Email Marketing

We’ve included several general email templates available for download below. 

• Newsletter
• Announcement
• Event

Create an Email Marketing Calendar
Take time throughout the year to create an email marketing calendar that supports your content marketing, event marketing and other promotional calendars. Plan, design and create content for emails and announcements ahead of time as much as possible — this helps to keep you organized, and also ensures consistent and strategic communication with your audiences.

Be Strategic
Each email you send should have a purpose that provides value to your audience, whether it’s sent to students, faculty and staff, or even external audiences. Be as clear and concise as possible with your message when creating content, and be sure to explore other avenues of promotion as well (e.g. social media, direct mail, print materials).

Maintain Your Distribution Lists
It’s important to review and monitor your email distribution lists on a regular basis, removing those subscribers who have become unengaged with your content in order to help maintain good deliverability rates.

List Segmentation
Email marketing has changed over the years, from a ‘blast’ form of communication, to a more catered and personalized form of communication. Segmenting your distribution lists allows you to experience higher engagement with your audiences because the more you cater to your audience interests and activities, the more your messaging will resonate with them.

Branding
By incorporating Ohio State brand guidelines into the email marketing campaigns you create, you’re helping to play a role in strengthening the brand of the university. This is especially important as we communicate with external audiences. Please reference the official university brand guidelines as much as needed for guidance with editorial style, color, logos, images and more.

Create Compelling Subject Lines
Subject lines are one of the very first impressions you have on your email recipients, and a compelling subject line can help your email stand out from the rest. Some good ideas to keep in mind for creative subject lines include being short and to the point, telling the audience what’s inside, creating a sense of importance or urgency, using numbers and asking questions.

Examples:
Scheduling soon? (Used with ASC spring courses campaign)
Interested in studying abroad this summer? (Used with Education Abroad Advertising)
We’ll Sugarcoat This for You (Used with ASC Donuts with the Dean campaign)
ASCENT: News from the Arts and Sciences (Used with ASC digital magazine campaign)
Can you crack our campus scavenger hunt? (Used with ASC Gold Rush campaign)

Call-to-Action (CTA)
Your call-to-action is the second most important piece of content in your email. Beyond persuading your audience to open your email (via subject line), you also want them to click on your content. Be clear and concise with your calls-to-action, keeping them to only 1-2 links per email, unless you’re sending out a newsletter.

Add Alt-Text to Images
Alt text (also referred to as alternative text or alt tags) is used to describe the images in your emails. Alt text is required in your emails for a couple of different reasons:

• If an image fails to load for any reason, alt text will display in its place allowing email recipients to understand what image should be there.
• Visually impaired individuals often need to use screen readers in order to browse web pages and emails. Alt text is needed to explain and describe to people using screen readers the context of the images included on websites and in emails.

Optimize for Mobile
Emails are now opened more on mobile devices than desktop computers and mobile users also tend to check their email up to three times more than desktop users do. Due to this, email content should be kept as short as possible, instead focusing on using compressed images and concise calls-to-action.

University Marketing provided all units with a new set of branded email templates (summer 2018) that are specifically designed to be mobile responsive.

Send Test Emails
When your email template and content are both complete, be sure to send yourself (and others) a test email before sending to the intended distribution list to ensure that:

• There are no typos
• The images show up correctly
• The format looks good on both desktop computers and mobile devices
• All of the links are working

Optimize Email Sending
The best days and times to send emails depend on the industry and its audiences.

For the higher education industry, we currently recommend:

• Sending to current and prospective students between noon and 4 p.m. during the week.
• Sending to faculty and staff between 9:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. during the week.

*Please note: While these are our suggestions for email marketing optimization, you may find that different days and times work better for your audiences. Always be sure to test your email optimization by reviewing analytics to create the best strategy for your department.

Track Analytics
The best way to measure the success of each email you send is to review its analytics. If you consistently see high open and click rates, your audiences are finding your emails useful. Low open and click rates tend to signal low engagement, which can be improved by reviewing and recording your email analytics to see where improvements can be made. 

Useful analytics to review and record include:

• Number of emails sent
• Unique open rate
• Unique click rate
• Call-to-action
• Subject Line

Be Aware of Anti-Spam Laws
The CAN-SPAM Act is a law that sets the rules for commercial email, establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to unsubscribe from our emails and spells out tough penalties for violations.

Due to this law, we’re required to include both a physical address and an option to unsubscribe from all email messages we send. This information is generally included in the footer of our emails — if you choose to design your own email templates please remember to include this information within.