Project: Personalized Email Outreach to Project Success Students, January 2021

My role: As Communications Manager, I was in charge of strategic planning, creation and execution of this robust email marketing campaign. I worked with our Database Manager to ensure our Salesforce database would sync with Mailchimp to create a highly personalized experience for students.

Audience: Nearly 10,000 Minneapolis Public Schools students, grades 9-12.

Goals:

• Increase the open rate of Project Success emails to students promoting virtual programs.
  
• Remind students that Project Success is actively offering programming during distance learning and the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Reengage students with Project Success staff, opening a new line of digital communication between school facilitators and high schoolers.

Challenges:

• Salesforce, our main database, syncs with our email marketing system, Mailchimp, but did not include all of the fields necessary to segment this campaign as I hoped. For example, "Facilitator Name" is not a field we associate with students, even though "School Name" is. This meant I would need to manually build one campaign per facilitator to send to each school.

Strategy: At Project Success, every partner school has a professional facilitator who facilitates one workshop per month in students' English classrooms. Our 14 facilitators become the face of Project Success in their particular schools, and their names and faces are instantly recognizable to their students. 

Instead of sending emails from a generic Project Success email address (as we'd previously done), each student received an email that was tailored to their school sent on behalf of their facilitator. I strategically included the following elements:

• I knew if a student saw their facilitator's name, they'd be more likely to open an email. So, each email came directly from an individual facilitator's email address using a personalized short, conversational subject line: "Hi, it's NAME from Project Success! How have you been?" and encouraged students to reply directly with questions or comments.
• The greeting was personalized "Hi SCHOOL students!" with the merge field containing the short school nickname (ex. "Washburn" or "Henry") to remind students that Project Success programming is offered to their particular school, and this is not a blanket Minneapolis Public Schools marketing email.
• I minimized the size of our logo to more closely resemble a letter sent on letterhead (vs. a marketing email) and included a photo of the facilitator in the email signature with minimal other visual elements, making the email feel more personal and the facilitator's face instantly recognizable.
• I used a conversational tone in the body of the email, tailored specifically to the age range of the students we were targeting (approx. 14-18).
  

Results:

• Open rates on personalized facilitator emails exceeded benchmarks by 15 percent, growing from 23 to 38 percent.
• Click through rates increased to 1 percent from .3 - .5 percent.
• Many facilitators reported receiving personalized responses from students.