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4 Email Marketing Tips for Higher Education
Learn how to attract donations, applications, and more with this compilation of email marketing tips for higher education institutions like yours.
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insights from 61,900+ hours of higher education marketing experience
Email marketing can work on many levels for higher education. You can use it to boost enrollment, connect with alumni, answer questions from incoming students, and market your school—all with one channel.
That being said, creating an email marketing strategy for universities isn’t as simple as writing and sending mass emails whenever you have a new campaign to promote.
Here are a few strategies to help your school or university reach your marketing goals with email marketing. Keep reading if you want to learn more, and give us a call at 888-601-5359.
Why use email marketing for higher education?
Universities face a unique challenge with all aspects of marketing and communication. Instead of focusing on one specific audience, you need to maintain frequent contact with several groups at once: Students, parents, alumni, faculty, donors, prospective students, and more.
Email marketing is a must-have for universities because it suits this task perfectly. Segmenting email lists into demographic groups is standard practice when it comes to email marketing. There’s really no easier way to manage your communication with various groups of people at once than by using email marketing for your school.
Here are some specific cases where email can make a huge difference for universities:
Boosting admissions
Attracting applicants is a top priority for any university, and email marketing for educational institutions plays a vital role in this effort.
The process for prospective students vetting and applying to a handful of colleges is long and often intense. Students and parents don’t make the decision lightly, as it essentially involves committing four years (and thousands of dollars) to a specific institution and location.
Having a stellar email marketing campaign in place can greatly set you apart from other universities by increasing communication, trust, and ultimately the number of applicants to your school.
The real strength of email marketing for prospective students lies in the ability to easily segment your email list. When you get applications or requests for information from prospective students, you instantly have access to a wealth of information about each one. You can use this info to segment your email list accordingly, by geographic area, by interest, by standardized test score…the list goes on.
The fact is that prospective students respond much better to more tailored emails than to a generic, one-size-fits-all marketing template. If you can nail down proper email marketing segments, you’ll be rewarded with more applicants and ultimately better admission rates.
As another example, every school should set up an email segment dedicated to students that were admitted but haven’t committed to attending yet. Personalized emails at this stage of the decision-making process are sometimes all it takes to convince students that your university is the best choice.
Alumni communication
Email is the easiest way to stay in contact with those who have graduated from your university. Many people stay very interested in the happenings of their alma mater and will be more than happy to stay subscribed to an email newsletter that provides that information.
As long as you don’t come across as spammy, you can use this alumni email list to direct alums toward specific goals. If you want to bolster your social media channels, for example, you can encourage all subscribers to follow your accounts across Facebook, Twitter, and more.
Drive alumni donations
Have a dedicated email campaign set up for your alumni is also the single best way of increasing your donations and fundraising efforts.
Again, you have to avoid coming across as spammy and salesy here – “please give us money” will simply not do. That being said, there are many ways you can creatively encourage donations. Weave your donation requests into an overarching story about campus, show alumni directly where their money will go, and ask them to remember how much their time at school could have been enhanced by a few generous alum donations.
Student and parent communication
This one’s a given. Your students (and their parents) need information on a daily basis coming directly from the university, whether it’s class cancellations, program announcements, extracurricular information, emergency issues, or anything else.
Email is the best possible avenue of distribution for this information. It’s important not to abuse this with mass emails, however, because that often results in students simply ignoring emails from the school even when they’re important!
As for parents, email is the perfect way to keep them in the loop while still allowing students to learn and grow as independent people.
Increased “brand” and community visibility
If your university offers services, programs, or resources that benefit the surrounding community (beyond just your students) email marketing is a great way to spread awareness about what’s happening on campus.
Maybe your biology department is flying in a renowned speaker, or maybe you offer some sort of discounted services. Setting up an email campaign or newsletter to lend these types of things more visibility is a great way of boosting your reputation and prominence within a community. That, in turn, can lead to increased applications, state grants, funding, and more.
4 email marketing tips for higher education
Learn how to get started with email marketing for higher education with these tips:
1. Build a list of subscribers
Before launching your email marketing campaign for your educational institutions, you need to have a strategy for collecting potential students’ email addresses and getting their permission to contact them about your university. Otherwise, you could appear as spam or an annoyance to a user who never signed up for your emails.
Here are some strategies for collecting contact information:
College fairs
Did your school just attend a college fair and leave with pages of contact information from potential students? You’ve already got your first batch of emails!
These email addresses will act as your top-of-funnel contacts—or ones that you’re just starting to draw into your university.
Social media
71% of teen’s ages 13 to 17 say that they use more than one social network. Given that your target audience is likely still in this demographic, marketing on social media is a genius ways to attract new students.
In order for social media to help your email marketing campaign, post content that leads potential students to your website. Content could include anything from high school senior planning or how to know what school is right for you.
You should provide links to email subscription landing pages in each of these posts, so that upon entering your website, users can subscribe to your newsletter or other emails.
The more contacts you can collect, the better! These are the users that you have permission to contact via email.
2. Write compelling content
It’s no surprise that content is one of the most important parts of an email. It’s what will either make or break your goal to successfully inform and convince potential students to choose your university.
In order to reach your goals with email marketing, there are a few tips you should keep in mind:
Keep it simple
Deciding on a university is a stressful time, so emails should relieve, not increase, stress for potential students.
Instead of sending emails with walls of text, make your point with shorter, condensed emails that only cover the most important information.
However, try to make each email as useful and informative as possible, so that you aren’t sending several emails on the same topic. Too many emails will annoy your recipients rather than help them.
For example, if you are sending a welcome email for students that are coming to take a tour of your university, wait until you have all the details finalized to send out the email. That way, the recipients have all the information in one place, and they don’t receive ten different emails– each with a single piece of information.
Personalize
If you write all your emails with an opening line that reads “Dear Student,” that’s a good way to make potential students feel like they’re just another drop in the bucket.
Try personalizing each email with individual students’ names. Although it’s a small change, this helps students feel like your emails are written specifically for them, and that they have a special place at your university.
3. Optimize for the best results
Once you’ve started your email marketing campaign for your learning constitution, collected email addresses and started sending information to potential students, you may think you’re finished creating your email marketing strategy. However, there are still a few things to keep in mind.
Optimize for mobile
With 55 percent of emails are opened on mobile devices, while only 19 percent are opened on desktops. This makes it crucial for you to optimize your emails for mobile.
If the email doesn’t work on any device, the recipient may not be able to view your message, which could cause frustration. This means that a large portion of your subscribers may never see your emails at all—especially if their smartphone is their only way of viewing email.
Test and improve
One of the best ways to understand how your email marketing campaign is working is to test and improve.
To do so, you should run A/B tests on your emails, in order to understand what elements are successful and what elements you could improve.
For example, you could perform an A/B test on your subject line in order to decide what promotes a higher open rate.
You could also perform a test to see whether pictures should be placed at the top, or end of an email.
When you take time to test the elements of your emails, you’ll be able to pinpoint the one that will promote the most opens and conversions.
4. Respond
There’s nothing worse than not getting a reply to an important email.
If you’re going to take the time to email prospective students and want them to attend your university, you should also make sure that you reply to their responses in a timely manner.
A late email could send the message that you don’t care, or don’t have time for questions, which is a huge turn-off to students that need answers.
Are you ready to start email marketing your university?
If you’re ready to start marketing your place of higher education, WebFX can help.
We specialize in email marketing for schools and have the expertise to help you create a campaign that attracts more applicants.
Contact us today for a free quote!
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