Market Insights
Take Your Email Performance Rates Up a Notch:
New Research and Advice From Two Education Email Experts
— Friday, May 20, 2011
Whether email is your primary marketing channel or just a small part of your strategy, knowing what’s working today with educators is essential to maximizing the return on your e-marketing campaigns. Now in its fifth release, MDR’s annual report, Email Trends in the Education Market 2011, provides a wide-ranging view of email in education, based on the results of thousands of campaigns to schools and colleges. Read on for highlights from this comprehensive new report, including the trends in mobile marketing, and get an update on email churn and deliverability and how these factors can affect your campaign performance.
The changing K-12 universe and how it affects your email performance
Even if you don’t change anything about your K-12 email strategy, the results of your program will diminish over time if you aren’t using an up-to-date list because of churn within the teacher universe. Educators change schools for a variety of reasons, and as with any profession, there’re a number of teachers who make the career choice to join or leave the classroom every year. According to Anne Goto, MDR’s Quality Advocate, recent tight budgets are causing more staffing changes than ever. This school year, almost 1 million new teacher names were added to MDR’s educator universe, while another 1.1 million or so were deleted. That’s over 2.1 million educators you won’t reach if you’re sending to an out-of-date list.
Goto further reports that for the 2010-2011 school year, nearly 1,400 schools have closed and about 1,100 new schools have opened. Does your email list capture where the teachers in closed schools have been transferred to and who came on-board at new schools? If you missed these personnel changes, your list will miss the teachers from these 2,500 schools. Compound this with the 6,000 schools that made grade-range changes over the past year and the effectiveness of your list old list declines even more.
Overall, 20% of MDR’s database is comprised of teachers new to their schools this year. Updated email addresses for existing teachers bumps up this percentage of new email addresses even higher—closer to 40%—since some schools change their email address domain, teachers change their names, among other reasons. To be sure your emails make it to teachers’ inboxes, your list needs to reflect these updates, so be sure to use a vendor with rigorous hygiene processes. An accurate email list with valid and current educators’ addresses is the key to strong email reputation, high deliverability, and successful results. For more details on the changing email market, you can download this MDR webinar presentation.
Education marketers’ reliance on teacher email continues to grow
During the 2009-2010 school year, MDR deployed more prospecting email campaigns to schools on behalf of its customers than during any previous year. In fact, 8,646 K-12 campaigns were deployed—up 30% over the previous school year—with the total number of messages hitting 93 million. Moreover, when including emails sent directly by customers through their own email service providers, K-12 campaign volume using MDR data during the 2009-2010 year rose by 65% compared with the year before.
Chris Ziemnicki, MDR’s Senior Director of Product Development, reported that the size of K-12 campaigns grew significantly this past year as well. The average school market campaign size rose to 9,953 messages, up from an average of 8,006 messages the year before. This was a large jump compared with other tracked years and is most likely attributable to increased use of dynamic content, which eliminates the need for multiple campaigns/messages tailored to specific market segments.
K-12 email response rates hold steady…even with increased volume
Response rates for MDR teacher campaigns during the 2009-2010 school year followed trends from the past five years, with an average unique open rate of 9.4%, an average click-through rate of 2.4%, a click-through to open ratio of 25%, and an opt-out rate of 0.16%. These rates show slight slippage over the prior year, as has been the case since MDR started collecting email response rates. However, in light of the sheer volume increase in messages sent, these minor performance rate drops in K-12 emails actually are positive since their steadiness indicates that large numbers of teachers are interested in email and continue to interact with messages.
Resellers, publishers, and consumer-related companies were the winners in response rates with K-12 campaigns, achieving both the highest open rates (10% to 11%) and also the top click-through rates (3% to 3.6%). Ziemnicki reminds marketers that these are averages. The complexity of a product, a focus on branding overselling, the level of targeting, and other factors can impact the results of any given campaign.
Day of week and time of day to send—how email campaigns performed
Marketers are always asking this question: What’s the best time of day and week to send emails? MDR’s research shows that during the past year, businesses continued to prefer midweek days for their school market campaigns, most often choosing Tuesday (30%), Wednesday (25%), and Thursday (22%) for their messages. Friday was the least popular day of the week for deployment, with only 8% of campaigns sent out on the last day of the school week. (No campaigns were sent by MDR to teachers over the weekend during the 2009-2010 school year.) In the end, however, day of week did not impact email performance. Messages to teachers performed similarly across the five weekdays in their average open and click-through rates, with Friday (the least popular day to send) coming in as the best click-through performer.
Education marketers continue to prefer morning deployments, with 60% of last year’s K-12 campaigns going out between 7 AM and noon EST. However, for the 2009-2010 year, no single hour of morning dominated as 9 AM did during the previous school year. Messages deployed to teachers between 10 and 11 AM EST performed the best all around, with a 10.4% open rate (a percentage point higher than the open rate for any other hour of day) and a 3.2% click-through rate (compared with 2% and 2.5% click-through rates for delivery during all other hours of the day ).
Personalization increases performance
Personalization is a universally accepted best practice to increase email campaign effectiveness, especially when prospecting. Therefore, it’s not surprising MDR found that during the 2009-2010 school year, K-12 messages customized by educator or institution demographics boosted open rates a full percentage point to 10.5%, compared with non-personalized campaigns, which had average open rates of 9.4%. Click-through rates also improved with personalization but not as much, improving from 2.4% to 2.7% with the more targeted messaging. Overall, personalization certainly pays off with busy teachers, especially when it increases a message’s relevancy, so it’s a smart tactic for education marketers looking to bump up their campaigns’ performance scores.
