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Universities in the US and UK are struggling with a small enrollment problem, but this problem can potentially be resolved through strategic university email campaigns.
In the United States, the number of students enrolled has dropped significantly. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, there are currently about 1 million fewer students enrolled than before the pandemic began. Due to labor shortages, wages for jobs that don't require a degree have increased, so it seems that young people are rethinking the value of an expensive college education.
In the UK, the problem is quite different, as universities there are feeling the impact of Brexit. The number of applications from EU students fell by 56% in 2021. One consequence of Brexit is that higher education in the UK is more expensive for EU students. At the same time, the number of international students at US colleges has also fallen by 15% compared to last year.
All of this means that a competitive recruitment strategy is needed to attract new students. Let's look at how email supports a strong college marketing strategy.
How to use email marketing for college recruitment
While email is just one channel in the marketing mix, it is a crucial one. Prospective students' inboxes provide a direct connection to prospective students and their families.
Forget about buying your first car or home. Choosing a college is one of the biggest (and potentially most expensive) life decisions a person will ever have to make. Email can support college marketing from the beginning to the end of a student's journey to the college of their choice.
Gaining student email subscribers
Before you can communicate with someone, you must first convince them to subscribe to your emails. Typically, this means having prospective students visit your website as they begin researching their options.
While SEO and content strategy may not be your responsibility as an email marketer, you can work with these teams to find the right places on the website to embed email subscription forms.
Find out which pages and articles on your school's website get the most traffic and interactions. Think about how these pages and pieces of content impact prospective students. Is it content that reflects what someone would look for when choosing where to study?
Once you've identified the right places to add an email subscription form, start split testing different versions of the form to find out what's most effective. Try different CTAs, form fields, headlines, and value propositions.
Blocking university content to gain subscribers
If your college's website offers downloadable content, consider blocking certain parts so you can collect email addresses from prospective students.
This could include brochures or PDFs that might be of interest to students considering a particular major. Perhaps you could provide videos of top professors or trainers. You could also create travel guides for the city where your college is located. This is a major selling point for many schools.
College email newsletter
You probably have email newsletters for university alumni, as well as current students and staff. But what about prospective students considering your school?
The best and brightest students may begin their search for the right school years before they're even ready to enroll. An email newsletter helps you build a relationship with these young people while giving you the opportunity to highlight campus life, educational opportunities, and more.
A newsletter for applicants allows you to curate and deliver content that will be of interest to them. They don't need to know what days finals are. But they might be interested in photos of student facility updates. They won't donate yet. But they might need help finding financial aid or choosing a major.
For tips on creating an email newsletter, check out our friends at Sinch Mailjet.
Landing pages for university recruitment
In addition to considering search traffic, consider using paid digital ads that target students and direct them to website landing pages where they can subscribe to your emails.
If possible, make acquiring new email subscribers the sole purpose of the landing page. Explain to visitors the benefits of subscribing by telling them what you plan to send them and how it will help them find the right place to study.
Segmenting College Email Subscribers
Once you've built a list of college recruits, look for ways to break the contacts into segments. This will allow you to tailor your message and email design to different audiences.
In the following email, Texas Lutheran University sends an email to a portion of prospective nursing students.
Use the information you collect in the email subscription form to guide your segmentation strategy. For example, the form could ask what the prospective student plans to study or what extracurricular activities they are interested in. You can set up a segment for student-athletes, scholarship recipients, military veterans using the GI Bill, international students, or any number of programs and majors.
Don't forget that parents and grandparents are often closely involved in students' higher education decision-making, and if they're the ones covering the cost of tuition, you may also need to convince them of the value of your school, so this is an important subscriber segment to consider.
The pages where subscribers convert and sign up for emails can also help with segmentation. If they signed up from a page about athletics or medical school, that's a clear signal about what content might be relevant to them.
Start curating website content that you send to your different lists. This segmentation will make it much easier to nurture college recruits, which we'll talk about later.
Personalization of university email campaigns
If your email marketing efforts make prospective students feel like they already belong at your school, you have a clear advantage over the competition. Basic email personalization is one way to achieve this.
This personalized college email from Arizona State University celebrates the arrival of summer as well as the beginning of a new journey for high school graduates.
Simply using first names in subject lines and greetings creates a feeling of a more personal connection. Add this familiarity to other automated emails, too, and personalize messages for birthdays and graduations.
Personalized emails to prospective students add a human touch to the school selection and application process, which is a stressful but also exciting time for many young people.
Another way to make university email campaigns more personal is to change the sender name to something other than
Promoting college recruits through emails
An effective college email strategy considers every step of a student's journey. If your school's marketing or recruitment teams have taken the time to create personas for different types of students, these can be helpful tools.
Ultimately, however, segmenting your list is the most important factor in determining how you nurture prospective college applicants. Nurture tracks are a series of emails written and developed for a specific segment that can be personalized for the individual subscriber.
This is where the real email marketing strategy begins. Automated nurture emails can be sent at set times, on set dates (graduation day, application deadlines, etc.), when certain actions are taken on a website (downloading course descriptions), or when participating in a previous email campaign from a university.
The key to effective customer care is the ability to put yourself in the subscriber's shoes. Ask yourself:
- What are your questions, concerns or objections at this point?
- What would inspire them?
- How can the content of an email help them take the next step?
Email marketing for universities never ends
Once you enroll in a program, you have numerous opportunities to continue marketing to your student community.
College clubs, social events, and sporting events provide excellent content for student newsletters and help build community among students and faculty. These newsletters can also highlight the availability of financial aid or employment opportunities. This is especially important when courses are taken online and students may initially struggle to build genuine relationships.
Even after graduation, there is still the opportunity to do marketing.
Alumni are a perfect source for future marketing content and often enjoy acting as ambassadors for their universities.
Do your college email campaigns stand the test?
Email is a great channel for college recruiting because it is cost-effective, direct, and highly targeted. Regardless of the industry, the ROI of email marketing is high.
However, once your college email campaigns are written, designed and developed, you need to be 100% sure they are ready to land in the inboxes of prospective students.
Email clients like Gmail, Apple Mail, and Outlook may display campaigns differently. These inconsistencies can ruin the email experience and make it difficult for subscribers to engage with what you're sending them. If people can't read your copy or click your CTAs, your emails could undermine trust rather than build it.
Sinch Email on Acid is a pre-provisioning platform designed to solve these problems by simplifying the complexity of email marketing.
Our Campaign Precheck solution is an automated email checklist that offers everything from accidental swear word filters to inbox display, deliverability, and email accessibility. You can also preview the university's email campaigns on dozens of popular email clients and devices. Get unlimited email testing from Email on Acid so you can tweak as much as you need.
Author: The Email on Acid Team
The Email on Acid content team is made up of digital marketers, content creators, and real email geeks. Connect with us on LinkedIn, follow us on Facebook, and tweet us at @EmailonAcid on Twitter for more interesting stuff and great conversations about email marketing.
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
