Kansas School District Rolls-Out Clean Energy School Buses

For Kansas City, KS Public Schools’ director of transportation, maintaining the district fleet of 160 buses is no easy task.  Incrementally-rising maintenance and diesel fuel costs prompted the director to start researching newer and more efficient buses.

So in 2010, the district learned about the Kansas City Regional Clean Cities Coalition, an initiative that supports alternative fuels for transportation fleets.  After becoming a citywide partner, the district received a $4 million grant from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

In August of that year, the director of transportation was able to order 47 natural gas powered buses, roughly one-third of the district’s fleet.  Because they are powered by natural gas, there are nearly no emissions.  The elimination of diesel fuel is projected to save the district tens of millions of dollars in expenses.

Also, the rear-engine buses are quieter for the driver, increasing their ability to hear and monitor the students on board.

To learn more about the benefits of the district’s new transportation fleet, click here to access the article.

Reducing Email Unsubscribe Rates - Psychological Tactics That Work

There are many psychological factors that must be considered when creating an email marketing campaign. From the  subject line and personalization to your list segmentation strategy, all of these pieces have an impact on your audience.

One of the best places to employ psychological tactics that appeal to an email recipient’s emotions is when managing your email marketing campaign unsubscribes.

If your email marketing campaigns are struggling to keep your target audience tuned in, check out the following psychological tactics on how to reduce unsubscribes quickly:

Tactic No. 1 - Give Them Control.

Try offering an option on the unsubscribe landing page allowing subscribers to change the frequency with which email marketing campaigns are received, or to opt out of some but not all mailings.

Providing this kind of option offers an opportunity to retain subscribers who still have interest in your company and your products or services, but who simply feel they are receiving too much email.

While the CAN-SPAM legislation requires email subscribers to be able to opt-out by providing only their email address and opt-out preferences, it is certainly acceptable to give recipients additional choices as long as the unsubscribe option is clear.

Tactic No. 2 - Repositioning the Unsubscribe Link

Don't hide your opt-out link. Psychologically speaking, when an email recipient has decided they would no longer like to be subscribed to your email marketing campaigns, the worst thing you can do is to make the process more difficult than it needs to be.

People who no longer wish to receive your emails are going to click your "Unsubscribe" link, or their "This is spam" button. Which would you prefer?

Making the unsubscribe link more prevalent might sounds like a bad idea, but this practice will ultimately produce a more targeted email marketing list and higher email deliverability rates.

For a different approach to reducing email marketing campaign unsubscribe rates, check out another BLI Messaging blog post here!

Understanding Your Target Audience Through Phone Surveys

Do you feel out-of-touch with your customer satisfaction levels?  Do you wish there was an easier way to know exactly how your clients and prospects feel about your products and services?

Phone surveys collect very valuable information that organizations can use to send highly targeted and relevant marketing communications. And because phone surveys are automatable and highly scalable, they can be tailored for efficient distribution and analysis.

Phone surveys are one of the most cost-effective means of collecting information directly from your target audience. However, there are a few things to keep in mind before launching a phone survey of your own:

The Structure.
How many questions do you want to include in your phone survey?  Surveys should be short and sweet. Having a survey with too many questions is difficult to organize and unlikely to keep your recipients’ attention.

The Law.
While survey administration companies are exempt from the FCC’s restrictions, organizations seeking to launch a periodic phone survey to their clients or prospects must first obtain permission from their recipients. 

Used correctly, automated phone surveys are an efficient and responsive method of getting information from your audience. 

For more information surrounding the legalities of sending an automated voice broadcasting campaign including phone surveys, click here to download our Voice Broadcasting Compliance Fact Sheet.

Procurement Tools Help Schools Save Money

How does your school or district solicit bids from prospective vendors? 

For the purchasing director at Utah’s Granite School District, posting bid notices on their website was not necessarily the most efficient way to solicit bids.  The district subsequently took on a bidding service that served as an exchange between them and vendors and allows for the transmission of documents, proposals and questions.

As a result of the transition, the new procurement service has increased the efficiency of the purchasing department, as well as saved the district thousands of dollars each year in paper, ink and labor expenses.

According to the purchasing director, not only has the new service increased efficiency and lowered expenses, it helps match them with the best bidder for each product and service, too.  Because the services shed a lot more visibility into the proposal process, it increases competition amongst bidders.

Another benefit of the service is that districts can collaborate to consolidate products or services needed, in effect lowering the overall cost for both.  They can also share experiences on pricing, market conditions and proposal process strategies.

Click here to learn more about how these procurement tools are helping schools save money.

