January 16, 2020  |  Angela Ridpath

You Have a List of Teachers – Now What?

Teachers hold the key to more than just their classrooms.  They are consumers of media, curriculum, technology, and they make or influence classroom purchases.  Many teachers are the primary decision makers for student travel and educational trips.  When selling or marketing to schools or districts, having teachers want and need your product or service is a necessity.  How do you build relationships with them?  How do you scale your sales and marketing programs to target teachers?  You have a marketing list of teachers, but how do you use it?  How do you know it’s accurate? How does it help you move the needle?  Below are some of the answers to those commonly asked questions.

Best Practices for Building Relationships with Teachers

Building relationships with teachers takes time, effort, and patience.  They get bombarded with messages from parents, administrators, and sales and marketing professionals.  On top of that, they are often asked to manage extra-curricular activities outside of the classroom.  Noise is everywhere, so your messages need to break through the clutter and resonate. 

Start With A Quality List of Teachers

Your contact list of teachers is the foundation for all of your sales and marketing programs.  If it’s not accurate, you’re laying a faulty foundation for your efforts.  Your list should also include important attributes that you can use for segmenting your messages or offers—such as subject matter taught, wealth score of the school or district, and more.  If you don’t capture that information, you can always append the information to the data that you capture.  The more you know and understand about your audience, the more relevant you can make your communications.

Keep Your List Current

Teachers change schools, get married, retire, or change the subjects that they teach.  It’s important that you keep your list of teachers current and accurate.  The rate of decay, if not updated or refreshed, is approximately 2 % per month or 24 % per year.  That’s a lot of wasted marketing spend, undeliverable emails, and low sales contact rates. 

Power Your Multi-Channel Efforts

A quality email list can be used to send targeted offers and deliver compelling content, but it can also be used to build custom audiences for digital and social media campaigns.  Coordinating your efforts with email, social, digital, and even direct mail will increase the efficiency of your marketing spend. 

Determine the Right Frequency

A combination of daily, weekly, monthly, and triggered emails to your list of teachers can serve education marketers well. Striking the right balance is crucial, so brands should be sure to test different marketing frequencies for various audience segments.  Gone are the days of sending one email and expecting to generate a positive return on investment.  It takes time, patience, and a thorough understanding of your lead to purchase timeline to develop the right message frequency. 

Establish the Right Metrics and KPIs

What are the right metrics and KPIs for your program? It’s important to establish those metrics up front, and have key leadership agree to those metrics prior to spending a dime on any marketing activity.  These metrics will differ based on the media channel used and the goal of the campaign.  For example, the goal of a monthly email newsletter might be to drive recipients to your website, whereas the goal of sending a targeted email offer might be to generate a specific sale.  Those are two very different KPIs for the same media channel.   

Choose the Right List Provider

Because the list of teachers is a foundation for your efforts, choosing the right provider is important.  You’ll want a provider that updates frequently, has broad coverage, and can integrate the data into the technology that you use.

How Often do They Update Data?

Choose a data provider that updates teacher names frequently and verifies that those names and email addresses are accurate.  MCH makes weekly updates.  Verified data is added to the database in near real-time, so our customers always have access to the freshest data. 

How Good is the Data Coverage?

How do you ensure you are reaching as many teachers who fit your target criteria?  Coverage matters, especially when sending emails.  If you work with MCH, you can be assured that you’re working with the market leader in K-12 school and district emails.  With over 5 million verified emails, you can rest assured that you are not leaving prospect opportunities behind. 

What Does the Data Integration Process Look Like?

How quickly can you access the list of teachers and how easily can you integrate into your CRM or Marketing Automation Platform?  Technology issues often hinder the ability for sales and marketing professionals to harness the power of good data.  MCH makes integration easy.  If you need a list quickly, access and build a list online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with our online ListBuilder.  We also have many off-the-shelf tools that integrate with the most popular CRM and Marketing Automation Platforms, or, you can work with our data engineers to build a custom integration into any technology. 

To learn more about how MCH can help you build a list of teachers, contact one of our Relationship Managers or call 800-776-6373.