Customise Your Education Campaigns to Achieve Higher Response Rates

The strongest education campaigns are rarely the biggest. They are the ones that make a principal, business manager or ICT leader feel the message was written for their situation.

Australia's school market is large and varied. In 2025, 4,160,918 students were enrolled in 9,673 schools – 62.8% of students in government schools, 20.0% in Catholic schools and 17.2% in independent schools. Independent enrolments grew 15.3% between 2021 and 2025 while government enrolments dipped slightly. Across the Tasman, New Zealand has 2,536 schools. A message that works for one sector won't necessarily work for another.

Segment before you write

Decide which schools are genuinely relevant to your offer. Useful segmentation includes state, school affiliation, school level, location, enrolment size and job function. A-ZGovBIZ records carry the detail to do it – first and last name, position, title, job level, job function, division, organisation, industry, address, metro or country, phone, email and number of students – so you can be specific. A cyber security campaign needs a different message for an ICT leader than for a principal; a facilities supplier may separate metropolitan and regional schools.

Customise the message – not just the first name

Personalisation is more than inserting a name. Reflect the recipient's role, school type and likely priorities, with different subject lines, proof points and calls to action for materially different segments. Government, Catholic and independent schools operate under different governance and purchasing arrangements.

Time campaigns around the school year

Plan around school terms, budget cycles and the time schools need for considered purchases. Use more than one channel – email, phone and mail – and test your cadence: track replies, meetings, conversions, unsubscribes and bounces by segment rather than assuming more email means better results.

Deliverability starts with the data

A-ZGovBIZ education data is benchmarked at a consistent 98.5–99% deliverability. Because we know our data and benchmark subscriber campaigns, we can tell which bounces relate to the data and when something else is at play – usually authentication. Gmail and Yahoo have required bulk senders to authenticate with SPF, DKIM and DMARC since February 2024, Outlook.com followed from 5 May 2025, and school gateways apply strict filtering of their own. Clean data plus proper authentication is what lands in the inbox. Campaigns must also comply with the Spam Act 2003 – consent, sender identification and a working unsubscribe.

Work from current data – and keep improving it

Subscribers access current data all year round through Discovery Online, our online data delivery platform, and licences are tailored to each customer – select by state, school type, level, enrolment size and more. After each campaign, send us your bounce report: our researchers investigate and upload corrections, ready to use again.

Reaching New Zealand? A-ZGovBIZ New Zealand Schools covers 8,026 decision makers, including 2,502 principals and 2,568 school IT managers, across New Zealand's 2,536 schools.

Explore the data cards: