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 print communications.” The purpose of her session, she explained, was to demonstrate why email is still relevant in recruitment and fundraising, and to discuss her five rules for a successful email marketing plan:

- Outsource your email broadcasting. “Using an Email Service Provider (ESP) is an inexpensive way to maintain deliverability, along with a number of other benefits.”

- Make HTML templates that are simple and unobtrusive. “The simpler, the better. The star of your email is the copy, and specifically the call to action.”

- Segment your audience. “By splitting your audience into smaller groups and targeting your message more closely to your specific users, you can increase click through rages by as much as 20 percent.”

- Make content timely, relevant and personal. “Every institution has information that can be seamlessly merged into your messages to make them more personal to the user.”

- Track results. But make sure you view them within the proper context — and that means defining your goals for each message before it is sent.

“Email marketing is not rocket science, but doing it successfully requires careful planning and an eye for detail,” she concluded. “By following these five guiding principles, you will be able to build an email marketing program for your institution that will generate results.”

To see slides from “Taking Email to the Next Level,” visit:
www.slideshare.net/karlynmorissette/taking-email-to-the-next-level-presentation?type=powerpoint

To visit Karlyn’s blog, click:
karlynmorissette.karlyn.me/