Wanted: Adult human. Interests: Everything I sell. Would you respond to an ad like this? Or would you prefer one that speaks directly to you as, say, a middle school science teacher?
Match Your Goal to Your Educator Audience to Your Message
With educators, everything is about time, and how little of it they have. To make an impact, you need to respect educators’ attention and be “Johnny on the Spot” with a relevant, targeted solution to their pain point of the moment.
Step One: Define Your Goal
Getting your product into every classroom in America can be a worthy goal. But, you won’t get there in one bite. A targeted, relevant campaign starts with a specific, realistic goal tied to a unique audience. For example, an app on the constitution principles is generally relevant only to social studies and history classrooms at a certain grade level. Not every classroom would benefit from such an app. The more focused the campaign, the more you can learn from what does and does not work. Make campaign goals specific, realistic, and measurable.
Step Two: Segment the Audience
Similarly, a high school algebra teacher wouldn’t be interested in buying or even reading about a constitution study app for his classroom, though he may be interested in one that simplifies working through the quadratic equation. Understanding your unique audience ensures that your message reaches the right person.
How do you know who that is? Think about who can use, buy, consume, or benefit from what you are offering and the data you can use to narrow it down. Everyone in a school district cannot be the right influencer or decision-maker for your product or service. Think about who benefits most from your offering to decide which administrators, principals, or teachers are the most likely to take action. Maybe it is a teacher at a specific grade level or a principal in a specific district. Does state matter? Get granular where you can and use all the information you have at your disposal to compile the most unique audience for your message.
Step Three: Craft the Message
Once you’ve segmented the audience to match your goal, it should be easier to develop messaging that speaks directly to what they care about. Educators always want to know, “What will this do for my kids?” Tell them. Relevant, useful information gets emails opened.
There’s a world of difference between “This product does X” and “6th grade science teachers like you found that using our product improved chemistry test scores by 40% within one month.” Focusing your message on relevant, useful, specific talking points is the kind of best practice that transforms a generic email into a persuasive message that generates interest, and therefore opens and clicks.
Step Four: Reach the Audience
You’ve defined your specific goal, identified your unique audience, and crafted an appropriate message. Next step is to break your email campaign down into smaller, targeted deployments. You’re guaranteed to get better results from a series of deployments than one mass-blast that goes to everyone, but engages no one. Better to run multiple, highly focused campaigns you can learn from than one mass-blast that delivers little and teaches you nothing.
In email campaigns, size does matter. We’ve seen that campaign lists smaller than 50,000 perform far better than those above that number. Sending 100,000-200,000 emails out to a prospecting list is likely to get your emails soft blocked, hard blocked, or get your sending domain blacklisted, especially in the education vertical.
Zoom in. Being focused in terms of goals, more targeted in your audience selection, and more on point in your messaging is the path to improved campaign performance. Deploy, measure, refine, and repeat.
Bringing the Email Campaign Back to Life
Email best practices are always a hot topic, and every aspect of email marketing needs to be addressed to achieve the re-invigoration today’s marketers are looking for.
Want to dive even deeper? Take a minute to review our Email Best Practices webinar which has tons of tips for getting better email results!
