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Email is pretty much the perfect marketing tool for higher education. With email marketing universities and colleges can attract new students, solicit alumni donations and effectively communicate with future students, past and current students.
The benefits of email marketing to higher education institutes include:
- Costs less than traditional advertising media
- Further geographical reach than traditional marketing methods
- Increases fundraising efforts and raise more money
- Send targeted emails to drive recruitment
- A/B Split line testing
When targeting prospective students, universities and colleges need to take into consideration that the average age of their target audience is 16 to 18 year olds and therefore the majority of students will be checking their email from a mobile device. In fact, regardless of the age of your audience, new data from the US Consumer Device Preference Report: Q4 2013, 65% of all email is now being accessed via mobile devices in the U.S.
We’re all familiar with the importance of responsive design for websites, particularly when you’re in the business of marketing to students who never leave home without their smart phones and tablets.
In the same way, it’s imperative when sending out email campaigns to have them optimized for mobile. There is something inherently frustrating about being unable to correctly read an email on a mobile device that makes you instinctively want to hover over the delete icon.
Responsive email design considerations
There are a number of issues that a developer needs to overcome when creating a design for an email including:
- The majority of mobile devices normally block images by default to save on data
- Alt text for images is often over written with a download button for the image
- Content will often either be scaled down and the text will be hard to read or it won’t scale at all which makes it hard to navigate with the small screen
When developing an email design a developer will need a different approach than if designing a one-page website. The design is different as there are a number of constraints:
No Navigation
Email will normally have only have one or two links to different locations as the function of an email is to direct the reader to visit a particular page.
Media Queries
Are not supported on all clients and some clients will overwrite them with built in queries (web based clients).
CSS and HTML Standards do not apply
Not all clients support HTML therefore a number of browsers will remove html commands; this will break the layout of your email causing it to display incorrectly.
No standards defined for email
There are currently no standards for email designs.
Designing Responsive email
When beginning the design process for email you need to understand the sections you will be designing within a single email:
1.Inbox view
This is made up with the From Field, Subject Line and Pre-header
2. Email/Body
This is the main content area.
3. Page/Link
Create a link to the page you wish to navigate the person to. All the sections will be designed within one page; using inline CSS as not all clients support media queries.
Useful links
There are a number of resources currently out there to help you with the design ideas and tips; I’ve listed a few below:
http://responsiveemailresources.com/
http://responsiveemailpatterns.com/
https://www.campaignmonitor.com/guides/mobile/
Email is a channel that can consistently deliver high-quality prospects particularly when clean and responsive in design, in-line with the university’s brand and the subject matter is relevant to its intended audience.