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Email marketing is a great marketing tool and advertising strategy for colleges to embrace and utilize to attract new students.

For high school students who are looking to go to college, choosing the right institution is often a monumental, long, and complicated search. Sometimes students will research on their own for a particular size, location, or major, but other times, in a process that is becoming more popular as technology permeates every aspect of our lives, colleges will reach out to students. As any high school student who has given up their email for a standardized test will tell you, colleges’ email marketing towards potential applicants is relentless and constant- but is it effective? And what is the true strategy behind all those emails?

Personalization to Draw You in

Students receive dozens of emails from colleges every day- so how do universities that really want those students to make sure their emails really stand out? Personalization is key. Using the students’ names is the first, most basic step, to catch their attention. Then, including information about their intended major, the potential scholarships the student could win from their individual grades and standardized test scores, and what the university could offer to the student are all parts of personalization. And of course, fun gifts like stickers and magnets always help. The more that students feel the colleges care and know about them, and truly want them to apply and attend their institution, the more likely the email marketing is going to pay off, and the university will reap the benefits.

It’s Economically Friendly

Many forms of marketing and advertising are fairly expensive, and not every university, especially if they are small, has the budget for large, fancy events and marketing campaigns. This is where email marketing, which is a fairly inexpensive form of marketing, comes in handy. Every college has access to technological devices like Chromebooks, laptops, and desktop computers, and access to Internet browsers and email accounts. It doesn’t cost a lot of money to send an email, and some email marketing services will allow colleges to send unlimited emails to a certain number of students for just a few hundred dollars a month. Besides being pretty cost-effective, email marketing has shown a very high return on investment for universities. Marketing services estimate that for every dollar a college spends on email marketing, they will get about forty dollars back in return.

Colleges Reach a Wider Audience

These days, colleges want as wide and diverse a student body as they can get, which includes students from all over the country and even the world. Before email marketing and advances in technology, the only way students could visit a college was to make a physical trip and tour it. And the further away a student lived from a university, the less likely they were to hear about it. But colleges’ intensive email marketing has changed students’ exposure to colleges, as well as the audience that colleges can reach. A high school student from rural Nebraska may get an email from a university that is in downtown Los Angeles, and they may never have known about that school before the email. On the flip side, urban colleges can now reach students in rural, suburban, and urban areas, having the ability to round out their student body with applicants from all fifty states and international countries. Email marketing allows colleges to reach a wider, more diverse audience of students, and for students to widen their gaze for their potential universities.

The college search can be a stressful process, and schools and students are trying equally hard to find their perfect matches. Email marketing is a great marketing tool and advertising strategy for colleges to embrace and utilize. Personalized emails reach so many students in a cost-effective way, and students may just receive an email that leads them to their future.