Be Relevant! 6 List Segmentation Strategies You Should Implement Now

When launching an email marketing campaign, it is extremely important that your content is personalized and relevant, engaging your target audience time and time again.  Failing to do so will result in a dwindling open rate and increased unsubscribes.

The more relevant your email marketing messages are to your subscribers, the better the response rate.  As your email marketing lists grow, the “spray and pray” routine will no longer work, and giving everyone what they want becomes increasingly difficult.  

In order to create relevant messages you must be able to create good list segments from your entire audience.  List segmentations can help your email marketing campaign open rates, click-through rates and conversion rates.

The following is a list of 6 list segmentation strategies you can most likely implement today using information you already have:

1. Country
Knowing the country your email recipients live in can help you adjust your product pitches accordingly, or even use a multi-language translation tool to send email marketing campaigns in the county’s native language.

2. Climate
Knowing what the climate is for your email recipients can help you promote products based upon geo-specific weather patterns, creating a sense of personalization.

3. Open Rates
Categorize your email marketing campaigns so you can group together recipients that open emails more often for particular categories. Once you know this, you can send these recipients more targeted emails about these particular categories.

4. Open Time
The pure meaning of marketing relevance is sending the right information to the right person at the right moment. By looking at peak email deliverability open times and volume, you can better determine what time works best for your target audience.

5. If They Purchase
Tracking email recipients through to a point of purchase can help you separating existing customers from prospects. This will help you avoid having a customer receive an email as if he or she were a prospect, offering better deals than the ones customers were offered.

6. What They Purchase
Segment your lists based upon which items individuals purchase. By tailoring your marketing messages specific to these groups, nurture and better engage recipients so that what they are ready to purchase again, they’ll have you in mind. 

Performing list segmentation before you send email marketing campaigns is a great way to increase response rates and conversions.  

For more list segmentation and audience targeting tips and tricks, downloaded our best practice kit today.

Extend the Value of Triggered Campaigns with Multi-Channel Messaging

Research suggests customers want brands to use an integrated multi-channel messaging approach that engages them to share their preferences regarding offers, alerts, frequency of contact and media preferences.

According to Forrester, 68% of U.S.-based business managers say their company desires to deliver a consistent, multi-channel customer experience, but only 29% have the ability to do so.

In the past, consumers have traditionally been at the mercy of whichever communication channel their brand decides to use. Today, there is a ton of research solidifying the importance of knowing a consumers’ preferred method of communication and adapting your messaging strategy to meet their needs.

Every experienced B2B marketer knows that relevance is a powerful tool in inspiring action and response from today’s consumer. Immediacy is almost always relevant, and triggered campaigns are particularly helpful for post-purchase follow ups, shopping cart abandonments, welcome emails and up-sell opportunities.

Below are two ways businesses can differentiate themselves from competitors by taking a multi-channel messaging approach to their triggered marketing campaign:

Combine Customer Knowledge with Timeliness and Location
To maximize the effectiveness of a triggered marketing campaign, businesses need to understand their customers and their activity. Understanding the time, location, preferred communication device and their communication preferences all play a key role in sending the right message at the right time.

Adapt to Changing Customer Behaviors
When you collect behavioral data over the long term, you learn enough about customers to accurately group them with others who behave and respond similarly. An ideal triggered marketing campaign is automatically generated based on a change in a subscriber's behavior using a multi-channel messaging approach.

Implementing a triggered campaign strategy requires knowledge of your target audience. Identifying customer behaviors and linking that behavior to a triggered marketing campaign combines relevance, timliness and personalized communication preferences to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time...every time.

Study Shows Effectiveness of Automated Grading Tools

A while back we told you about a computer program that had the preliminary ability to grade written assignments such as essays.  Findings at that time indicated the technology was far from producing an accurate evaluation of student writing.

Most recently, a study concluded that these programs have advanced to automatically read and grade as well as, (or even better than), a teacher.

Conducted at the University of Akron, the study ran 16,000 middle and high school essays through the software.  The essays had already been graded by teachers.  The findings?  The computer scoring returned nearly identical accuracy levels, with an actual increase in consistency over human grading.

How does a computer program grade an essay, you might ask.  In short, by many of the same techniques a human teacher would use to evaluate one.  Word usage, sentence structure, syntax and subject-verb agreements are scanned to determine the grammatical accuracy of the writing.

Whether or not the context is correct is something the readers need improvement evaluating, according to those related to the study.

To read more about this new technology, click here.

