HomeEducation is highly competitive and with the Government having announced a funding cut of £950m for British Universities over the next 3 years, it will only get tougher. 15-24 year olds make up 16% of the total PC-based Internet population in the UK but that figure leaps to 25% for mobile access.
As teenagers spend more time online and using smart mobile devices, education faces the challenges of finding new ways to grab attention and build engagement. In recognition of this, British Council now offers an e-marketing workshop1 to help education marketers understand how students select education products online (next course in London in November 2010).
How can higher education brands increase engagement with their customers? How can colleges win the persuasion battle and convince students that there is the right blend of skills and support to help them excel? How can they tap into the lucrative overseas student market?
Search and they will find
iProspect research shows that 62% of searchers click on links within the first page of results. It's logical that to be front of mind, you have to be highly visible on SERPs; rely on your marketing efforts, not on the propensity of searchers to sift through pages of results because we all have attention deficit issues online.
A few ideas:
Concentrate on your brand, location, departments and individual courses. In the last 12 months, in the UK alone there were approximately 390,000 searches for "psychology university" and 320,000 searches for "psychology courses".
It's a social thing
Traffic from social networks to brand websites is increasing. 99% of Generation Y users (aged 18-24) have a profile on a social networking site, though Twitter adoption in the under 24s is a slower burn. Higher education will benefit from the fact that social media is international - the key networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Foursquare enable local content to be dispersed to a global audience.
Here are some ideas worth exploring:
Be front of mind - get behavioural
Retargeting8 enables you to serve targeted online adverts to people who have visited your website when they browse elsewhere, using advertising networks and their media partners.
For example, Acme College has a new visit from a potential student who searched for "engineering degree" in Google. The student visits the engineering department landing page, then leaves and continues the web session on another website. Acme then serves adverts promoting its engineering courses via 3rd party websites to the same student to keep their message front of mind.
Evidence from the retail market9 suggests that 42.9% consumers who see retargeted adverts then return to the original website.
Further reading
There are some interesting articles available online for further reading. Check out the following:
Take away thoughts
Source
This article was written by James Gurd, guest writer and blogger at user experience consultancy13, Webcredible. They run a range of fantastic training courses including Google Analytics training14 and social media training15.
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by Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)
Ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to subscriber inboxes is an increasingly difficult battle in the age of spam filtering. Open and click thru response rates can be dramatically affected by as much as 20-30% due to incorrect spam filter classification.
Permission
Confirming that the people who ask for your information have actually requested to be on your list is the number one step in the battle for deliverability. You should be using a process called confirmed opt-in or verified opt-in to send a unique link to the attempted subscriber when they request information. Before adding the person to your list they must click that unique link verifying that they are indeed the same person that owns the email address and requested to subscribe.
Subscriber Addresses
When requesting website visitors to opt-in ask for their “real” or “primary” email address instead of a free email address like Yahoo or Hotmail. Free emails tend to be throw away accounts and typically have a shorter lifetime than a primary ISP address.
List Maintenance
Always promptly remove undeliverable addresses that bounce when sending email to them. An address that bounces with a permanent error 2-3 times in a 30 day period should be removed from the list. ISP’s track what percentage of your newsletters bounce and will block them if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.
Message Format
Usage of HTML messages to allow for text formatting, multiple columns, images, and brand recognition is growing in popularity and is widely supported by most email client software. Most spam is also HTML formatted and thus differentiating between requested email and spam HTML messages can be difficult. A 2004 study by AWeber .com shows that plain text messages are undeliverable 1.15% of the time and HTML only messages were undeliverable 2.3%. If sending HTML it is important to always send a plain text alternative message, also called text/HTML multi-part mime format.
Content
Many ISP’s filter based on the content that appears within the message text.
- Website URL: Research potential newsletter advertisers before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter issues. If they have used their website URL to send spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter could cause the entire message to be filtered. Words/phrases: Choose your language carefully when crafting messages. Avoid hot button topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography. If you do need to use words that might be filtered, don’t attempt to obfuscate words with extra characters or odd spelling, you’ll just make your messages appear more spam like. Images: Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly, if at all. Commonly used open rate tracking technology uses images to calculate opens. You may choose to disable open rate tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content. Attachments: With viruses running rampant and spreading thru the usage of malicious email attachments many users are wary of attached documents. It’s often better to link to files via a website URL to reduce recipient fear of attachments and reduce the overall message size.
CAN-SPAM Compliance
The January 2004 Federal CAN-SPAM law introduced a number of rules regarding the delivery of email. It’s important you have your legal counsel review your practices and ensure you are in compliance. The two most important rules include having a valid postal mail address listed in all commercial messages and a working unsubscribe link that is promptly honored to remove the subscriber from future messages.
Reputation
Reputation services are often used by large ISP’s as a way to vet email senders regarding their email practices and policies. Businesses listed with these services are then given less stringent filtering or no filtering at all. Several reputation services are:
- http://www.isipp.com/iadb.php
- http://www.bondedsender.com
- http://www.habeas.com
Relationships & Whitelisting
Contact with major ISP’s and email providers is essential in letting them know about your requested subscriber email. Many large providers such as AOL and Yahoo have specific whitelisting programs and postmaster website areas to ensure your email is delivered as long as you meet their policies and procedures in handling your opt-in list.
