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Last week I signed up for an NCAA.org informational Newsletter that they send out monthly. The newsletter provides information to student-athletes and member institution employees. When I signed up for the newsletter, I received a welcome confirmation email. As of today, I have not received any additional emails from the NCAA.
This week, we are going to examine email marketing strategies. I am currently researching the NCAA.org website, and this week we are reviewing the results of signing up for an email newsletter. As mentioned above, we have yet to receive any additional emails aside from the welcome email confirming the subscription.
The Advantages of Email Marketing
Email marketing provides a plethora of advantages. It is cost-effective, Highly targeted, entirely measurable, and customizable on a mass scale. Email marketing is useful because it is a highly focused strategy that can directly reach the end-user. The advantages marketers have when they can directly connect to a client or potential client via email make it a cost-effective endeavor allowing the marketer to create a targeted email. (Stokes, 2018).
Example Email Template (Click Below to Open PDF)
According to the text in the eMarketing textbook, you should include the following within your email; sender info, preheader, your subject, Header, personalized greeting, body, and footer (Stokes, 2018).
Our basic template provides general information on the NCAA.org newsletter and what it has to offer subscribers. The email subject details the message making it enticing so that the end-user will click to open. The email acknowledges the email recipient, the body gives details on what the newsletter offers, and the third line provides a link to the newsletter signup page. We added links to each of the NCAA eligibility center social media sites.
Obtaining Emails
There are several ways to get email lists if you don't have a current email list of your own. Some of the ways you can acquire an email list include; organic subscribers generated from your website, purchasable email lists from sites like mail chimp, and running promotions that ask the end-user for their email information.
Measuring The Success of Your Campaign
When measuring your email campaign's success, you should consider factors such as; the total number of emails delivered, bounce rate, number of unique emails opened, unsubscribe rate, referral rate, and click-through/conversion rate. The importance of these metrics is dependent on the email marketing campaign (Stokes, 2018).
Is email marketing a useful tool to reach future generations?
After researching an article on Entreprenuer.com titled "Learn How to Engage Gen Z With Email Marketing," my confidence in email marketing increased (Balkhi, 2020).
You might think Gen Z only ever uses social media, and if you do, you’d be missing out on the 95 percent of Gen Zers who say email is essential to their lives.
Gen Z uses email to conduct their day to day business and buying decisions, but they are savvier than past generations. They incorporate content filters to help them wade through the junk. Because of their savvy and short attention span, they make quick decisions on whether they are interested in something or not (Balkhi, 2020).
When email marketing to Gen Z, consider keeping the emails short, personalize the emails to the end-user based on the demographic information. Identify your brand, write a compelling subject line, try to position your brand to fit the target market identity, and send them what they want. Gen Zers like savings. Sending them coupons before and after they spend money on your product will keep them engaged with your brand. (Balkhi, 2020).
As it pertains to the NCAA.org website and how they market themselves, the above entreprenuer.com article only applies in the sense that they market informational material to all current and future generations. The NCAA is a non-profit organization, but that does not mean that they are not positioning themselves to make a sale. The NCAA does generate massive revenue from the name, image, and likeness of high profile student-athletes.
References:
Balkhi, S. (2020, July 09). Learn How to Engage Gen Z With Email Marketing. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/349665
Stokes, R. (2018). EMarketing: The essential guide to marketing in a digital world. Cape Town: Red & Yellow Creative School of Business.