Online Marketing Part 2 of 3

I have a confession to make. I am not a marketing expert.  So what presumption causes me to write an article about email marketing? First of all, I get slammed by marketing emails daily and have a reasonably good idea about what works for me. And I also subscribe to a number of very helpful newsletters.

As a consumer of both good and bad marketing email, I have experience. As an architect of such systems for customers, I have understanding of system requirements. And there are a number of common sense practices about this subject. Consider the following and see if you don’t agree.

Sending an email newsletter is one of the most cost effective ways of reaching an audience. Once configured, it costs virtually nothing to send and if created with some artistic consideration, can be a welcome addition to the mindless advertising that prevails in your subscriber’s inbox.  And if managed properly, your electronic newsletter can be self-supporting. Subscribers can add, remove, and modify their email and choose the format of your message.

So what is the difference between a helpful email newsletter and mindless email advertising?

I would boil it down to three simple ideas. You might want to conduct an internal review. Of course your own situation will depend on your intended audience, but develop your email newsletter with these concepts in mind:

• Permission
• Content
• Frequency

Permission

The most important principle that you should observe is permission, as in having it. There is nothing more annoying than to receive unsolicited email, which is primarily advertising, that pretends to be an informative newsletter.  Well, there is something more annoying, getting the same message several times at once (duplicate emails) or repetitively (too frequently).

So as you think about permission, please be considerate. There are wide ranging audiences for your electronic communication. Some may not know you at all, and have little interest. Others may be deeply connected to your organization and be very interested in your messaging. Most will be somewhere in between.

Be sure to have permission to send, in the case of familiar contacts; and a very easy and reliable unsubscribe feature for messages sent to those who may not have interest at the present time. It is important to note that there are laws on the books of some states requiring that your unsolicited email messages contain an “Unsubscribe” link in them. Regardless of the law, this is always a good idea.

The surest method of obtaining permission is to provide a sign-up link on your website (or in an email) for subscribing to your content. You may also gather email addresses from referrals, printed media, or word of mouth. In the world of commerce, it is very common to buy lists of potential recipients of your newsletter, but that may not be practical in the real world of Charter Schools.

Content is King

Much like your website, prospective students (and parents) will read your message for content. So find a good balance between too little and too much. I have seen entire newsletters that only amount to three solid sentences of information, and I have seen multipage tomes that require a serious read. You ought to be somewhere comfortably in the middle

A common format for electronic newsletters is to publish an introductory paragraph with a catchy headline and solid, well written introductory paragraph. And then include a “Read More” link for the remainder of the article.

This allows your readers to hit the highlights, and then expand on the articles of interest. This will save space, allowing a full set of articles on a single page. Be sure to dress up your email newsletter with some nice imagery, but don’t overdo it and ensure your images are formatted for the web.

More advanced newsletter solutions will allow you to accommodate both html and text based email messages. If you don’t understand the difference, html is better if you want graphics to accompany your words. Text is, well… text only, no pictures provided.

And one last thing, don’t embed music in your electronic newsletter. That can be highly embarrassing and/or annoying. Imagine sitting quietly, catching up on your email, waiting for a meeting or event to start while reviewing an email newsletter just received. Then without warning, Bon Jovi begins blaring out of your computer speakers when you open the email from one of your favorite organizations. That’s a sure way to get an unsubscribe request, at a minimum.

Frequency

Finally, be sure to keep the frequency and consistency of your email newsletter at a reasonable level. And be sure that your system has the capacity to detect duplicate recipients, one good email newsletter is good – but more (of the same newsletter) is not better!

Be careful as you determine a publishing schedule for your email newsletter. Remember that it takes time and effort to create useful and interesting content. And consistency is important if you want to build/maintain an engaged readership. Don’t overcommit yourself to creating content, or you may find yourself trying to be creative and dilute your purpose.

Frequency is a function of content and audience. If your newsletter is to highlight this week’s events at your school, then a monthly newsletter may not be sufficient. If it is a monthly Board Report, then weekly won’t quite work either.

Summary

Periodic newsletters to your community can be a very engaging and helpful service, but do this purposefully and with planning. There are open source (free) software solutions that will provide the functionality you need, assuming your website has been designed properly. So paying for a service such as Constant Contact may not be necessary. However, if the budget allows, commercial services may be easier for you to manage. Either way, obtain permission from your recipients directly or indirectly, produce good content, and publish your newsletter at a frequency that you and your audience can maintain.

If you need guidance on which email newsletter solution is best for you, please contact us. We are always eager to help.

Online Marketing Basics - Part 1 of 3

During the crucial planning year, you need to get your marketing game on. After all, the most important measure of your success is student enrollment. And unless you are deeply connected to your proposed student population through some other non-profit association or group, that means doing some good old fashioned marketing.

