Inboxes are inundated with sales emails, so it's crucial to make yours stand out.
Emails from edtech companies inundate K-12 school and district administrators’ inboxes. In this context, no matter how great your product is, it’s tough to get your email opened, and even harder to get it clicked or responded to. But it’s not impossible. With the six tips below, you can increase the open and click-through rates on your marketing and prospecting emails.
1. Provide Value In The Email
Admins are busy, and your email is unsolicited. Make up for your interruption by sending an email that gives the recipient something useful. Don’t write about how amazing your product is and beg for a meeting. Draft messages that offer resources that the admin will find useful in their day-to-day work. For example, if you know that their district has a high English Language Learner population, and your product supports such students, share a white paper or webinar on research-informed best practices that your team has curated. If the district has many students reading below grade level, and you have a reading program, share what the latest research says about phonics instruction.
Create an email that gives a payoff for reading it. And, bonus points if there’s so much value that they forward it on to others. The message will establish you and your company as knowledgable on the given topic, and the likely next step for the educator will be to check out your offerings.
2. Keep The Email Short and Sweet
Time and attention spans are short, so it’s important that your message is too. Draft your email, and then edit, and edit again. Cut all unnecessary words. Adverbs and superlatives are usually the first to go. If you want to share a study or in-depth findings, link to them, rather than including them in the text of the email. In general, one paragraph should be enough to get the email’s job done.
Within these few lines, it’s important to convey your message with lots of positivity and high energy. Remember that your recipients are receiving dozens of these emails each day. To stand out, have fun with the drafting. The email is your first chance to interact with a person with whom you want to develop an extended relationship. Make a good first impression!
3. Include A Clear Call To Action
Your paragraph-long email has a lot of work to do. It needs to offer value, be positive, and let the prospect know what you want them to do. What’s the call to action? Maybe at this stage, you just want to build brand awareness and have them click on a link to a webinar, study, or white paper. Or, maybe, your goal is for them to find value in the email and then schedule a call. Before you start drafting, get clear on the goal of your message, and make sure to make it clear to the reader too.
4. Personalize Subject Lines
One of the easiest ways to increase the open rates of the emails that you send to K-12 education administrators is to personalize the subject line. If you’re emailing Joe Schmoe, your subject doesn’t need to say, “Great EdTech Tool for Joe Schmoe.” But if Joe’s district is in Texas, and his title is Assistant Superintendent, you may want to start the subject line with “Texas Assistant Superintendents...” so that Joe knows that this email is meant for people in his area in his role. Further, if you know the lingo of a prospect’s area, include that. In Texas, they use the TEKS learning standards, so maybe you include “TEKS-Aligned” in your subject if your tool offers that region-specific alignment. Administrators don’t want to feel like you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what will stick when you’re emailing them; they want to feel like you’re offering a solution that’s right for them.
To further increase open rates, A/B test your subject lines to determine which personalized ones get the most opens. Then use the winning line exclusively.
5. Time For Maximum Opens
Even though email functions 24/7 and 365 days a year, there are good and bad times to send messages. Holidays are typically bad, and so are weekends. Mondays tend to do not as well, because people often have more of a backlog from the weekend. And Friday emails are less likely to get opened because the weekend is beckoning, and people are trying to finish what they already have on their plates. Tuesday through Thursday tend to be the best days to message, and morning usually performs best in K-12 education. People do open their emails all days of the week and at all times, but for your best shot at high open rates, schedule your messages for early morning mid-week.
6. Keep It Simple
In your email, you want to impress the K-12 administrator about how knowledgable you are; don’t do this with big words. Keep your language simple. Craft a message that a fourth-grade student would understand. This means avoiding the multisyllabic $10 words when a simpler one would do, and not using jargon. The more jargon you use, the more your message will blend with all of the other ones that use uninspired language and don’t get responses.
