the email on.  When you email teachers you only get to those teachers who have opted into the email service, which means you only reach a fraction of all possible teachers.  But because you reach them directly, and because they have opted in, the response rate can be much higher.  Selling the same £20 product as mentioned above we have had response rates of 3.5%, as opposed to the record 1.2% on the “email schools” promotion.

If you’ve not promoted your product before via email it is often a good idea to start by using the email teachers service, on the grounds that if you don’t get a good response rate there, you are very unlikely to get much of a result anywhere else.

After that, many companies find that they can make a good profit using both services.

There’s more on emailing teachers direct at www.yesmail.org.uk/emailteachersdirect.html

There’s a summary of prices for emailing schools at www.yesmail.org.uk/Schools.html

For more information, to talk about the ways of writing your email such that it will get the highest possible response rate, and to discuss the best way to write your email, please do call 01536 399 000.

If you have been, thanks for reading.

Tony Attwood

PS: The issue that I haven’t dealt with is the relative merits of email vis a vis direct mail.   That’s for another day – but if you would like to know more now please do call on 01536 399 000.

This entry was posted on 17/09/2008 at 03:33 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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