Your school email marketing database is a goldmine. You own it. You can do anything you want with it. Sounds great, doesn’t it?
You’ve probably already started to mine your school email marketing database. You’ve probably noticed all the valuable data it contains and how you can use it for various marketing and engagement purposes.
You might even have created spreadsheets to organize your data. You’ve probably noticed that the data in your school email marketing database grows every month. That’s because your students are constantly creating new accounts as new students arrive and because teachers often send emails to old students reminding them of upcoming events and assignments.
Now, it’s important to remember that your school email marketing database is completely different from your business email database. The former is a collection of individual school email accounts, while the latter is a collection of individual business email accounts.
Why Should You Create a School Email Marketing Database?
Let’s get to the good stuff now. Why should you create a school email marketing database?
Well, for starters, every single school email account is a potential lead or customer. It doesn’t matter if you’re in an elementary school or a high school. Every student, alumni, and parent has the potential to be a customer. You can target your marketing efforts to specific groups in your database if you want to gain more traction. Say you’re starting a new business but you want to target high school students. You can create a high school email marketing database and send out weekly flyers with tips on how to improve your social media skills or how to navigate the college application process. You can include links to websites and social media accounts that your students might find helpful. Or, you can create a marketing database for your alumni group and use it to target future events or fundraisers.
How Can You Use Your School Email Marketing Database?
Once you’ve mined your school email marketing database, you can use the data in many ways. Here are just a few examples of how you can put that information to good use.
- Marketing purposes. You can use the email list to send out regular emails with important dates or reminders. Or, you can send individual emails to promote a product or service.
- Engagement purposes. You can use the database to establish relationships with your students. You can ask your students to participate in a promotion or to sign up for a newsletter. You can create an RSVP list for an upcoming school event and send out an email a few days before the event reminding students of the event. Or, you can create a class website where you can post useful information and events for students. Or, you can create a teacher blog where you can share tips on teaching and strategies on how to engage students.
- Communication purposes. The account owner of each school email account has full access to that account. This means that you, the marketer, have no control over the content that is sent out through the account. However, you can delete emails that don’t apply to your specific targets.
- Research purposes. Say you’re an academic and you want to study the behavior of students and alumni when it comes to school events. You can use the database to establish a sampling frame. You can send out a survey to a random sample of the email accounts in your database and ask them if they’re planning to attend an event or if they’ve attended one in the past. You can follow up with a few emails reminding them of the event and offering them rewards if they participate.
Database Management In Excel
If you’re looking for an easier way to manage your database, you can download a free spreadsheet software from Google Docs called Sheets. It’s the perfect tool for quickly organizing and analyzing your school email marketing data. You can easily add new columns to the spreadsheet as needed. For example, if you want to add a new column for donations, you can do so by clicking the insert button at the bottom of the page. Then, you can start typing the letter ‘D’ in the first box and press enter. Boom. Now, you have a new column called ‘Donations’ where you can keep track of all your student and alumni donations. You can use this tool to easily find the total amount of donations for the year. Or, say you want to find the number of students who haven’t donated yet. You can enter the amount of donations in the first box and the number of students in the second. After doing so, you can use the ‘Countif’ function to count the number of students in the second box who don’t have a specified amount of money to donate. This function is really easy to use. All you have to do is type or copy and paste the information you want to analyze in the first and second boxes. Then, you can hit the ‘Countif’ button and your database will tell you the number of students who don’t have a specified amount of money to contribute.
Import Data From Other Databases
If you already have a business email database that you want to add to your collection, you can import the data into your school email marketing database using a tool called Bulk SMS. With this tool, you can import contacts from a variety of sources including a CSV file, an XLS file, or a vCard file. You can use the vCard file to import contacts from a vCard. These are cards that you’ve collected from businesses, universities, and other organizations. You can use a variety of fun things with your vCard file including creating a mailing list with all the contacts in the file and sending out mass emails or text messages. Not all vCard files are created equal, however. Make sure you are using a reputable source for your vCard file. Otherwise, all your efforts could be for naught.
Another way to add contacts to your school email marketing database is through an online form. You can use tools like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms to create a form that can collect contact information from students and parents. After you’ve collected the data, you can use third-party tools to send out periodic emails or text messages to promote an event, scholarship, or campaign. Remember, your students and alumni have trust issues. So, it’s important to establish a relationship with them via email if you want to gain their trust and convince them to participate in a campaign or to volunteer for a school event. In other words, use your school email marketing database for good and don’t spam it.
The key takeaway from this article is that your school email marketing database is a goldmine. You own it. You can do anything you want with it. So, don’t keep it a secret. Talk to your principal, the registrar, or the business department about creating an official data policy. Once you have that policy in place, it will be easier to use your school email marketing database for the benefits of the school and its students. Good luck.