The following article details the email marketing FutureLearn does and how partners can boost enrolments.

What email marketing does FutureLearn do?

When a logged-in learner discovers your course on the FutureLearn site they can add it to their wishlist. The site will then automatically generate an email to the learner when your course is open to join.

The site also generates emails to individual learners as they progress through the course from week to week. They will also be emailed towards the end of the course with the suggestion of buying an upgrade or an Unlimited subscription.

In addition to site-generated emails, FutureLearn runs a schedule of weekly bulk email campaigns to around 2m registered learners. These learners have all given GDPR consent and have shown activity through email or on the site in the last 229 days.

A typical week includes:

• General campaigns with links to new, popular or prioritised courses, or general campaigns themed around topics or learning tips.
• Additional newsletters split by subject group and targeting learners who have shown specific subject interests through past enrolments (eg business, education, healthcare).
• A ‘Best of the Week’ email or ‘Best of the Month’ email, promoting the most popular courses enrolled in over that week.

We also run ad hoc campaigns, like targeting our Unlimited subscribers to encourage them to discover more courses and get the most from their subscription.

Please be aware that this form of email marketing is different from the marketing emails that can be sent directly to Learners who are already on a specific course. 

What can partners do to boost course enrolments?

Chances are, the audiences you can target aren’t the same as ours, so anything you share with your audience is going to boost awareness and interest.

For most partners, a strong start would be sending an email to your alumni networks with a link to your partner page or individual course pages.

We can help by giving you tracking tags to add to any links you use in your emails or social media activity so that we can help analyse the impact your work is having.

Within each course, the course creator page provides automated UTMs (tracking links) that partners can copy and use for their promotion. Read more about using tracking links.

Your marketing or communications teams will probably have your organisation’s own standard templates for promotional emails, but if you’re building a new email to promote your FutureLearn course to your partners we’d offer these tips:

• Draft a punchy, short and enticing subject line - people have busy email inboxes and your email needs to stand out to get opened.
• Keep copy short, in natural language. Use minimal technical jargon and focus on the key benefits of your course. Include the number of weeks and estimated hours per week needed to complete it, as well as the most valuable learning outcomes, skills or knowledge that learners will gain.
• You might open your email with a tempting interesting fact.. “Did you know…?” to draw audience interest to the content of your course.
• Include the image from your course page on the FutureLearn site so the site looks familiar when the user clicks through.
• Have a clear call to action with links to the thing you want the customer to do, eg visit the course page, enrol or register interest.
• Where you have links to the FutureLearn site, use links with our tracking codes. You can copy these from the course’s Course Creator page on the site.