As a school communicator, your interactions with families are crucial to your school community. Handling a database of contacts and multiple communication channels can become difficult, but thanks to the advent of school CRMs, you can now keep parents updated with required information while easily managing your other day-to-day responsibilities.

The BenchmarkONE K12 Edition does this using a simple strategy – empowering you to create attractive, on-brand school newsletters seamlessly and manage your important list of contacts all in one platform. But leveraging the software effectively is also crucial to get the most from the CRM and streamline your workflow. 

Now that it’s the end of the school year, it’s a great time for some maintenance to ensure your school CRM is up to date and ready for the year to come. Let’s dive into the importance of managing your school’s email list and how you can do it for more effective outreach next year and beyond. 

Why Is End-of-Year Email List Management Important?

It never hurts to do a refresh, be it for your school’s website, your home decor, or, in this case, your K12 email list. 

A lot of things happen in one year – children graduate, move to another grade, and your donor list and school community grows. A yearly data refresh ensures you’re able to continue to reach out to the right contacts and send them the type of messages they are likely to interact with. 

But the thought of going through your entire database, contact by contact, to make sure each one is up to date would cost you precious hours you could be spending getting other things done. This is where a K12 CRM can come in handy. BenchmarkONE’s K12 Edition helps you effortlessly organize your contact list so you can:

  • Easily track information on each of your contacts so you can identify when and where updates should be made
  • Email the right people and send them the right content
  • Improve deliverability and increase your email engagement and ROI
  • Reduce manual tasks so you can avoid errors, save time and get more done
  • Facilitate relationships with your existing community and attract the interest of new community members

How To Ensure Your School’s Email Contact List is Updated

List management is crucial to ensure that your email marketing is effective and that every email you send ends up in the right person’s inbox. Here are some tips for an effective end-of-year data refresh, so your email list stays up to speed.

1. Use Surveys

Surveys are a great way to understand your audience better. Use the BenchmarkONE K12 Edition to create and share email surveys with your contact list to gain insight into their experiences. Ask them for updated information, or simply ask them questions that will help you understand their needs better. Be specific, but don’t make your email survey too long. Also, be selective with how often you send these out. One at the end of the year is a great way to get updated information and use the feedback to refine your procedures and protocols.

2. Use Tags and Segmentation

Once you gather your survey information, you can use it to refine your email lists, grouping people with similar interests, needs, and preferences. This will allow you to send each email list personalized messages that they’ll be more inclined to find valuable.

Dealing with different subscriber segments, including students, teachers, faculty, or other community members, is a big part of your job. Segmenting your email list ensures you are sending accurate messages to the right people. Using the tagging functionality, you can keep your groups organized and separated for more relevant messaging.

BenchmarkONE’s K12 Edition allows you to automate this process. All you have to do is set up your emails and prompts on the front end.

3. Regularly Prune Your List

Cleaning your email list regularly is a good practice to remove duplicate, uninterested, or invalid contacts from the list. But how do you do it without missing out on future opportunities? 

The answer to this is to “prune” your list — use deliverability methods to filter your active subscribers from the inactive ones. This tactic, along with a few others, such as A/B testing or using different times to send your emails, can increase engagement and create better deliverability.

4. Sync SIS with Your CRM

Sync your newly added recipients with your student information system (SIS) and then integrate it with your CRM. Having all the contacts in a centralized, automated system ensures that no enrollment data is lost. 

Simplify Your Sign-Up Process to Attract New Subscribers

Your CRM has the potential to not just manage existing contacts but also add new subscribers. Landing pages, pop-ups, and signup forms are some great ways to automatically add contacts to your list directly from your school’s website. 

By utilizing BenchmarkONE’s K12 Edition, you can create on-site forms that automatically add anyone who fills them out to your CRM. You can then add tags to these new subscribers based on their website activity and how they engage with your emails, ensuring their data is as up-to-date as possible.

There’s a lot going on at the end of the school year. But the last thing you need is to start off the following year with stale contact data. Make sure you find time to give your data a refresh, and if you need some help, use BenchmarkONE’s K12 Edition to do most of the heavy lifting for you.