Follow these tips to reach more of your Shocker audience and increase their responsiveness.
Making it personal
Personalized mailings have 29 percent higher unique open rates and 41 percent more click rates than non-personalized emails.
"Joe, WSU spring registration is coming up!"
Mobile friendly + social friendly
Emails with social sharing buttons increase click-through rates by 158 percent.
Test, test, test
If an email does not display correctly, 71.2 percent will immediately delete it.
Writing techniques
Brief is better
When messaging someone brief is better. The more words that are used, the more saturated the message becomes. Stick to a message of between 50 and 125 words.
Remove passive voice
Instead of "If you are contacted by your advisor," use "If your advisor contacts you."
Translate jargon
"Non-credit bearing" is equal to "does not count for credit."
Ensure readability
Write at the reading level of a high school senior.
Early bird
Send your email first thing in the morning.
Use simple language
Instead of "Exempted," use "do not need to."
Call to action (CTA)
Use one
Include only one call to action when possible. Clicks increase 42 percent when CTA is reduced from 4 to 1.
Subject line
Put CTA in the subject line so students immediately know what to do.
Urgency
Convey a sense of urgency. Use action verbs such as "sign up," "schedule," or "pay."
Stand out
Make your CTA stand out. Offset CTAs with bold, different colored text or buttons.
Tracking
Always track the basics for any campaign
You should track your own activity (i.e., students contacted, rounds of outreach) and student engagement (e.g., response rate, advised rate) because these metrics are important to evaluating your campaign's impact. They are also helpful interim metrics that prove a "job well done" and provide motivation along the way.
Find more ways of measuring campaign effectiveness here: https://wsu.news/EABMeasurement
Embrace analytics
Data is good and not to be feared.
Information provided by EAB.