At Salisbury University today, Brad Lena from Daniels Marketing Support Services made a presentation about integrated marketing applications and how the Web, mail and 1:1 marketing can generate increased return on investment for higher ed admission or advancement offices.
Lena defined integrated applications as “the use of databases and digital printing to drive traffic to a task-specific, personalized, micro website designed to achieve and facilitate a specific objective.”
Then, he explained that the use of a unique PIN number, provided to prospective students or donors to log to the micro website, is the key to this type of initiatives. By identifying each customer, this unique number not only permits to serve content customized to this person’s needs, but also to answer the following questions:
- Did the 1:1 direct mail work?
- If customers went online, did they stay or bail out?
- If they stayed, what did they investigate and what did they ignore?
- What was the conversion rate? Did it achieve the goals?
What I especially liked about this presentation is that Brad Lena shares a very interesting success story: the admission integrated campaign of St Andrews Presbyterian College:
This campaign resulted in a 66% increase in applications and 50% increase in entering new students according to one of the College’s press releases.
St Andrews used direct mail with a pre-populated reply card to drive prospective students to a micro website where they were invited to log in.
Once logged in, they were presented with a web page with a very specific message targeted to their interests in terms of majors as well as link suggestions to get more information about the college’s programs. They were also given the opportunity to update their information, which automatically sent an email notification to an admission counselor to assure an even more personalized and timely follow-up.