Email Marketing
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Established in 2016, Synergy Prep is a private tutoring center based in New York City. The founders of the company, Fahim Rofique (CEO) and Fatin Nabil (COO), had the idea of starting their own tutoring business in college when the two discovered they had a knack for teaching. Fatin, pursuing his Bachelors in Biology at the time, worked as a part-time teaching assistant for a chemistry class he had taken. Fahim, pursuing his Bachelors in Biomedical Engineering, had been an experienced tutor who was also well-versed in the tutoring business as he had worked as a branch manager, SHSAT tutor, and SAT tutor for a well-known tutoring company years prior.
Together, these two college friends wanted to bring an affordable solution to students from impoverished economic backgrounds such as themselves. Thus, Synergy Prep was born. Their goal with Synergy Prep was to provide the best tutoring possible at the most affordable prices.
My goal in this project was to create a social media strategy for Synergy Prep to keep the brand top of mind for current customers and fans, introduce the company as a thought leader in the industry to potential followers, and to turn those followers into paying customers and generating leads.
Devise an email marketing strategy in which a minimum of one newsletter is sent out per week to keep our brand top of mind, show Synergy Prep's thought leadership in the industry, move new subscribers through the sales funnels, and build loyalty among existing customers.
When the email marketing strategy was being devised, Synergy Prep catered to four different programs. These programs were Common Core, SHSAT, Regents, and SAT:
As this email marketing strategy was being implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic, initially our main purpose in creating these two newsletters on a weekly basis was to keep our brand top of mind with our existing customers. The newsletters served as a way to keep them updated on a weekly basis to show them we were still active and working towards a solution for replacing our traditional brick-and-mortar style tutoring services.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, which is when we started to amp up our email marketing campaigns, email blasts were sent out sparsely, did not contain much content, and did not perform well. Here are examples of some email campaigns that were run before 2020:
As you can see from these emails, there isn't a lot of content. Each email was only sent out to subscribers to notify them that a new blog post was written or to give a brief update. Call-to-actions usually consisted of a button that linked to the blog post like in the second and third emails. The first email was automatically sent to new subscribers when they signed up for our email list and offered them two free classes. Overall, these emails were boring.
In order to engage our readers and keep Synergy Prep relevant, our emails needed to change.
5 Bullet Point Monday was a series of newsletters that were sent out every Monday. The purpose of these newsletters were to engage readers by offering a variety of content such as:
Promotional Fridays were a series of newsletters that were sent out every Friday. These emails were segmented and targeted each of the programs we catered to. For example, parents and students who were part of our Common Core program were emailed Common Core related content. The content varied from free online resources to content we created.
By developing this email marketing strategy, in six months we were able to increase our email open and clickthrough rate by 40% and 4.4% respectively.
We used Excel to track the types of emails that were being sent out (5 Bullet Point Monday, Promotional Fridays, Miscellaneous) and used that data to determine which types of emails performed the best. We also tracked the time that each post was being sent out on which day and compared it to clickthrough rate (see above graphs).
By doing this we determined that the best time to send out our 5 Bullet Point Monday emails was between 12pm and 1pm on Monday.
We also determined that Promotional Fridays was the best performing email type (see below graphs). Our findings concluded that Promotional Fridays had the best overall performance than the other email types. 5 Bullet Point Monday had the lowest clickthrough rate most likely because emails were not personalized like Promotional Fridays were.
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