Day trips to museums, long-haul trips to Peru, music tours to Italy, or bushcraft days in Sherwood Forest, the trips and travel sector is one of the most popular promoted to the UK education sector.

Being straight-up honest with you, you’ve got a battle on your hands to make sure your company stands out head and shoulders above the travel crowd.

Having designed and completed hundreds of marketing campaigns promoting trips and travel companies to the education sector, we know what will work.

That is what this report is all about, helping you to delve into the belly of the beast of marketing to schools, so you can make a huge difference to the number of schools, teachers, and students benefitting from your top-notch trips/travel services.

Insight #1: Quantities of decision-makers

You lucky devils! When it comes to a target audience, you guys are pretty spoilt for choice. Not only will you want to target the more obvious decision makers like the Heads, Deputies, Heads of Year, and School Trip Coordinators, but you’ve also got a whole host of other teacher types that will have an interest in your trips or travel services depending on your own specific service.

There are over 450,000 teachers within UK educational establishments, of which we have over 400,000 named teachers across 31,000 establishments within our Education Database. The vast majority of these will be involved one way or another with school trips and travel, and we can contact them for you.

Insight #2: Segment by subject

With the potential to appeal to so many different teacher types, it might be tempting to simply blast the same email to everyone. The trouble is that by doing this, you may find your message doesn’t actually resonate with anyone.

The key is to ensure that you’re sending highly differentiated and targeted emails to different subject teachers. Here are some ways you can achieve this:

1. Use segmented landing pages to direct teachers to a page purely for them.
2. Segment your send list so you’re sending a series of highly targeted emails.
3. Utilise hyper-personalisation techniques and dynamic content (ask us).

Insight #3: Don’t ramble - stay snappy

The difficulty with trying to market ‘experiences’ is that words are often wholly inadequate to describe them. You’ll probably just find yourself repeating how ‘breathtaking’, ‘stunning’, and ‘inspiring’ everything is.

What’s the old adage, ‘a picture tells a thousand words’? Well it’s absolutely true for you. And if you don’t want to put images in your email then you can use them on your landing pages or your social media pages.

Showcase your stunning photographs from incredible local monuments or far-flung adventures, bonus points for those featuring staff and students having the time of their lives, and it’s far more likely to stick in their minds far longer than any of the emails they’ve read all week.

Insight #4: Always come back to the curriculum

You’re offering teachers a slice of adventure; a chance to get away from the classroom for a while. It would be all too easy to get carried away and discuss things that have little or no relation to their day job.

Big mistake. Although every teacher likes a chance to get away from the classroom, they will need you to show them just how the experience you’re offering is going to benefit their pupils’ education. Otherwise, they just can’t justify it.

Make sure that every time you describe an experience you come back to how it will bring the curriculum to life. If you can offer fun and excitement, and aid learning at the same time then it’s fair to say you’re onto a winner!

Insight #5: Teachers love a video!

We’ve seen email click-through rates increase by up to 96% by including a linked screengrab of your video, while including a video on your landing page can help to increase conversions by up to 86%!

It can also be hard to grab the attention of time-crunched teachers. But just one minute of video is worth a mind-blowing 1.8 million words in terms of engagement and recall! So instead of wearing out your keyboard crafting a long email, record a super-engaging, super-short video, and pop it in an email with a bullet-point summary.

You’ll be asking far less of teachers, yet will get much more out of them.

And because you’re promoting things that are a little more exciting than most education suppliers we think teachers will find you’re videos almost irresistible. Just make sure you keep them short and sharp – 60 seconds should do it!

Insight #6: Build trust - be a real person

No matter whether you’re coming into the school for a day, or taking pupils away for a trip abroad, it’s essential that you build trust with teachers.

Remind yourself that you are your charity’s greatest marketing asset. Your love of what you do is going to be what engages teachers, so you (and your face) need to be at the heart of every fundraising campaign.

Make sure your email has the human touch by making it clear that it’s coming from you. Set your email’s ‘from name’ as you, from your company; use ‘I’ instead of ‘we’ or the name of your charity to build a personal connection; and, if it’s practical, include your own work contact details instead of a generic ‘info@...’ email address so teachers know exactly who they can turn to for more information.

The relationship you strike up in your correspondence with teachers is what will make your campaign triumphant. Oh, and a smiley photo of you with a hand-written signature in your email sign off will never do any harm.

Insight #7: Arrange a face-to-face meeting

The experiences that your company can offer will generate the interest, but it’s the relationships that you build with teachers that are going to get them to use your services.

By far the best way of building these relationships is to offer to go and meet them at their school and discuss their requirements on a personal level.

Relationships are formed far more easily when people communicate face-to-face. A short meeting will give you the opportunity to build trust and move them closer to becoming a customer.

Insight #8: Combine post with email

You’ve probably got a superb brochure already. The trick is to find a cost-effective way of getting this under teachers’ noses without wasting money posting to teachers that are not interested in what you have to offer.

So why not consider combining post with email? Not only does combining your marketing channels dramatically improve your results, but you can also eliminate waste and minimise costs using a tried and tested method:

1. Send an email to all schools generating awareness and creating a buzz.
2. Post your brochure to the teachers that showed an interest in your email.
3. Email these teachers a few days later to prompt responses.

Insight #9: Plant seeds, nurture leads

The difference between you and many education suppliers is that once you’ve planted a seed inside a teacher’s head, they will remain a potential customer forever.

Even if you lose out this year to another supplier, there is a great chance that, if you keep in contact, these teachers will act upon their interest next year when they have a new class.

We can help you at Sprint by providing you direct contact details of teachers that express an interest in your emails, allowing you to build up your own prospect database. Our studies have shown that 82% of sales are made after the 5th contact with a teacher so make sure you keep nurturing those leads!

Insight #10: Get social media humming!

There is a lot spoken in marketing circles about the importance of social media. Some of it I believe is exaggerated by those who want to show they are at the cutting edge, and it’s certainly not as effective as email marketing both in terms of cost and results.

However, in your case, social media really is one of your greatest weapons. For a company that sell pens, building up a huge Facebook or Twitter following may not be of great benefit. For you, however, building a strong social media presence is going to enable you to keep whetting teachers’ appetites no matter whether they’re on their lunch, at home, or on the bus.

Over 75% of consumers consult social media channels before buying from a company, and social profiles can often be in the first few search engine results for company names, and there are over 800,000 UK teachers active on social media just waiting to hear from you.

So make sure your emails are encouraging teachers to follow you in the social stratosphere!

What next?

Get in touch and ask us about what we can do for you!

Our number is 01684 297374, or you can email info@sprint-education.co.uk.

That way, we can talk specifically about your offer and see how we can boost your marketing effort to schools quickly and effectively.

Tags
Education Marketing How to Sell to Schools How to Sell to Teachers Marketing to Education Marketing to Schools Marketing to Teachers

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