MENU
Background:
Email Marketing to Educators
Sadly, over the last decade educational institutions (particularly schools and districts) have become easy targets for bad actors who deploy cyber-attacks using ransomware or other malware threats. These attacks frequently originate from phishing emails that are sent to schools and districts disguised as legitimate promotions. Schools, school districts, and other educational facilities have been forced to implement aggressive cyber-security protocols to ensure that institutional services are protected, and confidential data is not compromised. The risks for lax standards are simply too great, so these types of highly visible and critical community institutions are going the extra mile to ensure they do not become the next victim. Marketers need to understand how these protective steps work and make sure they operate in ways that adhere to the proper “Do’s and Don’ts” for these institutions.
Sadly, over the last decade educational institutions (particularly schools and districts) have become easy targets for bad actors who deploy cyber-attacks using ransomware or other malware threats. These attacks frequently originate from phishing emails that are sent to schools and districts disguised as legitimate promotions. Schools, school districts, and other educational facilities have been forced to implement aggressive cyber-security protocols to ensure that institutional services are protected, and confidential data is not compromised. The risks for lax standards are simply too great. These types of highly visible and destructive threats have forced critical community institutions to go the extra mile to ensure they do not become the next victim. Marketers need to understand how these protective steps work and make sure they operate in ways that adhere to the proper “Do’s and Don’ts” for these institutions.
Schools and districts, with their enhanced cyber protections, do not operate internal email services like typical consumer email inboxes. They also do not operate like other B2B markets either. What is so different? Here are a few crucial differences:
Schools and Districts are Different.
In the consumer and retail world, email recipients typically configure their own level of email inbox security, and in most cases go with a middle-of-the-road default setting provided by the email service or software. In the education world, most school email services are administered by the school district. District email administrators typically set defaults much tighter and secure. They intentionally protect as a default.
Larger school districts have a concentration of educator email addresses within the same domain. Email monitoring software used in the districts can see how many emails messages are arriving from sending domains. When a marketer attempts heavy message saturation, it is easily recognized as promotional (likely spam) by the monitoring software and is frequently blocked by the ESP.
Monitoring software at districts pay particularly close attention to sender email address hard bounce rates. A high hard bounce rate is an indication that regular communication between the sender and recipients is likely not taking place or that the sender is not properly cleaning out bad email addresses when notified. As a result, poor quality list hygiene can easily lead to being blocked by a district server.
Finally, monitoring software at districts now also pays close attention to actual email engagement. How many opens, reads, reported junk, unsubscribes, etc. does a particular message or sending IP produce. Low engagement numbers (below 0.5%) can lead to being blocked by a district server.
