As data providers increasingly prioritize consumer privacy, private schools are also impacted. Aside from the decline of third-party website cookies, email service providers like Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook recently introduced privacy measures that effectively mark all emails as open, moves that are inflating metrics around email opens by as much as ten percent.
To help you see the full picture of how your emails impact family decisions, we wanted to lay out additional metrics beyond simple open rates to provide the full picture of how families interact with your school email campaigns.
RELATED: 7 Ways School Emails and Communications Amp Up Giving Campaigns
Traditional School Email Metrics
These metrics track actual subscriber actions once they’ve opened the email, giving you a better understanding of whether or not readers found value in what you sent.
Old School: Click-to-Open Rate
Most email campaigns will have a call-to-action (CTA), which is a link to the next step for families to take. For example, an email soliciting an open house to an audience of prospective families may have a link to a video of parent testimonials touting school value, in addition to a second link routing to the event’s registration form.
Traditionally, recruiters tracked the number of clicks as a ratio to the total number of opens. A high number of opens but few clicks would indicate poor email copy, and the inverse would indicate a poor subject line.
However, as those recent email privacy measures have made open rate information unreliable, this is no longer a dependable metric to base email strategy upon.
New School: Click-Through Rate
Instead, recruiters track the ratio of clicks across total sends. The formula is simple:
Total Emails With a Click / Total Send Size = Click Through Rate (CTR)
Rather than tracking every click (emails often have multiple CTAs and get forwarded), click-through rate works well for tracking the success of A/B tests and setting benchmarks. If you are interested in tracking the success of CTAs or the impact of an email among family members, total unique clicks would be the metric to keep an eye on.
Old School: Open Rate
This metric tracks the total opens across the send list and is often used to gauge the persuasiveness of subject lines.
New School: Click-to-Deliver Rates
As open rates prove increasingly unreliable, school email campaigns can rely on the ratio of clicks to the total number of emails delivered to subscriber inboxes. The calculation is similar to the click-through rate:
Total Emails With a Click / Total Number of Emails Delivered = Delivery Rate
Delivery rate is already a common metric, tracking the health of your email practices through two sub-metrics: soft and hard bounces.
Sometimes delivery problems happen on the recipient’s end, these soft bounces are most commonly a full inbox or server problem. Hard bounces, on the other hand, are an indicator to investigate further. These most often result from either your emails commonly getting marked as spam or if your database isn’t fully up-to-date (and as a result you send emails to addresses that no longer exist).
To track the success of subject lines, one strategy is to track interactions across the total number of emails that actually arrived at the inbox.
New School: Conversion Rates
Tracking clicks is important to any school marketer, but what happens after the click is the most important. Every CTA leads to an intended action, and the ratio of this action being completed to the total send measures the success of primary campaign objectives.
If you find conversion rates lag behind goals, there are some ways to optimize:
- A/B test landing page elements, such as form placement and navigation.
- Optimize website speed by eliminating unnecessary code and using smaller image sizes.
- Improve site and page compatibility with mobile devices.
- Minimize the number of form fields required for submission.
Keep in mind school email campaigns may not always have a CTA, and therefore nothing to convert. For instance, a registration follow-up email should be exempt from this metric.
Deeper Dive
Now that we’ve reviewed the traditional benchmarks for email marketing success, let’s dive deeper into how to better understand the ways families react to your emails.
Unsubscribes
Families, alumni, and your community want value from the emails they receive. When they receive too many emails from your school, those less interested will opt out though unsubscribing. This is another reason why open rates are misleading – often the only way to unsubscribe from a mailing list is to click the option within the email.
You can keep track with this formula:
Number of Unsubscribes Over a Period / Total Email Sends Over That Period = Unsubscribe Rate
It’s important to monitor unsubscribe rates, high ones indicate your content is not personalized enough to hold families’ interest or campaigns are not backed by a strong prospective family database (CRM) of relevant subscribers.
Worse than an unsubscribe is a subscriber flagging your emails as spam. Enough of these will signal to email service providers like Gmail and Yahoo Mail that your email domain too often sends irrelevant or dangerous content, negatively impacting deliverability and subsequent campaign success.
To determine the risk of unsubscribes and spam designations, you’ll need to calculate contact saturation. Determine rules for each contact to receive a certain number of communications, monitor a sample of contacts to see how often these rules are broken, and adjust practices accordingly.
Time-to-Conversion
Average time-to-conversion is typically a website metric, but school marketing or enrollment professionals can adapt it to measure email marketing success. In that case, you’ll need to take the total number of landing page viewers across the timeframe of the campaign and divide by the total number of form fills or leads who originated from that campaign.
