Wellness Works: Students and E-mails

I've told you a bit about our Journeys program and its impact on delinquency and default (see 4/17/06 entry). Now let me tell you a bit about some things we have learned about communicating with students by e-mail.

Although our Journeys program (www.journeysonline.org) has been around for three or more years, we began sending our newsletters to student by e-mail just this year. By e-mailing the Journeys newsletter, we can get much quicker results than are obtainable by mailing print literature, and we are also able to track some of our borrowers behavior. With some inexpensive software and the fact that the newsletter is web-based, we can track how many of the e-newsletters are delivered, how many are actually opened and how many and which articles are "clicked through" by the recipient.

When the "From" line in the e-mail is "American Student Assistance," an average of 17.36 percent of the recipients actually open the e-newsletter. Of those students who open the letter, only 9.35 percent will click on any given article in the e-newsletter. But when we send the newsletter as if it were being sent from the student's school, and the school's name appears as the "From" line in the e-mail, the open rates jumps to an average of 30.85 percent with an average click-through rate of 25.3 percent. Obviously, students do not know who ASA is and treat the e-mail as spam. But they are much more likely to open an e-mail from their alma mater. For some of our partnering schools the open rate is much higher than the average indicating a higher trust factor or engagement of the student by the school.

We did an interesting little experiment to see what types of visual graphics attract students. We randomly selected 500 borrowers who would receive the Journeys newsletter by e-mail. We split them in half. Although the content of the newsletters sent to each group was identical, we used stock commercial photographs to illustrate the articles for one group, and a characterized cartoon of the same image for the other half. Since the borrowers would not see the images until after they opened the e-mail, the open rate for both groups was similar, between 10 and 12 percent. But once opened, there was a remarkable difference in the two groups in reading the articles. The articles illustrated by the commercial photographs were read by just six percent of the recipients, yet those illustrated with the characterized images were read at a rate of over 14 percent.

Are you surprised by these results?

Best,
Duane

Posted by Duane Quinn on May 01, 2006 at 02:46 PM EST

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