Follow these tips to reach more of your Shocker audience and increase their responsiveness. 

Making it personal

Personalized mailings have 29 percent higher unique open rates and 41 percent more click rates than non-personalized emails. 

"Joe, WSU spring registration is coming up!"

Mobile friendly + social friendly

Emails with social sharing buttons increase click-through rates by 158 percent.

Test, test, test

If an email does not display correctly, 71.2 percent will immediately delete it. 

Writing techniques

Brief is better

When messaging someone brief is better. The more words that are used, the more saturated the message becomes. Stick to a message of between 50 and 125 words.

Remove passive voice

Instead of "If you are contacted by your advisor," use "If your advisor contacts you."

Translate jargon

"Non-credit bearing" is equal to "does not count for credit."

Ensure readability

Write at the reading level of a high school senior. 

Early bird

Send your email first thing in the morning. 

Use simple language

Instead of "Exempted," use "do not need to."

Call to action (CTA)

Use one

Include only one call to action when possible. Clicks increase 42 percent when CTA is reduced from 4 to 1.

Subject line

Put CTA in the subject line so students immediately know what to do. 

Urgency

Convey a sense of urgency. Use action verbs such as "sign up," "schedule," or "pay."

Stand out

Make your CTA stand out. Offset CTAs with bold, different colored text or buttons. 

Tracking

Always track the basics for any campaign

You should track your own activity (i.e., students contacted, rounds of outreach) and student engagement (e.g., response rate, advised rate) because these metrics are important to evaluating your campaign's impact. They are also helpful interim metrics that prove a "job well done" and provide motivation along the way. 

Find more ways of measuring campaign effectiveness here:  

Embrace analytics

Data is good and not to be feared.

Information provided by EAB.