Email marketing advice

Mail chimp - we use it for our list which is around 140,000. Very good analytics as well. You can see who opened the email, who clicked on a link, etc.

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Send it on Tuesday at 10:00 a.m.

I concluded on my own that this is the sweet spot to get people to open it and pay attention. I googled and found that there are studies that agree.

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even for his target audience?
Your rule still applies to principals and superintendents, but I would think it's different for actual teachers

Well, first you need to make sure you have permission to email them. All legitimate HTML email clients have a provision requiring that. They won't check it before you send if you say you have permission, but if you get a really high spam report they'll close down your account.

MailChimp is good, Constant Contact is good. Those are the most mainstream ones, so look into the pricing and what you get. They're generally priced per the number of contacts, but there are discounts for nonprofits, for paying a year up front, whatever. They may also have different features at different levels, so find what you need.

The only other "mainstream" one I've used that I hate is MyEmma. The interface sucks and it's super finicky. They're all going to have random issues with making your email look exactly like you want unless you can code your own template, but MyEmma has more of them in my experience.

There are dozens of other industry-specific platforms out there. Start with one of the above.

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You may even be able to load those email addresses into Facebook and cross reference them for an exact match.

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This is a thing. You can upload an email list into Facebook, create a custom list in your ads manager and it will match those emails to existing accounts. However, it's not going to be very useful to you if the emails you've collected are all school board emails. The teachers probably aren't using those for their Facebook accounts, they're probably using personal gmails or whatever. So Facebook won't be able to match them. You can always test it. If you upload a list of 50k emails and Facebook spits out a custom audience of only 300, it's probably not working for you.

However, digital targeting, when done correctly, can be extremely useful. I typically tell clients the lower the barrier to entry, the more effective a cheap digital campaign. If this book is free, or if you give them a sample if they click through for for free, it'll work better than if you try to spend the bare minimum and get them to buy something that costs a lot of money. Anything less than $50, depending on its value, is probably a "low" barrier to entry.

Facebook does allow you to target by job title, so you can target people with the job title "teacher" or whatever and limit it to your geo area, if that's necessary. You'll need to have more than that because people put in their own titles. If it isn't just teachers, you may also be able to target by education industry. You'll hit anyone who is a principal, admin, librarian, etc with that broad brush though. Also through the Facebook ad platform, you can run locally targeted ads on Instagram. Good for younger teachers who may not use Facebook as often or at all.

Also pay attention to the type of ad you run. If you have a website, you can set up a conversion pixel to find out exactly how many visits to your site started on Facebook and what action they took (view content, initiate a purchase, make a purchase, etc.). Helps you get a little deeper to figure out if the money you spent there was useful versus your website analytics by themselves.

If you have the money to do both of those things - email and a digital PPC/social campaign - then you should. Hitting them multiple times without overwhelming them is going to matter when you're not personally reaching out.