Email deliverability is about ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to the intended recipient. While no single tip will enable you to get 100% of your email delivered each one utilized as a group can go a long way to reaching that goal.
Related E-mail Marketing Articles and Tips:
Click on titles to read more.
3/15/11 3 Surefire Reasons to Use Animated GIFs In Your Email Marketing Click on titles to read more.
3/10/11 Email Timing: A Look At 6 Marketers
3/8/11 3 Helpful Thank You Page Examples
3/7/11 Meet AWeber at SXSW 2011
3/3/11 How to Instate Brand Ambassadors With Email
3/1/11 Do You Market Solutions, Or Just Stuff?
About The Author:
Tom Kulzer is the CEO of AWeber Communications. AWeber Creates Lasting Customer Relationships For You With Email Newsletters, Autoresponders, RSS to Email and Other Email Marketing Tools.
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Google was originally known as BackRub when it started in 1998. It represented a new approach to ranking sites on the web. Prior to Google, the dominant searches didn’t make much of an effort to improve their ranking systems. This led to a variety of bizarre results when people searched for something and the results were not particularly relevant. Google sought to overcome this problem.
Google works by focusing on relevancy. You will hear a variety of comments about how Google ranks sites, but in the end it all comes down to this term of art. Relevancy can simply be defined as a web page that is most relevant to the terms search for by a user. The trick, of course, is for Google to figure out how to determine relevancy.
Google works by focusing on the content of web pages. It tends to mostly ignore meta tags as too many search engine optimization people learned how to tweak their sites to get results. Since these tweaks were often shortcuts, the search results were less than great. To circumvent this, Google now focuses on the overall text of the page as well as the site as a whole. The exact Google formula, known as the algorithm, is not public information, but issues such as keyword density, flow of the text, amount of code, registration length of domain and how long visitors stay on a site all seem to be used. In truth, there are probably a couple hundred factors involved in the evaluation.
Google also determines relevancy and rankings by looking outside of a site. Specifically, it looks to see what other sites are linking to the site in question. In theory, the more sites linking to you must be an indication that you are offering highly relevant content on your site. For instance, the website for the IRS is consistently ranked highly for tax terms because thousands of sites link to it. Logically and practically, this must mean the IRS offers highly relevant information on taxes and of course it does.
As you might imagine, this linking factor led to the growth of an entire industry dedicated to trading links. This process is known as reciprocal linking. In the last year, Google has devalued such links because it no longer represents a measurement of relevancy. Instead, it just represents a measure of how many links a site can trade. Google now looks more at the type of links being traded and gives high value to links which are inbound only. This means someone is linking to your site without you linking back to them.
Asking how does Google work is a complex question. Part of the answer is unknown, but the parts we do know allow for the manipulation of search rankings. This, of course, leads to lots of traffic on a site.
I always laugh when listening to mainstream marketing company blabber on about branding and demographics. On the web, ecommerce is boils down to one concept and only one. You must determine the needs of your prospects and provide solutions.
It is so important that you should start every day and meeting off by saying, “What are the needs of my prospects and how does what I am doing provide a solution to those needs?” If you cannot provide a quick, simple answer, you have wondered off the path to profits and need to refocus.
So, what the hell do I mean by “needs.” The trick with web ecommerce is to realize that there is lookie loo traffic and need traffic. A person shopping online for Christmas presents on December 15th has a serious need and is highly motivated to buy. A person that is drinking coffee on a Sunday morning and catching up on the news has no needs and isn’t going to get off their butt to find their wallet. Obviously, you are only interested in the motivated person.
Finding the needs of your prospects should be the first thing you do. Before you decide on a business name. Before you buy a domain. Before you even decide on the exact products or services you will offer. All of these subjects will be determined by your prospects once you understand their needs.
Okay, so how do you figure out their needs? In the real world, you would invest $50,000 on a market analysis, surveys and so on to find out their needs and the best location for your business. You are going to love this. With web ecommerce, you are going to spend under a couple of hundred bucks.
You first step is to identify the single word that best describes your business. If you want to open an online travel site, the word is “travel.” If you want to sell a book on investing, the word is “investing.” Whatever you business, pick the one word that describes it best.
Taking your one word, you want to use this program: WordTracker. With Wordtracker, you are going to do a keyword analysis. You will do an analysis for “travel” by entering the word in a provided form, hitting the return button and then watching the program kick out every keyword phrase that incorporates “travel” that has been typed into a meta search engine in the last 60 days.
Think about that for a moment. It is going to report to you the exact phrases used by your prospects to find something related to your business, in this case, travel. Each of those keyword phrases represents a need your prospect has regarding travel.
Let’s say you were going to build a travel site focused on cruises to the Caribbean. After you do the keyword analysis using the phrase “cruise”, you find there are tons of search for cruises to Alaska. Your prospects are telling you the subject the site should focus on. Instead of wasting time and money on the wrong area, you know where to go to pull in customers. Your domain name, advertising and search engine optimization should all be focused on the keywords you identify for your area of interest.
Of all the purported strategies for web ecommerce, there is one that always works. Identify the needs of your prospects and provide solutions to them.
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