As you may well know, there are two types of email lists of teachers and managers.
First there are those that carry the personal email address of the teacher at a school (as in DSmith@westdale.haringey.sch.uk) and second the type that go to the school office which replace the name at the start by “Office@” or “Admin@” or a similar prefix.
Although generic emails will get lower response rates than emails to personal addresses they still can be of use, not least because most companies selling to schools either don’t use them or don’t use them in a way that works particularly well.
For the best way to use the generic lists is not to try to get immediate sales, but rather to inform teachers or managers of a free report on an educational topic which is published on your website.
Because this approach is purely educational and not sales-orientated, school administrators are three times as likely to pass the email on to the relevant manager or teacher.
For this to work, the report should be primarily informative in nature, rather than an advertisement, although the report can at the end link into an advertisement for your product.
Where this approach is used the number of teachers clicking through to such a report can be 350% above that achieved with a normal promotion. Better still, the teachers that we reach in this way are often ones who are quite hard to reach through other means.
This does not mean that advertisements leading to sales are abandoned – not at all – but rather that a second type of advertising can be introduced. Quite simply the second style of advertising leads the reader to a page relating to a primarily educational topic, not one that relates immediately to advertising your product.
And this approach works well not just because some teachers and managers are advert resistant and need to be led into the thought of buying a certain product more slowly, but also because the managers and teachers reached are those who don’t release their personal email addresses within the school.
Thus one sends out an announcement about an educational report on your website, using a generic “office@” list, and you use that web page both to provide the information offered and to link to the further note that you supply the product or service that will enable this improvement in educational results to happen.
If you would like to see how this “Two Step” approach can be used with your advertising, please do call Steve on 01604 880 927 or email Stephen@schools.co.uk with a link to your website, and we’ll come back with our thoughts on what could be done.
The main point to remember is that although it might take a little longer to generate the responses this way, because there is an extra step in the process, you really can engage with teachers who otherwise might not be reached.
Tony Attwood
