Subject line? Impacts when and how many people open it.

The original message had a very high image/html to text ratio, and the new version even more so. And the images themselves include a lot of text, which filters do score against. Your message might be getting filtered as spam for that and/or other reasons. (Don’t put full trust in built-in spam assassin scoring. Messages can score well and still get filtered by various ISPs.)

Include Yahoo, AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, etc., seed accounts in the send list to see if messages get filtered. Also note the image blocking. Code the e-mail to take advantage of image alt text and Gmail snippets

Consider having a list of potential discussion topic bullet points. That one bullet out of those listed might lure in a student to chat. (“Come to think of it, I do have some questions about housing…”) Plus if you add bullets (using hyphens in place of html bullets) you can lower the html ratio and decrease your spam filtering risk.

Thoughts on an interim page:

“One option would be to send all email recipients to a page on your Admission or Blogger site, so that even the late kids will get to somewhere of relevance. However, that just makes 1 extra click for those who do open the email on time, which is a hindrance and bad web usability.”

Personally, I’d send them to an Admissions page and have them click from there. You can make a relevant landing page with useful links regardless of when they click, as you mentioned. Maybe do some heatmapping to see what catches their interests among the carefully-chosen links. And click counts as a hindrance is an overrated concept, imho. If you think about your own Web surfing habits, what may be more important to you is if you think you are heading in the right direction vs. how many times you click. That reflects my own surfing habits, anyhow.

I’m a big fan of the page paradigm:

– - – - – - – The Page Paradigm – - – - – - -

On any given Web page, users will either…

- click something that appears to take them closer
to the fulfillment of their goal,

- or click the Back button on their Web browser.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Source: http://goodexperience.com/2004/02/the-page-paradigm.php

Good luck with the chat. Chats I’ve done this time of year with incoming students have largely turned into the incoming students chatting with each other. Not the original intention, but not harmful, either.