1) Open & Click Rates: Design Vs Plain Text

Broadly speaking there are two types of marketing email; design-style and plain text. Fully designed emails are superb for brand-building but, more often than not, it's the plain text emails that generate the best response. This graph shows that the plain text email leads the way on open rates, with subject lines often having a more personal touch, while designed emails generate a higher click-through rate. So, my advice is to use your design emails for educating teachers about what you offer and encouraging them to click-through to your website, but then use a plain text email to build on that engagement and generate actual responses!

2) Unsubscribe Rate: Design Vs Plain Text

As I’ve mentioned above, different styles of email can be used to generate different responses. One response you certainly aren’t looking for is the recipient to unsubscribe. These unsubscribe averages are based on all our client campaigns and, as you can see, the plain text approach does generate significantly more unsubscribes. Therefore, even though we know plain text emails work best for generating responses, they must be used sparingly in order to prevent your marketing list shrinking in size.

3) The Best Staff Types for Engagement Rates

Surprisingly, sending your marketing emails to just the Head Teacher tends to generate an open rate nearly 3% higher than any other. However, sending your emails solely to teaching staff produces by far and away the best click-through rates (over 4% higher than any other type of campaign). We often refer to teaching staff as the ‘influencers’ when marketing to schools, because they are very often the end users of our clients' products and services. Convince this audience that they need you and you'll have a vital ally fighting your corner.

Here’s a round-up of the breaking education news stories as we move into the 2017-18 school year.

Funding for Education

The Education Secretary, Justine Greening has committed to £1.3bn in funding for schools in England over the next two years. It’s thought by some that the funding comes in response to complaints by Conservative MPs who thought concerns surrounding Education were not dealt with in the election. However, this funding isn’t entirely new money, with some parts of the education budget being diverted. It’s thought that £600m will come from an unknown sector of the education budget, £200m from the Free Schools budget, and around £420m from the building and repairs section.

Exam Stress

The subject of exams has long split opinion with teachers and parents alike. Now, Kiri Tunks, Vice President of the Nation Union of Teachers (NUT) has made the link between examinations and pupil exclusions. Trunks said, ‘The system is creating exam factories in which increasingly children feel demoralised and are being told they do not fit in. Members tell us that as the curriculum gets narrower and children’s experience of school is ever more focused on preparation for tests and exams, more students are becoming disengaged from school which in turn leads to problems with behaviour.’

Pupils were excluded from school 6,685 times last year, compared with 5,785 in 2014-2015. These figures bucked a 10 year trend of pupil exclusions falling.

New GCSE Format

More than £350,000 has been spent by the government in a bid to ‘promote understanding’ of the new GCSE grading system. As of this summer, English schools will grade GCSEs numerically opposed to the previous letters ranked A* - G.

Labours’ Lucy Powell has criticized the new system stating, ‘With just weeks to go before GCSE results are announced, parents, business and pupils remain unclear on what these new GCSE grades mean in practice’. The new grading system is intended to highlight a change to the current format of exams and coursework, and a move to results based on final exams only. It’s also worth noting that grade 4 will constitute a ‘Standard’ pass, with grade 5 deemed as ‘Strong’.

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