The 24-Hour Digital Campaign Engagement Cycle
Teachers like to surf at lunchtime—surf the Internet that is. A majority like to open their email around noon, so, a good time to catch them is while they are eating. That’s food for thought as you put together your campaign menu.
In looking at our engagement data from thousands of campaigns to educators, we know that they are online throughout the day, checking different channels at different times. The chart below shows a typical day in the life of an educator and how they interact with email and social media (specifically Facebook). As you can see, email activity peaks during the mid-morning, while social media activity peaks late at night.
To get a more complete picture of how educators are engaging across multiple channels, we looked at our customers who are running digital advertising campaigns along with email and social ads.
Digital Ads Boost Email Performance
While it’s true that email is the tried and true star in the education marketer’s toolkit, it performs even better in multi-channel campaigns. Email open rates and your ability to reach an audience increase dramatically for campaigns that follow marketing best practices and include digital advertising and email, versus email-only campaigns.
Digital advertising is an effective addition to any campaign to capture educators’ attention. According to our Teachers as Consumers report, 44% of educators said they had been encouraged to purchase a product or service as a result of online advertising.
Customer Successes with Email + Ads
We have been reviewing customer campaigns that are serving digital ads in combination with their email marketing to the same audience. Three of these campaigns stood out as having exceptional performance for three different business verticals: publishers, app developers, and educational institution/government.
The engagement rates below are from the same time period of the specific customer’s promotion. When comparing rates, it is always important to note that good messaging and creative are also crucial factors in the success of a campaign. While advertising consistently helps drive positive results for email campaigns, a good subject line and offer need to be in place as a first step towards success.
Other Benefits of Digital Advertising
Advertising alongside email has other benefits besides just boosting your email open rates. You will be able to reach more of your audience with an advertising campaign because there is no “inbox” that a digital ad needs to reach. By extending your reach beyond email you can increase awareness for your offer beyond just the percentage of your list who open your email.
For example, if you were a publisher targeting a list of 100,000 K-12 teachers, and you got the industry average open rate of 6%, you would have reached about 6,000 people. Not bad. But, if you were to run a digital advertising campaign targeted at that same list of 100,000 teachers along with your email campaign, you could potentially double your unique open rate to 12%, reaching 12,000 teachers!
Additionally, your ads will continue to be served to this audience and will reach the eyeballs of thousands more teachers from your target list over time. This will multiply the impressions generated from the campaign (your reach) beyond just those who open your emails.
Note: if you look at the App Developer vertical, the effect of adding digital ads to your email campaigns was even more dramatic, increasing open rates by 545%!
The main takeaway? You need to be on all channels at the right times if you want educators to see your messages. If you are ready to take your email campaigns to the next level, contact us about implementing a multi-channel strategy today!
