Leveraging Direct Mail: How Colleges are Personalizing Outreach to Boost Enrollment
If you’re in charge of student enrollment for an educational institution, you know that student recruitment has become increasingly difficult. You might begin reaching out to high school students as early as their sophomore or junior years and you’re always developing strategies to attract international students, graduate students, and adults looking to gain knowledge for career advancement.
To stand out, you know that your school must continually innovate and explore ways to stand out in the crowded marketing place. You segment prospects by geographic and demographic data, degree programs, and other factors to create campaigns that appeal to and attract a diverse and broad population of students. Direct mail lets you personalize every communication and connect with every one of your prospects as an individual by incorporating precise data into postcards, letters, and each piece of printed marketing content you send them.
Even in a digital world, direct mail can dramatically increase the number of students enrolling in your institution and expand the ability to personalize the relationship at every step of the journey.
Direct mail personalization is a powerful student recruitment tool for several reasons:
The Power of Personalization Connects Immediately
Optimizing personalization in enrollment marketing communications with prospective students is essential to begin a relationship today. Fortunately, direct mail gives educational institutions memorable ways to connect that other channels can’t. Variable data printing (VDP) lets colleges and universities customize each mailed piece with content, photos, graphics, and other material that’s shared along the relationship and adds greater relevancy to each contact with the student. VDP allows for impactful, small batch printing that elevates the data known and shared by the prospect along the journey into content that they find useful and uniquely created for them.
Here’s one way your school’s admissions department could begin their direct mail outreach with a student. Send an oversized postcard with appealing photos and content that stands out among the household mail knowing that a prospect lives in-state and what their financial aid requirements may be. The student connects to the school website through a QR code on the card and shares information that helps the school learn that the prospect is interested in a STEM curriculum. With an introductory letter signed by the school president, your school introduces itself, touts its affordability for in-state students and its ranking as a STEM school, includes a brochure with images corresponding to STEM programs, and a link to a PURL where the relationship can continue to develop through both online and offline channels.
Segmented Direct Mail Campaigns Leverage the Right Data
Direct mail is useful when educational institutions segment audiences and provide more relevant information to potential students with content patterned to fit their academic interests and aspirations. Schools can inexpensively cast a wide net with segmentation based on geography, demographics, and other factors and using VDP still personalize each contact. As the relationship continues, so too does the ability to progressively fine-tune every subsequent printed piece the student receives for an even more impressive impact.
In this case, your school could decide to segment recruitment marketing efforts between undergraduate and graduate students. Each group has specific characteristics that set them apart from the other, and, using VDP technology, images are inserted that reflect specific course content, engaged faculty and students, and first-rate facilities specific to their course of study. The department can send direct mail invitations for on-campus or virtual open houses or link direct mail pieces to user generated digital content that establishes credibility and builds community. As the relationship develops and prospects provide more data through digital and social platforms, every subsequent mailed piece moves them closer to enrollment.
Customized Content Speaks Directly to the Prospect
Educational institutions use direct mail to customize every interaction with a prospective student into a unique communication that only the prospect will receive. Direct mail can be used to drive students to tailored online content with QR codes and PURLs where schools can continue to receive data to support recruitment efforts, answer enrollment questions, and provide reminders of next steps. Using AI-powered analytics tools, schools analyze student data to determine next steps based on online activity like browsing or can track event signups that might result in a personalized letter from a department head.
If your educational institution wants to increase international student enrollment, consider using geo-targeting customization to print and send materials to specific regions. VDP allows for multilingual personalization and small batch print runs with dynamic print versioning and font flexibility so that every communication is language-appropriate and still personalized to reflect academic and campus interests.
Interactive and Engaging Print Formats Stand Out
The tangible elements of direct mail and emerging and exciting, innovative print technologies let educational institutions create physically captivating print pieces that attract immediate attention, stand out in both the crowded digital and print worlds, and create unique, memorable experiences that digital and social media alone cannot match. Every printed communication becomes an invitation for prospects to interact with elements like scratch-off games and promotions, exploding pages that open to feature colorful, dynamic imagery, or pop up mailers that morph into fun and unique forms and shapes when received. Direct mail can also bridge the gap between physical and digital with QR codes that connect to videos and augmented reality (AR) experiences.
