Vision6: Reimagining Marketing & Communications for the Australian Education Sector

Effective communication is at the core of every successful educational institution. However, marketing and communications teams often face significant challenges in managing large databases, streamlining messaging for both internal and external stakeholders, and ensuring their efforts result in higher engagement.

By leveraging automation, data segmentation and personalisation, educational institutions can improve response rates, reduce workload, and ensure key messages reach the right people at the right time.

Below, we explore some of the most pressing challenges for marketing and communications teams in the education sector and how trusted email and SMS marketing platforms can help.

Challenge 1: Managing and storing large amounts of data

Educational institutions collect and store vast amounts of data. Everything from student and staff records, to alumni contacts, community supporters, event sign-ups and more. Without a centralised and structured system, managing this data to ensure accuracy and compliance can be a difficult and time-consuming process.

✅ Solution: List and data management doesn’t have to be complicated with secure communications tools (such as Vision6 by Constant Contact). Depending on how your team prefers to work, you can either upload and create multiple lists for your various teams and business units, or use a single list with ‘segments’ to target contacts (more on this below in the next section).

Either way, the process of managing your data on an ongoing basis can be simplified with tools that allow you to upload your latest contact data over the top of your existing list(s). Any contacts that are new, get added - and any contacts that have had some data changes, get updated. The rest remain untouched.

Vision6 by Constant Contact takes it one step further and provides the ability to  automate the ‘list updating’ process on an ongoing basis with some of our great 3rd-party integrations; including Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 (coming soon) - or build a custom cross-platform solution with the use of our powerful API. This way, you can spend more time making your communications perform better with personalisation and segmentation, and less time working with lists and contact data.

Challenge 2: Cutting through the noise in crowded inboxes

One of the biggest pain points for communication and marketing teams is ensuring important messages stand out without overwhelming students, parents, staff and key stakeholders with excessive emails and SMS notifications. 

After all, sending too many messages can lead to inbox fatigue, disengagement and unsubscribes - making it harder for key information to reach the right audience.

✅ Solution: Powerful segmentation tools allow you to target specific groups based on any field in your contact list(s) - such as year level, enrolment status, or past engagement… even a combination of all three! This form of granular segmentation ensures that every recipient gets relevant, personalised content while reducing overall email and SMS volume. By sending just to relevant and applicable contact groups, you can reduce unsubscribes and increase engagement.

Challenge 3: Spending too much time on email and SMS creation

Marketing and comms teams often spend hours creating multiple versions of emails for different audiences, leading to inefficiencies and wasted resources. Multiple variations of the same email can also lead to human error and difficulties with reporting.

✅ Solution: With dynamic content, tools like Vision6 by Constant Contact allow you to create a single email that can adapt the content to different segments—saving time while delivering highly relevant content to each recipient. You can even add multiple segments into different parts of the same email message - allowing for a very refined and specific message tailored to the intended audiences. No need to build five separate emails when one can do the job! A highly relevant email drives an increase in open and click through rates, lower unsubscribes and less (or no) spam complaints. 

Plus, AI Content Assistants can help streamline email and SMS creation while being fully customisable to suit your educational institution's unique tone of voice.

Challenge 4: Creating professional, consistent communications

Maintaining brand consistency across various departments can be difficult, especially when multiple team members or departments are responsible for the creation and distribution of email and SMS communications.

✅ Solution: Drag-and-drop email builders and uniquely branded templates can make it easier and more streamlined for any team member to create polished, consistent and on-brand emails. With Vision6 by Constant Contact, you can also use email and SMS scheduling to effortlessly schedule recurring messages such as newsletters, event updates, deadline reminders, and enrollment confirmations, ensuring timely and consistent communication. 

With the Vision6 by Constant Contact automation builder, you can also set-up welcome messages, nurture series and more - with a mixture of email and SMS messages sent to applicable contacts based on clicks, opens, engagement, subscriptions, survey results and more!

Challenge 5: Measuring the success of communications

Without clear insights, it’s difficult to know whether your efforts are working and to make impactful decisions to improve results. Are stakeholders engaging with your emails? Are SMS messages being read or links being clicked on?

✅ Solution: Vision6 by Constant Contact provides detailed reporting on open rates, click-through rates, and engagement metrics, helping you refine your strategies and demonstrate the impact of your communication efforts when it comes time to share results with leadership.

Furthermore, you can use these engagement metrics to build out more advanced workflows through automations.

Elevating education marketing and communications

By streamlining data management, leveraging segmentation and personalisation, and using automation for efficiency, communications teams can significantly improve their engagement results while reducing workload.

With smarter marketing and communications solutions, you can ensure every message is timely, relevant, and engaging, helping you build stronger connections with students, parents, staff, alumni and the wider community.

Start elevating your marketing and communications strategy and create a free 30-day trial of Vision6 by Constant Contact or request a call with our team to get a live demonstration. 

Try Vision6 Today

1300 284 736

sales@vision6.com.au

vision6.com.au