A closer look at higher education email trends
As with K-12 marketers, higher education companies relied more on email marketing this past year both in the number of campaigns sent and also in average campaign size. During 2009-2010, MDR deployed 1,974 college campaigns, compared with 1,689 during the prior year and 1,198 two years before. Average campaign size grew by 50% to an average of 4,027 messages per post-secondary campaign, an increase over the previous year’s average campaign size of 2,703 for this market segment.
In 2009-2010, college response rates beat their K-12 counterparts (as they have been all along); however, they did decline slightly this past year. Unique open rates for emails sent to the higher education market dropped a little during the past year, down to 13.8%, compared with 15% for the year before. Likewise, click-through rates fell off from 4.5% to 3.8% during the 2009-2010 year. These decreased performance rates aren’t surprising with the large jump in average campaign size that occurred this past year.
Day of week deployment patterns mirror what was seen in the K-12 market, with Tuesday (27%), Wednesday (23.4%), and Thursday (25.4%) being the most popular send dates for college emails. Unlike in the school market, a few higher education marketers experimented with weekend campaigns as well.
Tuesday was the top performer with college market email campaigns last year, with a 16% unique open rate and 4.3% click-through rate. However, end of week was also strong for unique opens, with a rate of 14.6% for Thursday, 14.0% for Friday, and 14.7% for Saturday. Aside from Tuesday, three other days had click-through rates of 4% or higher—Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday. (Note that only three campaigns were deployed on Saturday, so the results here aren’t necessarily conclusive for that deployment date.)
What are institutions and educators doing about spam?
The Email Trends in the Education Market 2011 report also includes recent insight intohow institutions are handling spam. Results from an MDR survey conducted in January 2011 show that when teachers and professors were asked if their institutions had taken new steps to prevent spam in the previous year, 77% of teachers answered yes, 15% selected not sure but it feels like it, and the remaining participants selected no or that they weren’t sure. Higher education respondents answered similarly. Educators are taking steps to ensure they receive valuable emails despite increased filtering by their institutions, with professors more active than teachers in dealing with spam filters. The most common tactic used by all educators was to peruse their junk mail folders periodically for messages that their schools’ systems may have inadvertently dumped there, with 50% of K-12 teachers and 64% of professors double-checking for wanted emails in spam folders. Many educators took proactive measures to safeguard their desired emails, with 23% of teachers (and 28% of professors) adding email addresses to their address books and 14% of teachers (and 23% of professors) adding email addresses/domains to their safe senders’ lists. Further, some educators took more than one step to safeguard valuable emails, including a small percentage who contacted their technology or network coordinator about spam filtering.
These statistics are encouraging for education businesses emailing to prospects and customers. However, it’s important to remember that there’re still some educators who don’t take any steps at all to prevent their schools’ spam filters from blocking email, including 35% of the teachers and 25% of the professors in MDR’s recent survey. Email marketers need to take precautions to ensure that their messages are reaching as many educators’ inboxes as possible by adding white-listing or “add to address book” instructions to every message deployed, for example. Some marketers are even spot-checking large accounts for spam issues and then leveraging those established relationships to achieve clearance for their brand’s messages with those key customers.
Educators’ mobile email rising, with K-12 teachers gaining ground after a slow start
Survey respondents across the entire education universe reported increased use of mobile email, with the iPhone (40%), Android (30%), and BlackBerry (17%) coming in as the most popular phones. (It’s also worth noting that 20% of professors accessed email from an iPad.) K-12 teachers showed the biggest gains in mobile email participation, jumping from only 9% usage one year ago (and 7% two years ago) up to 23%. Ziemnicki speculates that the surge of more affordable consumer smartphones and plans over the past year played a role in the increase of teachers’ buying and using personal phones to access their work email.
District personnel continue to lead in viewing email on handhelds, averaging a 10% increase over each of the past two years and hitting 46% usage this year. Higher education respondents fall in the middle, with usage of mobile devices for email now at 35%. With these levels of penetration across educators, marketers should focus on design best practices so that their messages render correctly on mobile devices—by following the same best practices for viewing emails on computers. A review of these tips is in our webinar archives, Tricks of the Trade for Successful Email Marketing.
MDR’s research also shows that teachers most common mobile email activity is to preview and sort through their incoming messages, with 68% using their handheld device for this task so that they can process their messages more efficiently when they get back to their computers. If a message is personal and a quick response will suffice, 48% are doing that as well on their phones. It’s important for marketers to be aware that only 13% of teachers download email images to their phones and just 7% click on links to view businesses’ websites or landing pages while on the phone—so remember, as with all prospect email marketing, the job of the email is to efficiently and effectively convey enough relevancy and value for the reader to decide it’s worth their time to read further. Thus, an email viewed on a phone gets the job done if it piques educators’ interest enough for them to revisit the message when they return to their computers.
Want even more details on educators using email today?
For more research on the current state of educational email marketing, you can dive into Email Trends in the Education Market 2011. The report provides in-depth analyses of deployment and response rate trends for schools and colleges as well as detailed statistics on the habits and usage of work-based email accounts by educators and professors.
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This article is based on MDR’s April 2011 webinar entitled Email Trends in the Education Market: Get the insight you need to drive more email sales . The one-hour online event features two MDR experts on educator email trends: Christopher Ziemnicki, Senior Director of Product Development and Anne Goto, Quality Advocate. The webinar explored how education marketers and thousands of educators are using email today. It’s part of MDR’s library of free marketing webinars and is available on demand for viewing at any time.
