I’m a huge fan of MediaPost’s Email Insider, and yesterday David Baker wrote a great piece to illustrate why, by outlining some of the ways in which a company can mess up their email program. He outlines the following mistakes places make:

  1. Continue to rotate through email vendors
  2. Benchmarking from the industry
  3. Mismanaging acquisition
  4. Not understanding social media theory
  5. Continuing to churn the resource pool

You can read his commentary for each over on MediaPost’s blog, but let me try to give each a higher education spin:

Continue to rotate through email vendors

When I first started doing email marketing way back in the day, I had no idea how different all of the email providers out there were and signed up with the first one that came along.  Big mistake.  The company didn’t really have a scalable product and way overcharged for it.  Within a year, I moved the school I was working at over to Fire Engine Red and never looked back.  Had I taken a more proactive approach to finding the right email service provider the first time around, I would not have had that problem.

Every time you switch email service providers, this costs you money.  You have to spend time demoing, evaluating and then training. Here’s a post I did about selecting an email service provider, so that you can avoid problems like this with your program.

Benchmarking from the industry

I’ve mentioned this several times in various posts but don’t ask what other schools are getting for core metrics like open and click rates!  There are too many unknowns to really make it a solid apples to apples comparison.  Instead of using outside benchmarks, start your own internal benchmarking program and use that to assess whether or not your email strategy is working.

Mismanaging acquisition

For higher ed, this usually isn’t as much of an issue because we have house lists, but simply put, don’t add people to your list unless they have requested to be, and if they ask to be unsubscribed, take them off. It’ll save you money from not having to pay for emails to communicate with people who don’t want to talk to you!

Not understanding social media theory

Email is not a magic bullet to dissemination of information, and adding “forward to a friend” in your message does not make you social media savvy.  Find your institution’s networks online and really make an effort to understand why (or why not!) your constituents are building relationships with you and each other on them.

Continuing to churn the resource pool

You don’t become an email marketing expert overnight, but a lot of places have people in these positions that have never done it before.  It’s just email, right? How hard could it be?  It’s a faulty assumption to think that anyone can walk right into it and understand the medium.

Then there are places at the other end of the spectrum - I’ve seen places who have established email marketing experts on staff, and treat them like dirt to the point where they quit!  Then the program gets handed off to the next person, who probably has little to no experience.  If you have internal people that are really good at this and have been doing it for a while, show them the respect and consideration that  you would want yourself.  You don’t want to lose them.

Bottom Line

For me, it really all comes down to discipline.  Don’t make snap decisions about things and really do your homework. Treat good employees well so they don’t leave you high and dry.  It’s not rocket science folks!

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