Make sure you’ve set your site analysis to only measure traffic from direct sources. While not all direct traffic stems from email campaigns, email is solely considered a direct source of website traffic.
Total Cumulative Time from Relevant Webpage Visitors / Total Number of Leads = Time to Conversion
This metric informs the health of your whole campaign, with the goal of evaluating how well it converted potential families into more-engaged prospects. Lagging results indicate that while subscribers found enough value in the email itself to click, there is something lacking on the landing page that drives the final form submission.
Power Future Recruitment Campaigns
Finally, email analytics inform future campaigns through a process called audience engagement scoring, which signals the subscribers that need pruning from your CRM and those best suited for further action.
Engagement Scoring Overview
Engagement scoring is a method that reflects how each subscriber engages with your school’s email campaigns. When this process is complete, each marketing contact is assigned a score or grade reflecting the level of interaction. With this knowledge, your recruitment team can better engage with audiences on future behavior-based campaigns through more resonant content.
Your school can use engagement scoring for any type of email campaigns, whether external recruitment or donation solicitation. For example, schools benefit from audience scoring when using the results to sort families for retargeting. Parents that react to donation emails a certain number of times and donate a certain amount may be primed for further outreach. The most relevant type of audience scoring for donation campaigns is the RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value) analysis.
How It Works
Here’s how to create an audience engagement model.
- Identify criteria and benchmarks. Begin by determining the key metrics that best reflect engagement and align with the most active, relevant subscribers. These metrics might include those listed above combined with event attendance, current schooling situation, or any other relevant indicators.
- Assign value-based weights to each metric. At a basic level, every engagement scoring model will include two factors that create the overall score – engagement and persona. It’s important to assign a score for engagement (e.g., a form conversion has a higher score than a single link-click), but who engages is just as important. Consider who each subscriber actually is. From a recruitment perspective, the parent of a five-year-old is far more relevant to your school than the spouse of a teacher signing up for the school newsletter. Your engagement model should reflect this by assigning more points to not only the level of engagement, but also the relevance of the marketing contact.
- Create a matrix. Once your model is established and contacts are assigned values, map out the results. As mentioned, the best model for private school recruiting will often be a persona-engagement model. To plot this out, have persona types marked A-D, with A being the typical families most likely to enroll and D being the least-relevant contacts in the recruitment database. On the opposite axis, create a similar layout for engagement, with 1 being the most engaged subscribers who have completed many high-value actions and 4 being those who have done minimal or no actions. Another common way is to combine persona and engagement into pure numeric values, the combination of which is plotted on a one-dimensional scale from 1-100. So, a medium-engaged parent of a 16-year-old may rank a 60 while a low-engaged parent of a six-year-old could score a 70 based off the strength of the persona.
Least Engaged 1 |—————50—————| 100 Most Engaged - Plot each subscriber. Once the matrix is created, it’s finally time to assign a score to each contact and place them on the graph. Combine both scores to place individuals in their corresponding division. Going back to our main model, your final results should resemble this.
Once this process is complete, the fifth and final step is to refine future campaigns according to these results. There are many ways to do so, but let’s look at the extremes – what do you do with your worst and best subscribers?
Worst Subscribers
Those in the D row and those with an engagement level of four are considered your least-relevant subscribers. Action needs to be taken to prevent those costly spam designations and a high unsubscribe rate.
The worst of these subscribers, especially those who have been in the system for years with minimal or no engagement, should be pruned from the school’s recruitment database. Continued disengagement not only contributes to poor deliverability but also takes away resources from more-engaged contacts and increases costs in pay-per-send email management systems. A healthy CRM full of involved, relevant families leads to stronger marketing performance.
Create new audiences for newer contacts or those you aren’t ready to give up on, providing more personalized, relevant content to incentivize action.
Best Subscribers
On a similar note, capitalize on the success you’ve already had with highly relevant, engaged families. Create new audiences that retarget these contacts with additional school email campaigns, ads, and ultra-personalized content. This strategy often results in the greatest bang for your marketing buck.
Find a way to offer exclusive benefits to these subscribers to reward and further strengthen their interest. In other industries, this often looks like personalized discounts, but in the K-12 recruitment space it may take the form of a personalized tour, a Q&A with faculty, or even a tuition discount. These are your most passionate recruits, so incentivize further action.
Supercharge Your Recruitment with Ravenna
As your team continues to send out school email recruitment campaigns, learn from and refine future email strategy with these beyond-the-surface analytics. Your team will benefit from more in-depth reporting, improved family engagement, and healthy marketing operations.
