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EdTech Email Alchemy: Turn Your Emails Into District-Winning Deals

do you have a signal?

Published 3 months ago • 1 min read

Hey, hey Reader,

Recently, I ran an outbound campaign for Client X. Instead of blasting every district everywhere, we used a signals-based approach to identify the ones most likely to convert.

(I got this approach and idea from Bobby Offterdinger. He talks about this strategy in this LinkedIn post. Bobby is a must-follow if you want tangible outreach/sales strategies).

Here’s what signals-based outreach looked like in action:

  1. Pick your lighthouses. We narrowed focus to priority regions based on funding and market opportunity.
  2. Establish your signals. Determine what keywords you will search for based on your market research in board meetings, state mandates/polices, funding, RFPs, etc.
  3. Use state data + ChatGPT to find peer districts. I had AI scour one state's campus improvement plans. Ex: For Texas, TEA releases accountability grades for districts. And on the Texas Academic Performance Report site you can search for “peer campuses”. I started by typing in current customer districts, and it generated a list of peer campuses with similar profiles across the state. I then used ChatGPT to search the district's elementary school's campus improvement plans for my targeted keywords. It made a nice spreadsheet for me, too.
  4. Enrich the list. Once districts were flagged, we layered in decision-maker contacts from Edulead.
  5. Write hyper-relevant outreach. I actually made my own GPT for this cold outreach and inputted my cold email guidelines to streamline this process. It was a less-shitty first draft, and it cut down on my time, but there were still revisions and edits to be made. Instead of generic copy, every email referenced the actual signal. (“At your July board meeting, you discussed expanding reading supports for students with dyslexia…”)

I will let you know how this plays out, but I predict the following:

✔️ Fewer wasted touches

✔️ Higher open, CTRs, and reply rates

✔️ More meetings with genuinely interested buyers

I like signals-based targeting because...

it respects districts’ time, it respects your team’s energy, and it creates a pipeline full of people who already care about what you solve.

I genuinely hope this helps you as you move through this school year into RFP-season. If you have any questions, just hit reply. I'm always happy to help.

See you next Wednesday.

And as always, I'm rooting for you,

Kelly

Whenever you’re ready, here are a few ways I can help you win more district deals.

  1. EdTech Email Alchemy — Join the waitlist (Re-opening this fall).
  2. Strategy Power Hour — Book a 1:1 hour-long sesh with me (And, if we decide to continue our work together, that first hour’s on me.)
  3. Case Study Blueprint — Turn ‘nice story’ into ‘district proof’. Buy now.​
  4. Say👋 on LinkedIn — Connect with me there.

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EdTech Email Alchemy: Turn Your Emails Into District-Winning Deals

by Kelly Cline

Strip away distractions and shiny objects to deliver the email marketing results you need in EdTech. If you're a customer success manager, a marketer, a copywriter, or a founder, every Wednesday get weekly tips to reach and genuinely engage school district decision-makers.

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