There is a profusion of channels available today to market your Moodle courses. But perhaps surprisingly, marketers consistently rank email as the single most effective tactic for awareness, acquisition, conversion and retention.
It is regularly predicted that newer social media channels will ‘kill off email’. Yet research shows that email still works, and indeed generates much better reach and engagement rates that using Facebook or Twitter.
Why is email marketing so effective for your Moodle courses? Because email addresses are a more reliable way of reaching people. It has been shown that less than 2% of a businesses’ Facebook followers will actually see an update from the business, and a measly 0.07% will actually engage and interact with the content.
Furthermore, who’s to say Facebook won’t make major changes to the way the platform works in the future that could wipe out your social media marketing? The same goes for most social media channels: they are businesses, and can change course at will in their search for profitability. As such, building the foundation of your marketing effort for your courses on Social Media is rather like building your house on rented land – it could be pulled from under your feet at any time.
Email, however, is more permanent. Indeed, an email address is a person’s de facto web ID: we need it to sign up for services and to identify ourselves in so many places on the web that we become permanently hitched to it. Emails get delivered over 90% of the time, whereas Facebook posts gets delivered 2% of the time. And with email, nobody is looking over your shoulder telling you what you can and cannot say. So rather than chasing new Facebook or Twitter followers, it is better to focus on getting new email addresses on your subscriber list. Growing your email list and sending out regular, informative, high-quality email newsletters is consistently shown to be a more effective strategy than growing your Twitter or Facebook followers.
If you’re worried about spamming people about your Moodle courses, it seems there may be less reason to worry than just a few years ago. Recent research shows that 60% of people want promotional emails from suppliers once a week and 28% want them more frequently. This is because email is the preferred channel by which people choose to be made aware of special offers and new products. On Black Friday 2015, email was the biggest driver of sales – even beating free and paid online search.
By all means do maintain a social media presence. But use it to drive new subscriptions to your mailing list. On your website or blog, make it easy to sign up to your newsletter. Place a signup form or button in a prominent place on the home page and in the header or footer of other pages. If you don’t have much of an email list, plan to acquire as many targeted, highly relevant people as you can over the next six months.
Creating and running email newsletter campaigns to better market your Moodle courses is no longer a daunting task. You don’t need to know HTML or have great design skills to format the newsletters. Platforms like MailChimp and Freshmail have galleries of templates that already look good – you can simply choose a layout and drop your newsletter content into it. You can build your own email template from scratch with drag-and-drop panels that lay out text and images for you.
This Moodle Practice related post is made possible by: Course Merchant, the leading provider of eCommerce, Training Management and Digital Marketing software for the Education and Training industry. Click here to learn more.
What is the most effective marketing campaign you’ve ever run? Tell us the details in the comments below!
