How AI can help you win the inbox attention game

Open. Archive. Delete. When it comes to email inboxes, these decisions are made in the blink of an eye. Standing out in the inbox, especially when you’re reaching out to students who have yet to express interest, is part art, part science, and totally crucial to the success of your marketing campaigns. But what will grab high schoolers’ attention enough get your messages opened?

We recently conducted an analysis of all emails from our Cultivate campaigns across every Enroll360 partner institution, using advanced machine learning techniques, to determine the impact of specific words within subject lines. For the purposes of the analysis, we principally looked at the hardest-to-engage audience: sophomores and juniors who have yet to indicate interest in the institution that is emailing them. Because privacy changes in the email environment have made open rates an ever-less-reliable measure of performance, we concentrated on click rates as the primary measure of subject line efficacy for this analysis.

Thanks to the power of AI for analyzing large data sets, we found overperformers, underperformers, a few surprises, and confirmation that many of our current best practices are still trustworthy.

Classic email marketing practices confirmed

Just as you’re inclined to look up when your name is called, our findings confirm that dropping a student’s name in the subject line space can increase the chances they’ll read an email and follow through on its call to action. Given increasing expectations around personalization across the marketing landscape, this wasn’t surprising, but it was certainly a welcome guidepost as we continue to develop more individualized communications with our partners.

In much the same way, we saw that student recognition—“Great work, Michael!” for example—helped emails bubble to the top of our analyses. Think of those affirmations as another type of personalization: a powerful combination of interest in the student and validation that they’re on the right track.

Interestingly, our analysts identified two related but contrary trends related to specificity and clarity. We saw vague subject lines such as “Can you confirm?” perform poorly, which wasn’t a surprise, since it’s a marketing truism that specificity usually outperforms vagueness.

However, subject lines that leveraged vagueness to cultivate intrigue ranked surprisingly well. In fact, a subject line consisting only of the student’s name followed by an exclamation point (“NAME!”) did just as well as the most concise, clear, and action-oriented subject lines like “Confirm your contact information.” The lesson? Be clear, or be so vague that it’s mysterious, but avoid the uncanny valley in between.

The Takeaway: Personalization, recognition, specificity, and intrigue are all alive and well in 2024, when it comes to subject line performance.

Don’t persuade with financial aid

Fraught as financial aid discussions may feel, it seems sophomores and juniors are united in their preferences: transparency, objectivity, and facilitation are key to communicating about financial matters to high school students. Hoping to have your affordability-related email read and clicked? Including words like “FAFSA,” “apply,” and “file” in your financial aid subject lines will help.

To engender trust between your institution and the students you contact, take an altruistic approach to the conversation. Here, transactional words like “quick,” “step,” and “follow” land on top, alongside language signaling support: words including “information,” “resource,” and “provide.”

Though it may be tempting to use words like “commitment” and “important” to highlight your school’s dedication to affordability, that approach is best avoided. So is leveraging the student’s aspirations via words like “path,” “want,” “option,” and “choose.” More interpretive or persuasive words—even “affordable,” which is so central to our financial aid lexicon—are landing less well with current high schoolers.

The Takeaway: Inform, rather than persuade. Empower, rather than solicit trust. And leverage honesty over levity at every opportunity.

Responsiveness equals relevance

In a holistic review of high-performing subject lines, we saw disproportionate representation from responsive marketing efforts—that crucial next step after a student shows interest.

This makes sense; students who indicated interest in a particular topic and were sent a related follow-up email have self-selected, and they’re naturally inclined to open those emails. But here’s what we learned: The subject lines that did best in that situation referred specifically to the topic of interest—business, the sciences and athletics, for example—making it clear that the conversation was continuing.

This proved even more true for financial aid messaging. We saw an astronomical click-through average for emails with “FAFSA” in the subject line when reaching back out to students who interacted with a prior message about the financial aid process. Note that this data was collected prior to the 2024 FAFSA delays, giving us a good look at status quo interest levels.

The Takeaway: When students show their interest, it’s best to listen, respond and use the subject line to show that they’ve been heard.

Do these findings mean that there’s a single lexicon or single strategy that every college needs to use to have a successful email campaign? Certainly not, and within our data set, we saw approaches that were wildly different across partners and yet equally effective. Nonetheless, this machine learning exercise validated our longstanding belief in the value of personalized marketing, responsive approaches, and authentic, supportive communications—and those are strategies that every institution can employ while representing their unique identity in differentiated ways.

Learn more about email deliverability in this related blog post