Email Best Practices

Follow these tips to reach more of your Shocker audience and increase their responsiveness. 

Personalized mailings have 29 percent higher unique open rates and 41 percent more click rates than non-personalized emails. 

"Joe, WSU spring registration is coming up!"

Emails with social sharing buttons increase click-through rates by 158 percent.

If an email does not display correctly, 71.2 percent will immediately delete it. 

When messaging someone brief is better. The more words that are used, the more saturated the message becomes. Stick to a message of between 50 and 125 words.

Instead of "If you are contacted by your advisor," use "If your advisor contacts you."

"Non-credit bearing" is equal to "does not count for credit."

Write at the reading level of a high school senior. 

Send your email first thing in the morning. 

Instead of "Exempted," use "do not need to."

Include only one call to action when possible. Clicks increase 42 percent when CTA is reduced from 4 to 1.

Put CTA in the subject line so students immediately know what to do. 

Convey a sense of urgency. Use action verbs such as "sign up," "schedule," or "pay."

Make your CTA stand out. Offset CTAs with bold, different colored text or buttons. 

You should track your own activity (i.e., students contacted, rounds of outreach) and student engagement (e.g., response rate, advised rate) because these metrics are important to evaluating your campaign's impact. They are also helpful interim metrics that prove a "job well done" and provide motivation along the way. 

Find more ways of measuring campaign effectiveness here: /services/strategic_communications/_documents/eab_measuring-campaign-effectiveness-toolkit.pdf 

Data is good and not to be feared.

Information provided by EAB.