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 ;-)