Students are a growing market for your business to explore. Whether you want to attract more customers for your business, or are targeting students for research or recruitment purposes, it's important to adapt your email strategy to suit this unique target group.
In this guide, we are sharing some useful ideas about what you can do to make your email campaigns more attractive to students and young people.
What to consider before you get started
Students are a unique target group in many ways, before you start building your campaign, it may be useful to consider the following points to help you understand your audience a little better...
- Don't stereotype: The stereotype of students spending all their free time drinking and living off pasta may be true for some, but definitely not all. Even if it seems funny, including stereotypes like this in your emails is more likely to make readers roll their eyes and look elsewhere.
- Is your product appealing enough?: Being in full time education and having to pay for rent, living costs, etc. means most students won't have a large disposable income. For this reason, they will only be wiling to splash the cash on things which they deem worth it.
- Brand image: Your brand will also play a part in whether students and young people will want to purchase. For example, despite their premium prices, Apple's strong brand image means their products are still massively popular among younger customers.
- The latest trends: Young people are usually very in tune with the latest trends. If you do your research, you should be able to capture these trends in your campaigns. For example, many companies are now experimenting with more vegan and vegetarian options, due to a huge rise in young people going vegan.
It's important to understand your target market before starting work on your campaign.
5 tips for writing emails for students
These 5 useful tips should help you create emails which are more appealing to students and young people...
Focus on good design
Young people in particular will be drawn in by a great aesthetic. One way to win them over is through an email which is visually appealing and interesting to read. Incorporating colours, images and funny GIFs (check out Giphy for this) is a great way of livening up your newsletter. You should also avoid long chunks of text, as these will quickly become boring.
Urban Outfitters is massively popular with students. Vibrant email designs like this help them maintain their cool brand image.
Keep the tone friendly
When trying to recruit students, it's generally ok to take a more laid back approach. Although it's important to always be respectful and maintain an air of professionalism, overly formal language is not really required. Try and keep the tone friendly to avoid alienating potential new recruits. This will also help students paint a picture of your company's working environment.
Provide useful information
Students are busy and, like the rest of us, won't appreciate being sent meaningless content which clogs up their inboxes. Make sure the content in your emails is actually useful for your audience. Think about how your business could help students solve some common problems they experience.
Here are some ideas you could try:
- Selling stationery or study supplies? You could try including some helpful study tips in your email. Tip: This would be especially useful during exam periods.
- A food or cookery-related business could offer some low cost meal ideas to test out.
- Banks or financial businesses could share their best advice on budgeting and saving money.
- Recruitment agencies could try giving tips on perfecting a CV and applying for graduate jobs.
Target Jobs use their email newsletters to provide students with useful careers information.
Include discounts and special offers
If anyone loves a bargain, it's students. One way of winning the hearts of students and young people is to offer them a discount on your products. Many students will appreciate this gesture and actively choose your business over competitors who don't offer a student discount.
Try using your email newsletter to remind subscribers that you offer a discount and you should notice a boost in click-throughs and sales.
Students will definitely be aware of the discounts available to them thanks to this bold email from New Look.
Concentrate on your social media presence
Maintaining an active social media presence is a good way to keep students aware of your business. It also provides you with more opportunities to directly engage with them. Together with a strong email marketing campaign, you'll be able to increase your reach.
Tip: Remember to link all of your social media profiles in your email newsletters so readers can follow you! Check out this guide for more tips.
We hope this guide will inspire you to consider students and young people as a potential new target group for your business. Remember to keep things relevant, interesting and on trend, and you're sure to be on the right track!
Until next time!
Your Mail Designer 365 Team
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