Email Marketing Basics: The Language School's Guide to Building an Email List
Email marketing has the highest ROI (Return Over Investment) among all the other marketing activities (like blogging and social media). It is cheaper and easier to use. So, if you build an email list and learn how to use it properly, you can start enjoying its power to bring in new students and attract the old ones back to your school!
Get access to our library of free marketing guides, trackers, and templates for expat language schools:
What Is An Email List And Why Do You Need One?
A mailing list is a group of email addresses that you have collected possibly from your website, or social media profiles, from people who are actually interested in your school’s offer.
Email marketing is the most targeted way of getting in touch with your potential students because the emails you send out actually contain information that they care about (or, at least, they are briefly interested in) and they will be delivered straight to their inboxes – with a minimized chance of being caught in the black hole of the spam filter.
As a language school, the main reason why you need an email list is that you can reach out to your students (and prospective students) much more easily. You can use that list to:
distribute content;
offer courses;
advertise your events;
ask for feedback; and
to send discounts or coupons.
Save up to 4 hours a week on content creation and increase student enrollments!
We’ve created a powerful system for helping language school owners, marketers, and language tutors rapidly speed up their social media content creation process without:
creating a full, professional content strategy
facing creative blocks
feeling the need to copy their competitors
So if you want a crystal clear and predictable roadmap to help you get more students, look no further!
The Power of Email Marketing for Language Schools
Email Marketing is one of the cheapest and most effective ways of selling products and services. According to an eMarketer study, the median email marketing ROI* is 122%. That’s four times higher than any other digital marketing channel.
* ROI stands for Return On Investment. An ROI calculation is a measure of the return (the benefits gained) that an investment delivers in relation to its cost. 🤓😉
For a language school, it means that you can spend less money on advertising and get more students 🤯 It happens because email marketing helps you to increase the number of sales and conversions.
It all starts with people giving you their email address, which means that they already trust you in some way, and want to establish a relationship with you.
Think of asking someone to enroll in your courses in terms of dating. You wouldn’t ask someone to marry you on the first date, right? Small chance of success…
So, them giving you their email address is more like swiping right on Tinder - which, for those of us who are unfamiliar, means showing the initial interest. This is them saying “ok, I’m interested, show me what you got” 😏
For example, let’s say that a potential student visits your website a few times but has not yet signed up for a course. Perhaps they need more information or some time to consider other options. Or maybe they just need that little push to finally make the purchase…
With email marketing, you can keep in touch with these interested students while providing them with valuable information and encouragement they need to make a purchasing decision. (To say yes 💍😉)
As you can see – when they give you their email address, you are creating a possibility of a long-lasting relationship instead of going on one date and spoiling it all by saying something stupid like buy now 😉
Cultivating Relationships: Email Marketing x Social Media
As already has been said, an email list is an effective channel to stay in touch with your students and potential students, as well as parents, teachers, and staff. You can let them know about your courses, events, promotions, and even share information and content related to what your school teaches, to keep the conversation alive (remember: “out of sight, out of mind”!).
For all of that, we advise you not to rely only on your social media. As we have seen with Facebook on multiple occasions, those platforms are changing all the time, and they might cut you off from the people who liked your profile and who were interacting with you!
People can unfollow you, they can block your page, or they simply will not be shown any of your messages (unless you will pay for it, and even then, you cannot have a warranty that they will actually see what you want them to see). So, you need to have those people at your own playground. 🎠
All things said, we recommend you to have a tangible list of people's email addresses (be it even in the excel sheet, though we do strongly advise you to set up an email marketing tool like ConvertKit).
Also, people do not change their email addresses all that often, so you won’t lose that initial connection that was created. And, most of the people – no matter their age – check their email on daily basis.
How to Build a Meaningful Email List for Your School
Your two main sources to get people’s emails are:
asking them to sign up for your newsletter (through your website and social media in general) or,
when they are signing up for the courses you can also invite them to join your email list.
Obviously, they have to have the possibility to unsubscribe/inform you that they don't want to receive those messages anymore. That is not only legally required, but also for your own good.
You don’t want to have a big email list just to be able to show off your numbers!
In the case of an email list, size really matters, but “it’s not what you think” 😉
If you keep your email list full of what we call in marketing “dead leads” you run the risk that a big part of those people won’t even read what you’ve prepared.
And that, my friend, can get expensive quite fast:
If you're using outside tools to manage your email addresses where you usually have payment brackets, which means that you are, effectively, paying for every email address – whether it is your potential client or not; and
If you’re sending emails to people who are not interested in receiving your emails. They might be immediately removing your messages, which gives all the email providers a message that you actually are a spammer. So, your emails can end up in spam folders – even for those people, who are potentially interested in enrolling in your school (which means losing sales).
What Is A Lead Magnet And Why Do You Need One?
Now – you shall ask – why would anyone give you their email address just like that? Well, you have to give them something in return – enter: lead magnet. A lead magnet is anything that offers your readers/subscribers something free in exchange for subscribing to your email list. It could be an ebook, short video series, report, value bundle, etc.
Think of it as opening the door so your potential students want to stay for a while, and take another step in their journey with your school (you’re giving them flowers on the first date, to stick with the cheesy metaphor we’ve got ourselves into earlier in this article 😉).
In your case, think about what brings value to your clients: the students. And provide content that brings information or entertainment to them, so they will want to give you their emails in exchange for that shiny lead magnet of yours!
We will have a whole separate article on lead magnets for expat language schools coming out soon, so stay tuned (the easiest way is by joining our newsletter 😉)
👇 Below you can see our library of marketing guides, trackers, and templates – this is how we collect emails from people who want to stay in touch with us – feel free to both get inspired and download the goodies 😉 👇
Get access to our library of free marketing guides, trackers, and templates for expat language schools:
What is the difference between email newsletters vs drip campaigns
In regard to sending emails there are two major approaches that you can take:
Email newsletters; and
Email drip campaigns.
Email newsletters are emails that are sent regularly to communicate with your subscribers. In there you can add new promotions, case studies, reference links, etc.
When it comes to creating newsletters for expats – leverage the power of them not really knowing what to do and where to go. If you’ll include some lifestyle advice into your emails – you stand a stronger chance of people actually reading what you have to say before throwing your email into their virtual dustbin (which might be the case if you’re constantly spamming people with pure sales!).
Think about your newsletter in a similar, but more effective form of posting on social media. Both involve creating content and publishing that content so that the audience can see it. The only difference is that instead of rolling through it on Facebook or Instagram, it will arrive straight to people’s email inboxes.
Bonus points: in email marketing, you can freely use other people’s content, and link to interesting blog posts and websites without spending hours on writing those articles yourself! 💪
Email drip campaigns, on the other hand, are pre-made automated emails that are sent accordingly to a schedule. Their main purpose is to:
show the benefits of your services, and
to take the person who was not ready to “pull the trigger” with the initial purchase through a journey of getting to know and trust your school enough to enroll in your course.
Conclusion: Grow Your Language School with Efficient and Effective Email Marketing
Finally, we can say that building an email list and sending out regular emails is a very effective way of getting in touch with your students, opening communication to new ones, and keeping the old ones coming back!
So go ahead, and get started on that right now. Because the sooner you do, the sooner you’ll see the benefits.
Ah, and in case you need a hand with that, ours is here to grab! 🖐
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