If you’re running an educational institution – be it a school, college, or university – it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the choice of digital communication channels out there. How do you best reach your students, prospective students, parents and staff with content that’s relevant, engaging and gets them responding?
In line with the communication and marketing strategies of your institution, it’s time to review how you’re setting the tone when it comes to general announcements, student and staff communications, and engaging with the students’ parents who, in many cases, provide the funding to keep the wheels turning.
Why not simply enhance your most frequently-used digital channel to create a more personal and engaging touch… by adding interactive email signatures and marketing banner campaigns to your everyday email.
Here’s 4 challenges educational institutions face and how email signature marketing and email banner campaigns via one-to-one email can come to their rescue…
1. Cut through the competitor crowd
With new schools and private tertiary education institutions opening their doors on a daily basis, competition is tight. The result? They feel forced to spend more money on various traditional and digital awareness campaigns.
But there is a more convenient (and far more affordable) option available to stand out from the crowd.
With Rocketseed you can insert impactful, interactive branded banners into each and every email – either at the top or within your signature – to create thousands of extra marketing opportunities every month. Create effective awareness campaigns around new or existing courses, remind prospective students about registration deadlines and promote upcoming events – all with easy click-through to the appropriate content.
Pro-tip: Sending the right message to the right person at the right time is vital. Our advanced segmentation and scheduling rules allow you to assign specific banners to specific sender and/or recipient groups, ensuring your audience is always served the most relevant information.
2. Keep parents posted
When it comes to pre, primary and secondary schools, learners can hardly be relied on to pass on important information. Nowadays, the majority of schools have a “parent portal” which is updated on a regular basis, keeping parents well informed at all times.
But how do you promote the portal, especially to new parents?
Endorse the portal’s benefits and features in an email banner campaign which will encourage parents to download the app.
What if your institution doesn’t have a “parent portal”? No problem – you can run an informative and educational “Welcome to our school” campaign with a series of interactive email banners. Rocketseed’s image map feature allows you to create as many clickable areas as you want on each banner, each linked to different content.
Pro-tip: Various targeted banner campaigns can be run simultaneously. You decide the frequency and which campaigns to prioritise. Schedule banners in advance and set an end date to ensure you never promote an event past its expiration date!
3. Keep students up to speed
In most instances, tertiary education institutions provide their students with an email address based on their student number or name and surname. This is a perfect opportunity for the institution to utilise the Rocketseed email branding tool to create targeted and tracked banner campaigns that drive important communications from admin staff and lecturers to students in each faculty, as well as allowing for campaigns to be driven via student-to-student email communications.
Should there be special upcoming calendar events such as Varsity Rugby Festivals or Student Council Elections, the Rocketseed email branding tool can be utilised in a targeted, cost-effective way to convey these messages to the students and drive direct click-through response.
Pro-tip: Each and every banner is tracked which means you get an instant click notification email as soon as someone has interacted with one of your banners. You’ll be able to see which banner was clicked on, who the email was from, who engaged with it and the time the email was sent, as well as the time the banner was clicked on.
From a revenue generating perspective, the institution can also sell advertising space to their partners or suppliers in the form of email banners to promote their products and services to the university and its students.
4. Getting staff on-side
Internal business communications can be tricky. Especially with staff who aren’t always too eager to participate. So how do you keep track of whether they received and reacted to important communications?
Internal Marketing campaigns via your everyday email is the answer.
Send interactive, targeted messages to specific departments with a clear, clickable call to action, using your everyday email. Maybe you need to send out an important message from the Principal or share new company templates with the team. How about informing teaching staff of upcoming internal training sessions and events? Or maybe you want to get staff feedback on new work practices via an incentivised survey? Best of all is that you can keep track of exactly who has engaged with your banners.
Pro-tip: If your HR department feels frustrated when it comes to recruitment and onboarding, then they’ll just love Rocketseed. Conveniently announce newly available vacancies via interactive email banners, giving recipients the opportunity to apply with the click of a button. On-boarding is also made easy. Make new staff feel welcome with a banner introducing them to the institution’s culture with all the onboarding information and policy documentation they need, easily downloadable at the click of a button.
Don’t go mass mail – engage students, staff and parents alike with the personal touch of interactive Rocketseed email signatures and marketing banner campaigns.
Shanique Brophy | Marketing Executive
Connect with Shanique on LinkedIn