Help Students Finish the School Year Strong, Here’s 3 Tips for Teachers

The end of the 2011-2012 school year is right around the corner.  For many, especially high school seniors, the anxiety to finish is overwhelming.  In this post, we’ll discuss three tips for teachers to keep their students on track until the very last day.

1.        Plan engaging lessons for spring.  Although there may not be a lot of flexibility, teachers who plan more-engaging lessons in the spring are better able to keep the attention of their students.  Interactive lessons with group activities help keep students stimulated against end-of-year excitement.
2.        Allow students to choose.  Many teachers have chimed in, agreeing that allowing students to choose the completion of their assignments allows them to be more enthusiastic because they “call the shots”.  According to one teacher, “giving students a choice as far as what they can do for a projectmakes it more relevant and fun for them.”
3.        Make your classroom mobile.  Weather permitting, teachers should consider bringing their teaching outdoors.  Incorporating lessons into an environment outside the classroom is always anticipated by students looking to escape the indoors.

A Text Messaging Debate: Dedicated Short Code Vs. Shared Short Code

Consumers have their phones clutched to them at all times, consistent with the fact that 90% of SMS text messages are read within minutes of delivery – making it one of the best ways to attract the attention of your customers– fast.

Businesses can now enhance the way they use SMS text messaging campaigns to engage audience members with the help of a short code. Short codes are designed to be easier to read and remember than normal telephone numbers.

The question still remains, should your business be using a shared short code or a dedicated short code? The pros and cons of both are listed below:

Shared Short Code

PROS

1. Time to Market: Sharing a short code is the fastest way to get into the mobile marketing space. Becoming a mobile marketer takes seconds, not months. Your time to market with a shared short code is extraordinary.

2. Cost: Short codes are expensive. If you are sharing a short code, typically there are very little additional costs involved other than paying for the SMS text messages you are sending.

CONS

1. Brand Confusion: There isn’t much brand value in using a shared short code. In some cases, there is a very good chance someone else in your industry is using the same short code you are. If that subscriber is signed up to two different companies using the same code, he or she won’t know right off the bat who sent them the SMS text message.

Dedicated Short Code

PROS

1. Brand-Friendly: It is extremely important for any business with a well-known brand to have a dedicated short code. The subscriber needs to be able to recognize right away who is sending them an SMS text message.

2. Portable: If you lease your own dedicated short code, you can take it with you no matter where you go.

3. Better User Experience: Because you are not sharing your short code with anyone, you don’t need to have a keyword sent in before your action word. You can simply have your recipient’s text message in the keyword directly.

CONS

1. Cost: There are a few fees associated with have your own dedicated short code. You would apply for your code at www.usshortcodes.com and it would cost thousands of dollars each quarter depending on the type of code you choose.

2. Time to Market This is a big downfall to using a dedicated short code. They say it takes 6-8 weeks on average to approve a dedicated short code. However, sometimes it can take as long as 12.

The Pros and Cons of Email Marketing Campaign Personalization

In this day and age, savvy email marketers know better than to ‘spray and pray’ to their entire target audience.  Instead, they’re sending out personalized, segmented communications that speak to the interests of each particular recipient. 

Many say personalization is absolutely essential to engaging your recipients and maximizing the performance of your email marketing campaigns. However, personalized email marketing campaigns demand a lot of work. So the question remains: to personalize, or not to personalize?

Most experts waver back and forth between the answers yes, no and maybe so. Below is a consolidated list of some of the pros and cons of personalization:

The Pros

- Personal details can still grab a reader’s attention.
Sending an email marketing campaign including past activity, is a great way to create that sense of one-on-one communication.

- Custom personalization can inspire recognition.
Using an email recipient’s name within an email marketing campaign can sometimes seem cliché, but it is still powerful. Recipients instantly recognize their name, which in turn makes them more prone to open your message.

- Personalization sets expectations and leads to stronger engagement.
Using personalization can lead to improved audience engagement. People respond better and more often to tailored content.

According to these pros, if you use personalization correctly in your email marketing campaign, then you will have a better chance of creating a cohesive relationship between the recipient and your brand.

The Cons

- People provide inaccurate information all of the time.
If people are not entering correct information, and you send them an email marketing campaign using that inaccurate information, it could have the adverse effect of proper personalization.

- It’s a tactic widely used by spammers.
Because personalization is a very common tactic among spammers, many experts suggest using a branded subject line instead; something that identifies your company and services as a recognizable and consistent message.

Personalization tactics aren’t bad in and of themselves, but a truly personal email marketing campaign will address a subscriber’s needs, desires, fears and preferences.

For personalization segmentation tips and tricks, download BLI Messaging’s Personalization and Segmentation Best Practice Kit today!