School communicators deal with many different tasks, which usually include email marketers.
Responsible for managing email and becoming an email marketing expert are two different things. For many school communicators, it is difficult to grasp all the ins and outs involved in the task.
Experts or not, you will soon find that just writing an email and pressing “send” is usually not enough to guarantee a high open rate. In order for your email to be seen-and better yet, to get a preferred action or response from your audience-you need to ensure that the right message is delivered to the right person through contact list management.
Why your contact list is important
One Email newsletter Only by contacting the right people can it be effective.
For school communicators, this may be students, parents, community members, or faculty and staff, all of whom represent different groups and usually require specific and targeted information.
List management is critical in these groups, especially when it comes to ensuring that your email actually ends up in the subscriber’s inbox. Bounced mail, dead-end addresses, and unintended recipients who mark your mail as “spam” can all make your outreach work difficult. This is important when the large amount of information you send is time-sensitive and requires some kind of direct response from the reader.
To ensure that your email is delivered to the right person at the right time, you need to manage your contact list regularly. Fortunately, we have some simple tricks to help you do this.
How to manage the school’s email contact list
You don’t need to be an email marketing expert to effectively manage your contact list. Here are four things any school communicator can (and should) do to keep their list as clean and accurate as possible.
1. Use All-in-one marketing automation and CRM Platform to track your subscribers
All your contact list information should be in one place.Ideally, this will be your Marketing automation and CRM platform, It not only stores email addresses, but also integrates them with other contact information you need to know so that you can organize everything in one place and easily access key contact data.
If you manage your contact list from here, much of the hard work involved in this process will be dealt with. It’s also easier to make large-scale updates and see how your list looks at a glance.
2. Use labels and segments to send personalized emails
Audience segment It is very important to ensure that you send the right message to the right group at the right time.
Your marketing automation platform will be an integral part of achieving this goal, because accurately organizing each contact into the correct list requires a lot of guesswork. Labels are also useful and can be used to further categorize each contact and the type of outreach they should accept.
Both of these strategies allow you Send more relevant and personalized emails Go to the designated contact group—result: improved effectiveness of outreach work—and save some time.
3. Sync your contacts with your SIS
Among the K12 communicators we surveyed, 69.2% said they are in sync with SIS When adding a new email recipient.
By synchronizing SIS with marketing automation and CRM, you can ensure that all contacts are updated. Therefore, no newly enrolled families, dropped-out students or any other enrollment progress will not be lost.
How you do this will depend on the system you have. If you are not sure where to start, please contact your marketing automation provider to learn about the next steps for SIS integration.
4. Provide a simple registration process for new subscribers
Make sure that everyone who wants to join your newsletter list can provide a way for people to sign up for your newsletter Email marketing Directly from your website.
Landing pages and pop-up forms are two great ways to achieve this. They will help you keep your list fresh-again without manual input.
Any registration form you include on your website can be linked to your marketing automation platform to automatically add content. You can even add extra symbols to the form to mark and segment new addresses correctly from the beginning.
5. Clean your list regularly
It is a good practice for any email marketer to check their list regularly to make sure that there are no spam addresses, and the same applies to K12 communicators. If you keep sending emails to spam accounts or accounts that are no longer active, you may harm your delivery rate and affect your ability to send emails in the future.
If you notice a Lack of participation in your newsletter, First try various strategies to increase engagement, such as A/B testing or sending your newsletter on different dates. If you still don’t see an increase in engagement after trying various strategies, check the email accounts that are not participating to determine if they should be completely removed from your list.
What all these techniques have in common is that they provide foolproof contact list management without requiring you to carry out a lot of supervision and action. By formulating and running each strategy, you can spend less time managing your list and more time on all the other things on the to-do list—no marketing degree required.
