The Sorry State of College Emails
After taking the PSATs last year I naïvely gave the College Board my main email address to send “college information” to. I soon found out, much to my chagrin, that that meant inundating me with at least 10-15 emails a day from various colleges. Tip: Don’t be stupid like me and give your main email address out to services such as this.
It’s not necessarily the fact that all these colleges are emailing me that’s the problem. It’s the way they go about it. I’d be pretty content at going through an inbox filled with emails from colleges if they:
- Contained information about the college
- Told me why I would want to go to their college above other colleges
- Had a short list of majors, with a link to see a full list
- Were nicely written
- Had a link to the college’s website
But unfortunately almost all of the emails I’ve received thus far haven’t had any of these things. You’d think it would be common sense. Instead, I wade through a stack of emails telling me to “Sign Up” for this and “Click here” to get more information sent to me!
And a link to the actual college website is nowhere to be seen; instead, all links lead to a sign-up page offering no information whatsoever. Yeah, because I’m going to sign up to get more email or snail mail when I could just look on your website. Which I now have to google or guess because you haven’t listed it anywhere in your email.
So I’ve resorted to filtering all of it into a label and only looking at it to basically go through and delete most of them (they’re all pretty much carbon copies of one another, I wonder if they all use the same annoying marketing firm). And some of them still manage to slip through the filter and not mention ‘college’, ‘university’, or even ‘school’.
The sad part is I want to learn more about different colleges and having good, informational emails sent to me would be a benefit. These colleges have meticulously maintained campuses and pretty nice websites, for the most part. Why can’t they give attention to the emails they send out in the same fashion?
