Edupost's email technology explained The Science behind the service

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Develop an e-plan for your school

Is there any limit on numbers
Edupost gives schools of any size access to their parent market at an affordable price anytime and unlike text and paper communications, it allows truly personalised messaging.

Lower cost
A properly planned and effectively managed e-mailing can reach the right parents and pupil groups at a much lower cost than the traditional letters home.

Trackable, measurable results
Communicatiuons by email makes it easier to establish how effective your message has been. You can obtain detailed information about recipients' responses to your delivery.

Better response rates
Your parents or student groups are only ever a few clicks away from the school website. Unlike other media which require staff and logistical management to either make a phone call, prepare and duplicate a letter and distribute it to various student groups, e-mailing is seamless and email recipients can be driven to the correct information on the school website.

How are the delivery reports, open and click-through rates calculated?
All the rates are based on the number of messages sent.

Viruses and attachments
EduPost email is guaranteed to be free from viruses. Viruses spread through attachments. By choosing not to support attachments at all, we are able to completely remove the virus risk.
-You are advised to take your own steps to protect against viruses While you can’t send attachments with messages as you would with Microsoft Outlook, you can create a virtual "attachment" by linking to a document in the body of your message.

Why EduPost e-mailing doesn't allow attachments:

1. Attachments increase the size of your message. The larger the file size, the more susceptible your message becomes to a filter or an outright block. Also, ESPs (especially free ones like Hotmail, Yahoo etc) limit the size of emails it will accept and deliver to an inbox. A message with an attachment might not be delivered because it puts the recipient over their mailbox quota.

2. Attachments can’t be opened by all users. Not all people run the same operating system and/or use the same applications. Although they have the file, they might not be able to actually open it.

3. Attachments sometimes can raise red flags. Smart email users will sometimes question attachments because of a potential virus and damage to their computer.

4. Viruses spread through attachments. If EduPost allowed this functionality in, it would make your recipients unnecessarily susceptible to a virus attack. By choosing to not support attachments at all, we're able to completely remove the virus risk for our customers.

Instead of an attachment - Here's why:
In the typical sense, we recommend that Edupost “host” your “attachment” and link to it in the body of your message.

1. Linking to the document mitigates all of the potential delivery problems you might encounter with attachments.

2. Linking to the document enables us to view the contacts that "open" the "attachment" via 's click-through tracking. Links to a .pdf or .doc work just like a link to a URL and thus will appear in your link tracking and click-through overlay reports.

Here's how we do it.
First, we host image files, Word documents and PDFs. Now that your file is hosted, your e-mail will direct the school contacts to view it through a hyperlink in a message. This is all achievable through the Email Builder Rich Text Editor on the system.

I have tried e mail broadcasting before and often wondered if mail is ever delivered?
The tracking report is a vital part of the service. It reassures the school that the important link with parents and cares is maintained, provides a message audit trail and reduces frontline costs and time.

What is the delivery rate?
The delivery rate is the number of messages sent minus the number of messages bounced divided by the number of messages sent. Both hard and soft bounces are included in this calculation. EduPosts's database management tools mean that bounces are kept to a minimum.

Why are the open rates so much lower than the delivery rates?
Opens are tracking when a small image in the messages is displayed while the recipient views a message. It is more common these days for the email programs of message recipients to have images turned off by default. This makes it difficult to accurately tell whether a message is being opened or not. For this reason, the open rate should be viewed as a minimum and used not in absolute terms but rather in relative terms to other like statistics. (e.g., comparing the open rates of all industries for a given period of time.) In many cases, HTML and text versions of a message are sent concurrently in a format called Multipart/Alternative. In the system, these are marked as HTML messages since it is assumed that the recipient will view the HTML version. However, the recipient might have an email client that prefers the text version (e.g., BlackBerry, Cellphone, UNIX-based email clients) and hence the system would not be able to track if it were opened.

Does tracking click-throughs have similar limitations to tracking opens?
No. Click-through works differently and is a fairly accurate indicator to the number of recipient that clicked on a specific link.

Are there any other limitations?
The rates only count the intended recipient. For example, if a message goes to Sally and Sally decides to forward the message to ten of her friends then the messages is counted to having being sent to one person, and opened by one person. If Sally and all her friends click on a particular link in the message then only one click-through would be recorded. In our experience, since less than 5% of messages are forwarded, this could potentially increase the open and click-through rate by 5% (e.g., an increase of an open rate of 27.2% by 5% would make it roughly 28.5%.)

Are these unique or absolute values?
These are unique values, which means that if one recipient opens a message twice then they are counted only once for the purposes of this calculation. This is a more conservative and accurate way to measure such things. service levels are quite straight forward.

Edupost - School Mail Manager does not require any software download. You simply access everything you need from any computer connected to the internet! You could even send a communication from the internet cafe at the top of the Eiffel Tower on the school's Paris trip!

Try Edupost - School Mail Manager Free trial account for 30 days - with no obligation! See the benefits, how easy it is to use and start saving time and money!