Email might be cost-effective, but it’s not be the best way to reach prospective students anymore.
Don’t believe me?
You don’t have to (although I would have appreciated it ;-) — just look at the following results from the national survey conducted with high school juniors I mentioned in a previous post:
64% said they would like to receive college information in the mail instead of email.
They prefer snail mail over email! And, I can understand them. Bloated and generic email messages don’t appeal to me either, especially when you factor in junk mail and aggressive spam filters.
As danah boyd, a social media researcher at Yahoo!, explained in her blog post what i mean when i say “email is dead” in reference to teens earlier this week, teens have the same kind of emotional attachment to IM, myspace or SMS that adults have with email (don’t you check your email more than you should everyday?)
Comparatively, they see email as we see snail mail – a necessity as danah put it:
“Now, let’s talk about youth. They have email accounts. They get homework assignments sent there. Xanga tells them that their friends have updated their pages. Attachments (a.k.a. digital Netflix/Amazon packages) get sent there. Companies try to spam them there (a.k.a. junk mail). Sifting through the crap, they might get a neat penpal letter or a friend might have sent them something to read but, by and large, there’s not a lot of emotional investment over email.”
When you haven’t established a connection with a prospective student yet, your email might be automatically identified as junk mail.
According to Debra Aho Williamson, a senior analyst at eMarketer and author of “How to Reach Teens: IM or email?”, “students expressed strong aversion to email, saying they used it when they had to, to communicate with adults or to send something official” in an informal research conducted earlier this year on college campuses for a report
IM and the like are for friends while email is for adults and official business.
Does this really mean you should try to reach your prospective students only via email?
If the whole college decision was just a regular shopping experience, it would probably make sense. However, as you know, there is much more to selecting the right college. Most prospective students and their parents see this process as one of the most important decisions to make in their life.
That’s probably why the high school juniors surveyed indicated that admission folks were welcome to use the communication channels teens use with their friends:
82% would consider reading/responding to an instant message from a college representative
71% would consider sending an instant message to a college representative through the school’s Web site
That’s why many admission offices have started to ask their prospects for their IM accounts.
Agree? Disagree? Post a comment! (that’s always the best way to communicate with a blogger ;-)
In the college context, I’m very curious about the IM / chats. All those I’ve seen anything about have always been at incompatible times, but I’m interested. I don’t know how they would necessarily work out, but I expect they’d be like other situations where an “official” type presence is confronted with lots of common people. Works out fine a lot of the time. Fun fun.
I had a longer comment but a database error killed it. :( ?
Thanks for your comment, Sam. Always appreciate your insights from the other side of the fence ;-)
Sorry for your longer comment. I haven’t noticed anything wrong on my end though.
I’d be interested in knowing the logistics in this as well. I consider myself to be very savvy with IM since it was the main method of communication between students at my university where we all had laptops – however, don’t you need to be online to receive a message?
I can see how it would work in recruitment where an admissions officer was online 24/7 to respond to inquiring prospectives, but it’s impossible to control when students would be online.
I think that text messaging may be a better method – it’s growing in popularity and messages can be sent/received at any time.
Skype comes to mind, too.
Good point, Robin. I guess late afternoons and evenings come to mind. I don’t think prospective students expect a 24/7 service, but it will definitely be outside of office hours. Beloit College uses current students with adapted schedule to answer questions via IM.
Dimitri, yes, you’re right Skypecasts are definitely something to consider as I wrote last May in “How your admission office can use Skypecast to hold online open houses”
I thought I’d just clarify my 24/7 point. I listened to a podcast earlier this year (although I can’t remember where I found it) where an admissions officer left her IM on overnight with some sort of away message on it to let people know she wasn’t at her computer. She said she was shocked at how many IM’s she received while she was away from her computer, and she was able to respond the next morning or next time the person was online.
I realize this takes a bit of the “instant” out of IM, but it is still allowing prospectives to use a method of communication they are comfortable with.