Archive for 'Email'

Email may be one of the easiest ways to respond to prospective students and parents, but we can often rely on email too much — not thinking about other communication channels or if the message is appropriate for email.

Christopher Elliot provides us with five things you should never include in an email. I’ve narrowed down the top three that relate to admissions:

“If you have to tell a customer ‘no,’ an email is sometimes the worst way to do it.” Admissions offices have to say ‘no’ for a variety of reasons and if you need to have an uncomfortable conversation with a student, an email might not be the best option (use a formal letter, phone call, etc.). Make sure you’re ...

Plain-text emails can be a really effective way to get your message across without the complexities and margin for error that html presents.

But what to do about those long, not-so-attractive links?

You know the ones — they include the “behind the scenes” coding that allows us to track who is clicking on them.  Html can hide them, but unfortunately plain-text bares all.

Here’s a trick I use to handle plain-text links:  Try rewriting the sentence with the link at the end.  Then add a colon and a hard return and place the link on the next line by itself.

When you’re done it should look like this:
(insert link here)

This approach sets off your call to action really well and makes skimming the ...

Today I’d like to share my “10 Email Tips” from our most recent webcast.

I figured if you were there, this could be your little “post-game wrap-up.”  And if you weren’t, then hey, it’s new to you;)

Here are my “Top 10 Tips for Writing Better Email Messages:”

1.  Know your role: Email works best for invitations, reminders, confirmations, surveys, notifications and process updates.

2.  Get to the point: Skip the intro, get rid of big blocks of text and say what you need to say right up front.

3.  Make the call: Have a clear call-to-action and set it off by placing it on its own line.  Consider bold type and other ways to make it stand out.

4.  Inform your subjects: When creating a ...

Monday used to be the worst, then it was the best. Now it’s somewhere in between. Early morning is out of the question, except for Saturday and Sunday. But we should avoid Saturday and Sunday like the flu, shouldn’t we?

It remains one of the burning questions of our time: What’s the best day of the week to send promotional emails?

After years of research, the answer is clear. No one knows.

More accurately, no one can keep up with the shifting behaviors of email recipients and the resulting efforts of marketers to catch up with the latest research. So the news a year ago that open and click-through rates were best on Monday resulted in so much Monday traffic that response rates ...

For cost-effectiveness, it’s still hard to beat email as a marketing tool, says Dartmouth’s Karlyn Morissette. Given the economic shock waves buffeting campuses everywhere, her recent words to a group of college marketers carry extra significance.

Morissette is the Web Producer in Dartmouth College’s Development Office, but she is probably best known for her popular blog on e-marketing in higher education. Last month, she presented a session on email at the 19th annual Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education in Chicago.

“Email marketing is not new to higher education,” she said. “However, many colleges and universities have struggled to grasp its potential impact on the overall goals of the institution and have relegated it to a second-class status in relation to ...

There’s something vaguely voodoo about search engine optimization — the process of attracting more crawling spiders to your website through some mystical HTML coding that results in a higher ranking when search results are presented.

An entire industry of “optimizers” has sprung up to make your website more search engine friendly so you can beat out your competitors when a prospective student does a Google search for “college illinois communications major.” But these consultants are not cheap and their results are often disappointing.

Now you can go directly to the source and obtain Google’s “Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide,” a free 22-page PDF that lists some of the best practices for improving your site’s search results.

“SEO is often about making small changes ...