Thursday, January 29, 2009

How to Use E-mail Marketing to Offer Products to Educators

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E-mail marketing has proven to be a very effective marketing technique in this day and age. That is because e-mail is widely used by everyone. Lawyers use e-mail to reach out to their clients. People use e-mail to keep in touch with their loved ones. In short, people of every age and social status in this world are using e-mail.

E-mail is here to stay, and so is e-mail marketing. E-mail marketing is so effective for a lot of reasons:

It has a wide reach. E-mail can be sent from the United States to somewhere as far away as China, provided that the recipient has access to the Internet.

Messages can arrive even while your recipient is not at home. He can just read it later. Otherwise, you can also receive e-mails even when you’re offline.

E-mails are instantaneous. You don’t have to count days or even weeks for your marketing mail to arrive at your intended recipient’s inbox. E-mails are received within minutes after sending.

E-mail marketing makes it possible for people to be analyzed as a lead faster than other forms of marketing could. Compared to direct mail marketing in the earlier days, responses to e-mail can be received as fast as they are sent, so you can assign an appropriate lead score instantly.

Those are just some of the reasons why marketers have considered e-mail marketing as a tool that they should take advantage of in their advertising campaigns. However, to leverage on these benefits, you must also do something at your own end--that is, you still have to make a very effective approach for your e-mail marketing to do as it is intended.

For example, every type of lead has a different way of being approached. When you sell insurance, you have to approach every person differently according to his occupation or his age. In short, every demographic group requires a different way of selling. Hence, if you’re selling products intended for teachers and educators, you should have a very effective strategy that applies specifically to this group.

Here are some things that you can do to make it easy to close deals with educators:

Formulate an e-mail that will make it relevant to the educator. For example, you can write an e-mail that relates your product to the subject matter that the teacher handles. You can relate the product to any possible problem that he is facing as an educator. Make it clear to him that your product is beneficial to him, and he must buy it.

Make the e-mail short and straight to the point. Most people do not like to read long e-mails, teachers included. Teachers have only a short time in which they are free to read e-mails; most of the times they’d be busy teaching classes, writing up lesson plans, or grading their students’ performances in the classroom

Make your point seen in the preview of the e-mail. Most e-mail providers nowadays give us a preview pane in which we can see a few lines of the actual message. As a marketer, you can use this preview to go straight to your point and make your sales pitch. Make sure the first few lines are attractive and make certain that the recipient will open the message.

Include your logo in every e-mail you make with your correspondents. This makes sure that, even though they do not buy your products, they remember your brand. Who knows, they may just be interested later on.

Those working with education leads can truly benefit from e-mail marketing. They can further enhance their marketing campaign by integrating a solid lead generation system.

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Friday, January 16, 2009

Steps in Creating a Career Assessment Tests for Students

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What are career assessment tests? These are tests that can be used for the following reasons. They help students determine what kinds of jobs they will be interested in getting right after school. They can also be used to determine the interests of examinees, so they can choose the right courses for themselves. Career assessment examinations are also extremely helpful for those who are dealing with education leads. They can use these to qualify their prospects as well as to identify which products they have to offer to them. Your goal is to make sure that you can match students with the right programs and sometimes universities.

But how do you exactly create an assessment test? Creating one is actually not an easy one. It’s not a simple “take your pick among the choices” test. Every question should be well-thought-out and can definitely be used for whatever objective you have in mind.

To help you out, you can follow the guidelines below:

1. Have an educator or a psychologist. Most of the career assessment examinations are usually created by these professionals. After all, they already have the right academic background, experience, and expertise to be highly qualified to make one. Psychologists, for example, have spent considerable time studying student behavior or career choice patterns. They can utilize this knowledge in producing a well-defined and measurable career assessment test.

2. Define your goals. What will be the ultimate purpose of your career assessments? It could be that you’re offering a whole new program for your school, and you want to determine if there’s going to be market for it. Of course, it could also be that you’re looking for qualified leads for such. In fact, you may even have an existing course, and you wish to increase your number of enrollees. These objectives will help you design the questions in your test. For example, if you are offering a new master’s of nursing program, you may want to ask existing nurses or those who are about to graduate if they will be interested in pursuing further education.

3. Make sure that your career assessment tests are measurable, dependable, and valid. Don’t treat them as another online quiz that your visitors can answer in their spare time. First, you must be able to generate empirical values out of them. Every choice in each question, for instance, may correspond to a certain point. Based on the example given above, you may rate those who say yes with a perfect 10 and those who don’t with 0.

The career assessment tests should also be reliable. This means that no matter how many times the student may take them, the result will always be the same. If they make modifications of their answers, then the results should also reflect such changes.

Lastly, ensure that the tests are valid. It should measure what it says it should. For instance, if the career assessment examination is to determine a student’s inclination to medicine, then it should inform him if he is or not. This also means that you are responsible in providing all examinees with results after every test.

4. Have your tools ready. Career assessment tests also need to be evaluated, and you may have to make use of some tools for that. They may range from crude to simply state of the art. The most important thing, though, is that the program can interpret data well. With that, you may want to run some tests to determine its capacity.

A career assessment test is not only a great come-on for your website, but can also assist you in determining your education leads.

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