Contact: (877) 560-3473

Marketing automation for higher education

Higher education institutions are distributing their marketing message to prospective students, parents, current students, and alumni via online and offline channels. To do so successfully, higher education institutions are hiring agencies to create and execute their year-round marketing campaigns. As an agency, you can use marketing automation to build and launch your higher education clients’ campaigns in these four areas: search, yield, alumni relations, and student applications.

Student search campaigns

Higher education institutions are competing with each other to attract and enroll the top talent to their university. Communicating effectively with those prospective students is a key priority to help students learn about the institute and make an informed decision about their future.

Search programs target high school students and post undergraduate students for advanced degree development. Between high school students, parents of high school students, and post undergraduate students, areas of interest during the research process can vary greatly. Knowing this, agencies can use their marketing automation software to create campaigns that gather data about each researcher’s interests and deliver multi-touch messages that are in line with those specific interests.

By delivering relevant information to prospective students and parents, the research process is user-friendly, personalized, and informative. This ultimately leads to higher levels of engagement with your higher education client during the college search process.

Yield campaigns

Ensuring that accepted students make the commitment to enroll at your client’s institution is also a top concern. After students have been accepted to your client’s university, agencies can implement a nurture campaign to ensure that the newly accepted student chooses to commit to your client and not a competitor.

Student’s level of commitment can range significantly based on a number of different factors. To deliver relevant content that can address each student’s specific needs and concerns, agencies need to create campaigns that are segmented and personalized based on an accepted student’s level of interest. By gauging a students’ level of commitment and following up with relevant information in a timely manner, you can help your client achieve higher enrollment rates.

Alumni relations

Many higher education institutions depend on the donations from alumni to fund various education, research, and/or athletic programs. Agencies can work together with the Development office to creatively plan, produce, execute, and analyze alumni relations campaigns that produce large donation results.

David Olson of the One to One Group created and launched a campaign for NC State University’s Student Aid Association, the Wolfpack Club. David and his team utilized MindFire Studio to send personalized direct mail and email campaigns to donors. By delivering a multi-channel campaign that seamlessly integrated a payment application within the program, the Wolfpack Club raised over $6,000,000. (You can find this case study and many other successful campaigns here.)

Student online applications

Online applications for universities can be lengthy. From contact information and academic history to essays and payment applications, higher education institutions need to have a user-friendly and tech-savvy program in place for their digital student application process.

Waybetter Marketing used MindFire Studio to create a student application process for their client, University of Colorado, Denver. Their program successfully guided students through the multi-page application and allowed students to complete the application all at once or over a period of time. Waybetter Marketing generated and scheduled triggered reminders dependent on how much of the application has been completed via direct mail, email, SMS text, and automated phone call from a university counselor.

By implementing marketing automation software to launch the student application process, universities can successfully gather student information and provide an easy-to-use interface for students to complete their online application.

Take action today!

Higher education institutions require year-round marketing campaigns to address multiple areas of communication. Whether it’s receiving donations from alumni or appealing to a new class of students, universities need technology that can distribute their messages for all their marketing needs. With the use of marketing automation technology, you have the ability to segment and personalize messaging, customize microsites, implement 3rd party applications, and prove data-driven results.

Schedule an online 1:1 demo of MindFire Studio now, and see how you and your team can offer a high-value specialized solution to your customers!