Four Hundred Billion Emails a Day

Four hundred billion emails get sent every single day. That number comes from Ashley Budd, and when she said it on Escape Velocity, I had to pause and let it sink in.

Ashley is the Senior Director of Advancement Marketing at Cornell University and co-author of Mailed It! with Dayana Kibilds. She's spent over a decade figuring out what makes people actually open, read, and act on emails. Not in theory. At one of the most complex institutions in the country, with alumni, donors, prospective students, and parents all hitting the same inboxes.

I wanted to talk to her because email is the thing everyone in higher ed uses and almost nobody does well. The average open rate for education marketing emails sits around 35%, which sounds decent until you realize that means 65% of your carefully crafted messages never get read at all. And of those who do open? Only about 3 in 100 click through.

So your enrollment team sends an email to 5,000 prospective students. About 1,750 open it. Maybe 150 click. That's the math. Most schools are simply living with those numbers rather than addressing them.

Ashley's book and our conversation changed how I think about this.

Your job is not to send emails

That's Ashley's line and it reframes everything. "Your job is not to send emails. Your job is to get your message received."

Read that again. Because most higher ed email operations are built around sending. Send cadences, send schedules, send volumes. How many emails did we send this month? How many drip campaigns are running? That's measuring activity, not impact.

Email marketing returns about $36 for every $1 spent, making it one of the highest-ROI channels. 68% of students prefer to receive content from colleges via email. The demand is there. The channel works. The problem is what we're putting in it.

The two-second test

Ashley shared an exercise that sounds simple but will humble you fast.

Write an email. Hand it to a colleague. Start a timer and stop it at two seconds. Ask: "What was the point of that email?"

If they can't tell you, your message is already dead. Because two seconds is generous. Most people give an email less than that before they decide to engage, delete, or scroll past.

The Nielsen Norman Group's eye-tracking research shows readers scan emails in an F-pattern. They read across the top, jump to the next paragraph, then skim down the left side. Everything after those first few lines is a gamble. So if your email starts with "I hope this finds you well" or "We're excited to announce," you've already burned your best real estate on nothing.

Put the point first. Every time. Save the pleasantries for the sign-off if you need them at all.

The trust triangle

Ashley and Dayana built their book around a framework they call the trust triangle, rooted in Aristotle's rhetorical principles (ethos, pathos, logos) and adapted from Frances Frei and Anne Morriss's work in the Harvard Business Review. The three points: authenticity, empathy, and logic.

Authenticity means having an actual voice. Not a committee-approved institutional tone that could belong to any school. Ashley puts it bluntly: "Authenticity is about keeping it real and having a voice." When every email from your school sounds like it was written by the same cautious committee, you've lost the thing that makes people trust you.

Empathy means the email is about the reader, not about you. This is where most higher ed emails fall apart. They're full of what the institution wants to say instead of what the student or parent needs to hear. "Empathy is all about them," Ashley says. Your reader is buried under hundreds of other emails. Respect that.

Logic means the email makes a clear, easy-to-follow case for action. Not complex. Not clever. Simple language, simple structure, direct ask.

When one of those three is weak, Ashley calls it a "wobbly triangle." And wobble is exactly what most higher ed email feels like.

Personality beats personalization

This one surprised me, but Ashley is adamant. Inserting someone's first name into a subject line isn't personalization. Not really. It's a mail merge.

Real personalization is personality. It's writing that sounds human, that has a point of view, that feels like it came from a real person rather than a CRM workflow.

"You're not going to build a relationship with a drip campaign," she said. And she's right. Drip campaigns are useful for logistics and timing. But the words inside them still need to sound like they were written by a human who gives a damn.

This matters more than most schools realize. Segmented email campaigns have been shown to generate up to 760% more revenue than generic blasts. But segmentation without personality just means you're sending the same boring email to a more specific group of people. The targeting gets better but the message stays flat.

What Cornell does that most schools don't

For major campaigns like Giving Day, Cornell's team proactively offers recipients the option to pause emails if the topic isn't relevant to them.

That sounds counterintuitive. You're giving people permission to hear from you less? But Ashley says the results speak for themselves: "Just having those statements dropped unsubscribe rates by up to 75%."

Think about that. By being transparent and giving people control, they kept 75% more subscribers than they would have otherwise. That's empathy as strategy, not just sentiment.

Most schools are terrified of unsubscribes. They should be more terrified of irrelevance. An engaged list of 10,000 will outperform a disengaged list of 50,000 every single time. Education already has one of the lowest unsubscribe rates of any industry, around 0.1%. The people on your list want to be there. Don't make them regret it.

Write like you talk

Ashley's advice on language is so simple it almost feels too obvious. But look at the emails your school sends and tell me it's not needed.

"We're losing people by using language that requires a postgraduate level to understand. People will act faster with simpler language."

Higher ed has a particular weakness here. Academic culture rewards complexity. Long sentences, big words, careful qualifications. That's fine for a journal article. It's death for an email trying to get a 17-year-old to sign up for a campus visit.

Ashley recommends tools like the Hemingway App to check readability. Write as if you're speaking directly to one person. Not to "prospective students and their families." To one kid sitting on their bed scrolling their phone at 10pm trying to figure out where to go to college.

What this means for enrollment teams

If you're running email campaigns for admissions, recruitment, or yield, here's what I'd take away from Ashley's approach.

Stop measuring success by send volume. A school that sends fewer, better emails will beat a school that blasts the full list three times a week. Look at click-through rates, not just open rates. (Open rates are increasingly unreliable anyway, thanks to Apple's Mail Privacy Protection auto-loading images.)

Front-load your value. The F-pattern isn't a suggestion. It's how human eyes work. Put the most important information in the first two lines and the first few words of each paragraph.

Let your people be people. The emails that perform best won't sound like they came from "The Office of Admissions." They'll sound like they came from an actual human in the office of admissions who cares whether this student finds the right school.

Give your audience control. Cornell's opt-out-of-this-topic approach is a smart retention strategy. A smaller, more engaged list converts better than a massive, resentful one.

Test everything. Ashley and Dayana are emphatic about this. Subject lines, send times, formats, length. The data will tell you what works for your specific audience. Tuesday and Thursday tend to perform best for undergraduate emails, but your list might be different. Find out.

The bottom line

Email isn't going anywhere. It's still the most direct line to the people you're trying to reach, and the ROI remains unmatched. But as Ashley puts it: "Let's all use our email for good."

It's not about sending less, though for many schools, fewer emails would be an improvement. It's about meaning more when you do send. Authenticity, empathy, logic. The trust triangle. It sounds almost too simple. But in a world of 400 billion emails a day, simple is the hardest thing to get right. And the most valuable.

Listen to the full conversation with Ashley Budd on the Escape Velocity podcast.

Ashley's book Mailed It! is available everywhere. If your team sends emails (and you do), it's worth your time.