By Courtney Pederson, Director of Strategic Accounts
You’ve just finished reviewing the results of your latest email campaigns. Are you left wondering how to get higher open rates and more click throughs?
Change how you talk to your prospects. Deploying highly targeted emails to smaller, niche groups of educators will yield stronger results, boosting campaign engagement, conversions and ROI.
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Chances are, you have more than one “ideal educator” that you’re trying to reach. Education purchasing is a long process that weighs input from many stakeholders, from influencers to decision makers. Rather than sending one general message to everyone involved in your sales cycle and trying to address all of their different needs, send many messages each tailored to the individual roles your core audience personas play in purchasing.
To execute microtargeted email marketing correctly, you must segment your lists. Do this by defining your ideal audience for a specific messaging strategy. Review your data to determine which leads and prospects best match your criteria, weeding out contacts as you go. Once you’ve narrowed your list down to only the most qualified contacts, you can then begin developing highly targeted messages personalized to their specific pain points.
Follow these four steps to make your move toward more microtargeted email lists, and repeat them for each audience segment.
1. Begin with the basics. Start by defining your audience by simple demographics: school type (public vs private), location (state, city, county) and job category (district-level or school-level).
After applying these variables, your list might include only public school teachers in Iowa.
2. Add more detail. Now take that targeting one step further, weeding out contacts who don’t fall into your ideal audience for specific messaging in the following areas:
• School enrollment size
• Grade levels
• Funding levels
• Job title
• Neighborhood demographics
Now your list might include only public high school teachers in Iowa in rural communities with school enrollments fewer than 500 and a high percentage of Title I students.
3. Start getting really specific. Just when you thought your list was final, you can apply more detailed variables to keep defining it. Out of the educators on your list, pull out those who meet specific demographics and building variables and teach in schools and districts with initiatives of interest to you and with certain accountability/performance indicators and scores.
At this point, you’ve narrowed your list down to only public high school teachers in Iowa in rural communities with school enrollments fewer than 500, a high percentage of Title I students and in schools where no more than 30 teachers are employed. The schools all use an LMS and have high ELA and Math proficiency scores. Eighty percent of teachers have earned their master’s degrees.
4. Weed out your current customers. Some of your current customers and prospects might end up on your microtargeted lists. Remove these individuals so that you’re sending messages only to new leads.
Finally, your list includes only non-customers who are public high school teachers in Iowa in rural communities with school enrollments fewer than 500, a high percentage of Title I students and in schools where no more than 30 teachers are employed. The schools all use an LMS and have high ELA and Math proficiency scores. Eighty percent of teachers have earned their master’s degrees.
Want to keep all of these strategies close by as you build your lists for upcoming campaigns? Download our new Targeting and Segmentation Strategies Cheat Sheet.
Contact Agile
Agile offers data, tools and more than 500 selects for microtargeting the educators within our K-12 database. Contact us to discuss the best strategies for segmenting and targeting your data to improve email performance.
About the Author
Courtney Pederson is Director of Strategic Accounts at Agile Education Marketing and has more than 15 years of experience in strategic sales and business development. She applies her extensive knowledge of education marketing, specifically in the edtech arena, to help companies develop integrated marketing solutions that sell effectively to educators in K-12 and higher education. Reach Courtney at [email protected]