Innovative ways to give students a tangible reminder about important dates include sending a fun, mascot-inspired or 3D campus map that pops up when opened and is timed and coordinated with email reminders. The mascot popup can also contain QR codes to link students to online forms, FAQ videos, and personalized pages.
Direct Mail Integration Improves Digital Channel Performance
It’s no secret that the students your educational institution wants to attract spends a lot of their time in the digital realm. However, it’s a crowded world of emails, SMS messaging, and social media ad and platform interactions that students move in these days. That’s why impactful and timely direct mail marketing and correspondence, with its tangible elements, helps cut through the digital clutter and become the gateway to videos, PURLs, and other important online content that gets noticed.
Your educational institution can use direct mail to engage prospects with QR codes and send them to personalized websites where the student can engage with videos, faculty webinars, and meet other students. Using an automated, multichannel marketing platform, your school can monitor the prospect’s progress through the enrollment process and send print mail reminders of important dates for events and registration material completion.
Direct Mail Automation Creates Efficient Follow-Up Strategies
The ability for educational institutions to automate data analysis and trigger follow-up communications through multichannel marketing platforms makes direct mail an important way to get conversations started and to keep communications flowing. QR codes and PURLs on printed material can link to landing pages that allow schools to track engagement and prompt personalized responses that are relevant to the student’s stage in their enrollment journey. Direct mail can drive students to social media platforms that they trust, initiate multi-touch follow-ups that can include phone calls, voice mail, and text messages, and retarget students with relevant social media ads.
Summer melt is a common phenomenon faced by educational institutions, a period when it becomes more difficult to engage with students. Direct mail proves especially effective for keeping lines of communication open and acting as a way to break through the many distractions a student faces after graduation. The ability to personalize the invitations you send to campus events and school tours and stay connected with follow-up email campaigns, phone calls, and texts can strengthen bonds between accepted students and schools.
Direct Mail Personalization Collects Data for Measuring Success
Direct mail has always been appreciated as one of the most effective marketing channels for delivering personalized print materials like postcards, brochures, catalogs, and even school swag into the homes of prospective students. When educational institutions integrate their direct mail campaigns into a multichannel approach, they can track and achieve metrics like conversion rates, click through rates (CTR), and return on investment (ROI) with a through-channel marketing platform like Marketing.com’s Dot® to quickly understand and adapt to their prospect’s behavior and measure the success of the campaign.
With the vast amount of student data that your educational institution has available, you’re able to effectively segment targeted audiences based on program interest, geographical location, and demographic information. With strong calls-to-action, you can incorporate QR codes, PURLs, and phone numbers to determine the mailer’s effectiveness by tracking visits to unique landing pages, knowing when QR codes are scanned, and determining call duration and call volume.
Case Studies of Personalized Direct Mail Student Recruitment Success
Here are three real-world examples of how personalized direct mail campaigns integrated with digital and social media marketing increased prospect awareness and enrollment.
- A Texas university used a direct mail piece that expanded to 4 times its mailing size when opened. The piece contained a stunning assortment of photographs that captured the vitality and community of the school and a QR code that connected to a personalized website. It resulted in 26 percent more applications than the previous year.
- Facing a decline in new student enrollment, a small northeastern US college spearheaded efforts to increase enrollment, particularly among female students, with a direct mail campaign to increase open house visits and drive prospects to the school website. The mailers were personalized to direct prospects to video content that highlighted the school’s features. The campaign resulted in an increase of 40,000 new users visiting their website.
- A liberal arts college sought to increase both the quantity and quality of their prospect inquiries by highlighting the school’s small class sizes and low student-to-professor ratios. The institution set a coordinated, multichannel campaign in motion with personalized direct mail. The result was record-breaking enrollment.
By implementing personalized direct mail outreach into your student recruitment efforts, you can see significant increases in your institution’s enrollment numbers. Contact a Marketing.com direct mail specialist today and start making your student direct mail personal.