Admissions/Student Search
It was year 1996 or so. We were in front of a major University in Boston at The Undergraduate Admissions Office reviewing the student search mailing. Back then, that prestigious university in Boston used to acquire a list of students with certain SAT scores and preemptively send out the application package along with the full catalog. While reviewing budget, there was a need to significantly lower the cost of direct mail because in that particular year there were significantly high number of students were within the score range that BU wanted to target.
Our recommendation was: Send out a letter with response card inviting the students to request the application package and those who ask for it, send it to them by express mail.
It was a good idea at that time and it saved the college close to hundred thousand dollars. We also used then state of the art tracking mechanism called ‘planet codes’ to alert the college on which zip codes are receiving their mail on a daily basis so the telemarketing team made phone calls to zip codes where the mail pieces were being delivered.
We have done some amazing things in Student Search campaigns at Undergraduate Admissions, 2 year colleges’ admissions, Graduate admissions, Continuing Education, Distance Learning and Corporate Training marketing for prestigious colleges and universities. We have also done extremely well in the area of privately owned vocational schools.
The core concept is effective use of dynamic, digital, multi-version direct mail marketing with matching e-mail messages inviting the prospective student to come visit a landing page and explore the campus. Once the prospect comes to the web site, we persuade the prospect to give us their first name & email address so we can send them their invitation to the e-campus. The e-campus is actually a long form sales letter or a sequence of video sales letters describing the benefits of attending your college and invites the prospective student to share their postal address so they can receive the current year course catalog and campus life style guide for their offline reading. The system tracks the click through behavior and open rates for emails and at appropriate time the system invites the students to download the application or request a contact from an admissions counselor.
Automating the communications between the admissions counselor and prospective students takes a massive load off your staff. This automation workflow will free up your admissions staff to spend more time with interested students.
