A few years ago, email personalisation became one of the biggest buzzwords in marketing.

Research would pop up proudly claiming that adding a recipient's first name to the subject line would increase open rates. Which was usually true - but there was then an influx of businesses putting personalisation merge tags everywhere they could. Every other sentence in an email would end in the teacher's first name. School names would be plonked into subheadings and take up three lines of text that teachers had to scroll past. Job titles were shoehorned into random paragraphs and made sentences clunky. Before long, some campaigns felt more like a mail merge than a genuine conversation.

Merge tags are great when used properly, but they shouldn’t be doing the heavy lifting. The thing that should be making an email feel genuinely personal is relevancy.

A headteacher, a school business manager, and a classroom teacher could all receive exactly the same campaign, but they'll be reading it from completely different perspectives. They're asking different questions, looking for different outcomes, and playing different roles in the buying process.

You don't need to build a dozen completely different campaigns to achieve that. Sometimes it's as simple as refining your audience segmentation, cloning a campaign and making a handful of targeted changes, using dynamic content to personalise selected sections, or writing messages that naturally resonate with several decision-makers at once.

In this guide, we'll look at how to personalise marketing emails to schools at scale, where personalisation has the biggest impact, and how to create campaigns that feel genuinely relevant without becoming unnecessarily complicated to manage.

Why one school campaign rarely fits every decision-maker

Once you understand who might be involved in the buying journey, the next step is working out what each person needs from your message.

Job role is useful, but it’s only the starting point. A headteacher and a school business manager may both influence the final decision, yet one may be thinking about school improvement priorities while the other is looking at budget, value and practical delivery.

The same applies earlier in the process. A classroom teacher may care most about whether something will save time or improve lessons, while a head of department may be thinking about consistency across their team.

That’s why the most useful personalisation often comes from changing the angle of the message, rather than simply adding a job title into the copy.

For example, the same campaign could lead with workload reduction for classroom teachers, value for money for school business managers, department-wide consistency for heads of department, and long-term impact for senior leaders.

The product stays the same, but the reason to care becomes more relevant to the person reading.

Personalise around buying motivations, not job titles

Once you understand who might be involved in the buying journey, the next step is working out what each person needs from your message.

Someone’s job role is useful, but it’s only the starting point. A headteacher and a school business manager may both influence the final decision, yet one may be thinking about school improvement priorities while the other is looking at budget, value and practical delivery.

The same applies earlier in the process. A classroom teacher may care most about whether something will save time or improve lessons, while a head of department may be thinking about consistency across their team.

That’s why the most useful personalisation often comes from changing the angle of the message, rather than simply shoehorning someone’s job title into the copy.

That doesn't necessarily mean creating a completely new campaign for every audience. Sometimes a cloned version with a few carefully considered messaging changes is all that's needed, rather than a brand-new campaign for each teacher type. In other cases, dynamic content can personalise selected sections, while some campaigns can simply be written cleverly enough to speak naturally to several decision-makers at once.

The right approach depends on your audience, your product, and how differently each group is likely to evaluate it.

Make the school setting feel obvious

The priorities of a primary school, secondary school, independent school, and multi-academy trust will overlap, but the language, examples, and context that feel natural to each setting can differ quickly.

Sometimes, those differences are substantial. A campaign aimed at primary schools may place more emphasis on whole-school implementation and teacher workload, while a secondary audience may respond better to subject-specific outcomes or departmental consistency.

However, school-type personalisation doesn’t always need to involve a major shift in messaging. Once the main angle feels right, smaller details can help the email sound more natural to the setting receiving it.

For example, in the UK, primary school learners are referred to as pupils, whereas secondary schools have students. It might seem like 'just one word', but it’s enough to even subconsciously make a teacher feel disconnected.

Using Sprint Education's specialist education merge tags, campaigns can automatically change details like these without creating entirely separate emails. For example, the following merge tags…

Reinvigorate [learner_type] at [school_name]

Would automatically become…

Reinvigorate the pupils at Cherry Orchard Primary School

Reinvigorate the students at Tewkesbury High School

Small changes like this help the email sound like it was written for that type of school - even if you’re sending one email to both primary and secondary schools. When they’re combined with carefully tailored messaging, they create a much stronger impression than simply adding someone’s first name throughout the email.

Use dynamic content to make bigger personalisation changes

Standard merge tags are useful for adding details such as teacher name, school name, or establishment type, but they only take personalisation so far.

With Sprint Education's managed campaigns, we can make extra changes to selected sections of an email beyond those standard merge tags, using something we call ‘dynamic content’. For example, different audiences can receive different subject lines or email headers, while the main body of the campaign stays the same.

If your messaging doesn’t need to change drastically across job roles or school types, you can avoid six different emails for six different audiences by instead using one email with six automated variants, for far less than the cost of creating, writing, designing, and building separate emails for every audience.

It’s a practical way to make one school marketing email feel more tailored to different roles, school types, or audience segments, without the cost of multiple different campaigns when it’s not necessary.

Personalise the parts that actually change the message

Personalisation starts to fall apart when it’s added for the sake of it.

The research saying ‘first names in a subject line improve open rates’ probably needed a pretty important caveat: it only improves open rates if it feels natural, and overusing them, or shoehorning them in, will actually go the other way and reduce open and click rates.

A teacher’s name in a subject line can help if it adds relevance, but repeating it three times in the body copy, forcing the school name into every other paragraph, or squeezing their job title into a sentence that didn’t need it can quickly make the campaign feel like an uncanny targeted advert – and damage engagement rather than improve it.

A better approach is to personalise the parts of the email that change what the teacher takes from it.

That might mean:

• Leading with the benefit that matters most to that audience.
• Reflecting the pressure points linked to their role.
• Showing proof from a similar type of school.
• Writing a subject line that speaks to what they’re trying to achieve.

Those changes influence how relevant the email feels from the very first line. Merge tags can still play an important supporting role, but they shouldn’t carry the responsibility of making the whole email feel personal.

Common school email personalisation mistakes

Even well-planned campaigns can miss opportunities to become more relevant.

Some of the most common mistakes include:

• Focusing heavily on names and merge fields while sending identical messaging to every recipient.
• Personalising around job titles without considering what actually motivates different decision-makers.
• Positioning the same product in exactly the same way for primary schools, secondary schools, MATs, and independent schools.
• Trying to personalise every element of an email instead of concentrating on the areas that genuinely influence engagement.
• Overusing merge fields until personalisation becomes distracting rather than helpful.

The strongest campaigns use personalisation to remove friction. A teacher, school business manager, or headteacher should be able to read the email and quickly understand why the message is relevant to their role, their school, and the decision they’re involved in.

Make your school marketing more relevant

Personalising marketing emails to schools at scale takes a bit of restraint. The aim is to make the email feel sharper, clearer, and more relevant to the person reading it, without turning the campaign into a Frankenstein’s monster of merge tags, variants, and overworked copy.

That’s where the right mix matters: strong audience segmentation, carefully chosen merge tags, small language changes, dynamic content where it adds value, and messaging that understands how schools actually make buying decisions.

At Sprint Education, we've spent more than two decades helping organisations create more effective school marketing campaigns through stronger targeting, better messaging, and education-specific personalisation. If you’d like help identifying practical ways to create more personalised school marketing campaigns that resonate with the educators you're trying to reach, book an education strategy call with our team.

Tags
Marketing to Education Marketing to Schools Marketing to Teachers

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