email

Email Marketing at OSU CVM

Debbie

Email was a big part of my role at Ohio State’s College of Veterinary Medicine. I managed the email strategy, content calendar, development and analytics of all emails for the college and Veterinary Medical Center.

This included:

  • Monthly alumni newsletter (called Connect)
  • Quarterly reputation newsletter (called Be The Model)
  • Quarterly VMC client newsletter (called Making a Difference)
  • Quarterly estate donor newsletter
  • Event emails, like inviting donors to events, alumni to alumni receptions, vets to continuing education seminars
  • Fundraising emails
  • Stewardship emails and many more.

My Email Best Practices:

  • The goal of every email should be for the user to take an action, like clicking on something. This allows for success to be tracked in clicks and click rates.
  • Send the email to a specific, targeted audience. The more narrow your audience, the better your email will perform.
  • Have one Call-to-Action in an email
  • Track your open and click rates to measure performance
  • Send email newsletters at a consistent date and time. We began sending our alumni newsletter on the 15th of every month and have seen improved email performance.
  • Test your email. Send yourself a preview and double check all the links work, especially your unsubscribe link.

For example, on January 30, I sent an email to Vet Med alumni registered for the Midwest Veterinary Conference. The goal of this email was clicks on the Register CTA button. The email had 33 unique clicks, or a 1.5% click rate.

I tracked every email send in an Excel sheet. This allowed me to track the success of each email and compare year over year growth.

Tracking emails in an excel sheet. I tracked when I sent, who I sent to, who I didn’t send to, the type of email and the results of the email.
Tracking email results: My biggest metric was the click rate. Open rates are inflated now so I took that metric with a grain of salt. I also monitored Bounces and Unsubscribes. Often we’d see Unsubscribes increase from email fatigue, especially in our alumni audience.
I have a separate sheet for our monthly alumni newsletter emails. This allows me to see trends for our clicks and open rates. For example, I’ve learned that in the fall we usually see an increase in click rates.

To keep everyone in the loop about email sends, our team used a shared TeamUp calendar to track events, campaigns and emails. This allowed everyone to know what was being sent when and to who.

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