If you're wondering how an email performed in your marketing and/or recruitment campaign, there are four metrics you should be reviewing.
Today we are sharing the first in a series of posts, covering each of the conversion points. We could simply place them all in a single post, but breaking them out gives us a chance to expand a little more than we typically do.
EMAIL OPEN RATES
The open rate was the first real metric we used to assess email. If you are sending mass emails through any type of campaign software/tool, and don't know what this is, then PLEASE stop and don't send another email until you finish reading this post. And if you don't understand it by the end, search for additional posts on the topic.
What does the open rate do to help your email efforts? It helps you understand the success of your subject line. If you find an abnormally low open rate on a particular email, the first place to start is by looking at your subject line.
Your subject line's job is to inform your potential reader to the point of your email in a way that makes the reader WANT to open and read it. I emphasize, "want," because the less she/he wants to read the email, the less time she/he will give to read it (see number 3 in this post).
When I am teaching subject lines in our recruitment training, we stress an email 50/50 rule: however much time you spend crafting your email, spend an equal amount of time crafting the subject line. It's that important. How effective will your email be if no one opens and reads it?
Here are a few tips with your subject lines:
1. Keep them short. Remember this, if you are sending a mass email, your reader most likely knows it. So, we aren't looking at subject lines from emails sent to us by a friend - but by an organization. These are the types of emails that are very easily glanced over, so we want brevity to get our point across and grab their attention. Our recommendation - 50 characters or less is best. That will not always be possible, but if you can keep it around that point, and create subject lines that do get their attention, you should see some improvement.
TIP: time yourself to see how long it takes you to read the subject line. If it is more than a second, shorten it.
2. Make it relevant to your prospect. A couple of posts ago, I shared a video and how-to post for using context in your inquiry forms. If you took that step and had context on a prospect, you can incorporate that into not only your emails, but also in your subject lines.
Example:
What if you collected a prospective adult or graduate student's motivation in an inquiry form or during the recruitment process?
If a prospect wanted to enroll for an MBA because it was required for his next promotion, you can use that in your emails and subject lines.
If he stalls and doesn't complete an application, you want to send an email to encourage him to complete the process. But that's not why he wants to complete the application. He wants to complete the application to start the process for his next promotion.
From our secret shopper study, we know that when a prospect stalls in the recruitment process, schools typically respond with emails that have subject lines like:
- Still Interested?
- Apply Today
- Will you be enrolling?
- It's not to late to get started
We will talk in an upcoming post about content and purpose within an email, but with the subject line, as mentioned above, we simply want the prospect to OPEN the email. So, imagine a subject line like:
Quick question about your job promotion
That subject line makes the message more focused on him, and less on us. It is more personable and shows we know about him and his goals.
If your recruitment strategy is focused on building relationships, which of the subject lines is more driven toward that goal?
You may be thinking to yourself, "yeah, but we can't get the motivation;" or "our technology doesn't have the capability to do that." Well, unless you have nothing but Outlook, and can't afford even the cheapest of email marketing tools, this approach is possible; we've implemented it with many schools - large and small.
3. If a prospect's response or action is needed before an upcoming deadline be sure he knows it in the subject line. Samples may include:
- ACTION NEEDED: Your application deadline is in 5 days
- ALERT: Your application can't be reviewed
- Down to 5 days! Can you complete your application in time?
Let me caution you with these. If you constantly use the warnings and alerts to push prospects (or students for that matter) to take a specific action, you will water-down the impact they can have. So I suggest using them with caution. If your team creates and sends emails to their prospects on their own, then get agreement from all which types of emails can use the urgency tactics to control the number of times they get used.
Subject lines are often treated as a trivial component to the messages people use, but they are a critical component to the success of your email open rates. And that success is imperative to the next conversion you need.
What happens if your open rate is strong, but the click rate is weak? Stay tuned, and we will answer that for you!