Building an admissions email marketing plan: Part 1 - The Five Commandments

This is the first in a series of posts on creating an effective 
email marketing plan for your admissions office. 


The news of emails death has been greatly exaggerated: Technology pundits have been proclaiming the death of email as a tool to reach your teenage audience for well over a year at this point. I maintain that the pundits aren't happy unless they are proclaiming the death of something. The fact is, for the type of communication a college would be doing with any prospective students, email is still extremely relevant. Remember, you're not their friend. You're more of a business contact. For their friends, in-person communication, text messaging or social networks reign supreme as their communications mediums of choice but their "business" contacts are relegated to a second-class email status. A lot of your prospective students will have created separate email accounts (that their parents have access to) for their college search process so to a real extent, they are expecting you to communicate with them through the medium. Plus its so cheap to do it will almost instantly garner a huge ROI.

Ok so it's still useful...but what do I do with it?

Before you jump into it, you need to come up with an over-arching plan or philosophy.  Here are my commandments for effective admissions email marketing:



Make it timely, relevant and personal: One of the benefits of doing email marketing is that it is very easy to customize it to the individual user. A great place to look for inspiration are political emails because these guys get it. If you can, hit the user when they are most open to it, like right after they've submitted an application or have been accepted. Statistics show that emails that are sent based on a user's action are up to nine times more effective than ones that are sent whenever. Also, make sure your content is relevant to what the user has told you they are interested in. Big news in your school's biology program is not relevant to a student who's applying as an English major! By only sending out relevant content, you create a promise with your students that you will only email them when its directly applicable to their interests, which will result in higher open and click rates in the long run.

Target the type and quantity of emails to the specific audience: The more excited your students get about your institution, the more you can get away with emailing them. This excitement usually goes by high school graduation year and then admissions status:



You should always include all audiences in your plan - a freshman or a sophomore wouldn't have inquired if they weren't interested and open to being cultivated. At the same time, be mindful of what stage they are at in their life to avoid turning them off with too much communication. The communication is meant to build off of each other. You may only be able to get away with emailing a sophomore inquiry once a month but you can add more relevant communication as they move through the admissions tunnel.

E-newsletters suck...but can be salvaged (to a certain extent): E-newsletters are probably the most ineffective type of email marketing you can engage in but for some reason, directors of admissions think they are the greatest thing ever. If you find yourself forced into the position of doing one, there are ways to salvage it to make ultra-relevant to your user. Think about merging in the following fields: name, major, high school graduation year (if they're an inquiry), phone number (and ask them to update it or add a cell number to their file), admissions status (inquired, applied, accepted, etc...), any missing items from their application if they've applied, their counselors name, phone number, email and IM screenname. And, yes, I'm taking about merging it all into the same newsletter. You'll have a huge spreadsheet like you've never seen before but it is very doable.

Also, think about incorporating student profiles into your newsletters and then segment your newsletters based on major or gender or whatever so that the user can see "students like me" in the newsletter. This will re-enforce that your school is a good place for them.

Then after you've done all this personalized stuff, put all the regular mass news that they probably won't read anyway. They may read the first two articles but readers will trail off as it starts getting longer so make sure to put your most exciting stuff at the top.

Keep it simple: Email templates should be ultra simple - a tables based layout with a simple header and a simple footer. Keep it to 600px width max. Always assume your images will be turned off when they first open it. The less distractions you give them to the call-to-action the better. Test the template before you send it if you've never used it before. Campaign Monitor provides a great service that you can use to test it in a ton of email clients for $10.

Use an external provider: Higher education institutions are simply not equipped with the resources necessary to support sending email in-house. The deliverability issues alone should make it a moot point. There are a ton of great email service providers out there, some higher ed specific and some not. If you're looking for a higher ed specific one, I really like FireEngineRed and James Tower. However, don't completely discount providers that aren't specifically higher ed oriented! A lot of colleges have gone with providers like Exact Target, What Counts, Silverpop, Real Magnet or Emma. There is no one best service provider out there - make sure you do a bunch of demos to find the one that is right for your organization.

Key Takeaways:
1) Email is still a very effective way to communicate with prospective students.
2) The more personal you get to your specific user, the more effective your campaigns will be.
3) Design for usability, not for flash.
4) You're only asking for trouble if you send emails in-house.

Stay tuned for Part 2 next week!