There are many ways to do marketing and I don’t pretend to be a marketing expertise. My experience with those who make such claims is not favorable.  However, when it comes to the basics of online marketing, or marketing driven primarily by the Internet, there are some reasonably well established ways of doing this.

Let’s consider three areas you might want to review with respect to your Internet oriented marketing strategy, we’ll review one each week:

1. Your website as a marketing machine
2. Email marketing and online communications
3. Social media sanity

Your website as a marketing machine

 

The notion of a “well designed” website is a bit  subjective. It starts with artistic style, design elements, and color combinations created by an experienced design team. But it also assumes an underlying quality of hosting platforms, server technologies, and functionality. And it assumes dynamic and current information that is relevant to your potential site visitors.

 

There are several articles on this blog addressing website construction, but let’s set that completely aside and focus on your website purely from a marketing perspective.

 

From a marketing perspective your objective is pretty simple. Help potential students (or their parents),  find your school online, make it easy for them to engage, develop a relationship with them,  harvest or gather their contact information, and develop a process to follow up and answer their questions and guide them through enrollment. You will want to automate this process as much as possible to keep costs down.

 

Improving the ability for potential students to find your school on the Internet is often referred to as search optimization. Doing search optimization well is an ongoing challenge and consists of two general categories of activities – paid optimization (such as Pay Per Click advertising) and native or organic optimization. In my mind free is always better, but good optimization always comes at a cost. You either spend money for search optimization advertising, or you spend time placing high quality content on your website that produces high organic search results. In real life you will probably want to do both, this is particularly true for new schools.

 

One of the most frequently overlooked features that will improve organic search results is to place video on your home page. A recent study I found suggested a 1200% increase in search results by using this technique alone. In addition to that you will want to tag (label) or provide keywords called meta data on each page, use sufficient headers in your articles, label each and every image or video on your site with accurate and descriptive words,  and of course write useful content. All of these things will make it easy for search engines to properly index your site. Indexing is an ongoing process by which search engines crawl or evaluate your site and quantify relevance of your content, these measurements will determine your placement on their service.

 

There is an entire industry on the Internet, indeed an inexhaustible supply of individuals and groups who claim to have expertise in Search Engine Optimization. No doubt someone out there has to be an expert, but in every case (and we have tried more than a few) that we have hired these so called “SEO Experts”, they have collected a lot of money and without exception delivered little in the way of improved results.

 

Google and the other search engines closely guard the metrics associated with search optimization, in similar fashion Coca Cola closely guards the formulation of their products. And they (search engines) are continually changing the formula for search optimization to produce better results. Good quality content that is fresh and relevant and linked to other sites and networks will eventually produce good organic search results, in the interim you may want to do some search word advertising.

 

Want to take a simple test to see how well your school does in organic search? Just open a fresh browse and clear all of your cookies and cache, then type in a few key words that you would use to find your school (hint: don’t use your school name – that’s cheating and a prospective student would not know that information). Now count the pages of results and if you don’t appear on the first few pages, you have work to do.

 

Bottom line is that a free web site put up by one of your parent volunteers, while an admirable effort, may not garner the kind of organic search optimization you need. And with that quality of website construction, you may need to spend significantly to buy search optimization.  This of course, assumes the volunteer is not one of those hard to find SEO experts!

 

Measure your progress

 

Google analytics is no doubt the industry standard tool to measure your site traffic. But many website authoring frameworks provide their own measuring tools, often in the form of raw page counts. However you choose to measure your website traffic, do so regularly. Even with just basic page counts, you can quickly determine which content on your website provides the most interest for site visitors.

 

Don’t forget the mobile platform

 

The statistics associated with mobile devices as a share of Internet search makes a very compelling argument to optimize your website for mobile devices. Mobile access is the fastest growing segment of Internet traffic. Accordingly, it would be a very good idea to ensure that your website is mobile friendly.

 

There are several ways to do this and the techniques are outside the scope of this article, but a good start is to take a look at your website through your mobile phone or smart phone.  Then enlist your friends, with different brands of phones to do the same.  Taking a look at your site and attempting to navigate it will provide you a great deal of insight into what works and what does not.

 

The simplest way of managing the mobile access on your website is to use the right technology in the first place. Mature open source platforms, such as Word Press or Joomla do a very good job of mobile optimization right out of the box. “Build your own website” tools on many of the popular hosting companies may not do an adequate job.

 

If your budget allows, it is possible to place code on your website that senses a mobile device and redirects site visitors to a portion of your website that is designed specifically for mobile web browsers.

 

Summary

 

Your online marketing begins with a well designed and constructed website with fresh and relevant content, particularly video. Your website should be the communications hub, much like a bicycle wheel, that serves as the end point for all of your Internet communication. Invest the time and money necessary to develop the search results you need. This may include paid search word advertising, Facebook Ads, and other venues. And don’t forget the ever growing audience of mobile users.

Next week we will address email and other forms of communication that will improve your marketing reach.