Your emails: The student's perspective

What do students see (and do) when you email them?

We send out a lot of emails. We welcome all new MoreThanGrades.com members; we send informational emails on current topics of interest to students, and of course, we send scholarship opportunities. Yes, we send out a lot of emails. But are they getting read?

Over the last two years, we have been fortunate to have an extremely high rate of opens for our emails. I believe we are able to accomplish this because we adhere to a very simple premise when we email: provide information that is important to the students, not what we think is important to the students. Before we send something out, we ask ourselves, would this email be missed if it were not sent? In short, we try to put ourselves in the student’s place. But I have to let you in on a little secret…. we have help.

In an attempt to answer the question what do students see when you email, and exactly what kind of emails the typical junior in high school receives, we had one of our MoreThanGrades.com members send us their college related emails. We monitored these emails starting in the middle of the student’s junior year, continuing this monitoring at the present time. In total, we have slightly less than a year and a half worth of emails. It was an eye opening experiment. Over the next several blog posts, we will give you an inside look at what students see when you email, and examine what works, and more importantly, what doesn’t.

To begin with, in total, our student received approximately 571 emails from colleges, roughly 35 per month. The list of colleges that emailed ranged from small liberal arts schools to big name schools. Additionally, geographic location did not factor in at all. Schools from across the country emailed. Many of the schools emailed once, but several came in at 30 or better emails over the sixteen-month period. This list included colleges where information was requested, but more times than not, these emails were unsolicited.

Some of the finer points: Of all the emails received, slightly more than half were plain text with links embedded. The rest utilized html formatting. Of the 571 emails, 170 were purchased directly from College Board as indicated by the required disclaimer at the bottom of the email. 27 emails came from a commercial website emailing on behalf of the college, also based on the footer present in the email.

These are just a few of the interesting findings we uncovered in our study. In our next blog, we will disclose what exactly was in all those emails -content wise. We will end our blog series by showing you a sampling of emails including the subject lines and first few lines of the actual email. Stay tuned; it is going to be something you will want to read.

Mike, Co-Founder of MoreThanGrades.com