CRM systems and automated email campaigns

by Thijs van Vugt and Mykolas Knasys 

Attracting and recruiting new students and upholding the loyalty of past students is not an easy task, especially with fierce marketplace competition and growing budget pressures. Traditional marketing strategies are failing to prove effective at engaging the right students, alumni, and donors. Proactive institutions recognize the need to evolve their marketing techniques and many turn to customer relationship management systems.

CRM systems come with a set of features that help with managing every part of a student life cycle. Automated email campaigns are likely some of the most important features that support the relationship building process – engaging more prospective students to drive higher enrollments, improving productivity for recruiters and alumni relations, and optimizing marketing investments across recruiting, admissions and alumni.

Automated campaigns

So what benefits do automated email campaigns bring? Firstly, these tools make it possible to plan and coordinate bespoke marketing activities at scale – meaning that you can engage thousands of students as simply and effectively as you can engage one student. This starts with advanced segmentation capabilities.

The best segments involve some demographic and some behavioral information – for example, you can create a segment such as “high school juniors who are interested in Law and have visited university’s website in the past week.” Furthermore, you can even generate emails to certain people based on specific happenings, such as someone who requests information about a specific program.

After your database has been segmented, the next step is personalisation. Students are much more likely to respond when shown a message that is relevant for them, whether it is in an email or a message on institution’s website. For example, prospects may receive an email about applying to the school or an alumni could get an email about making a donation.

Furthermore, automated email campaigns can interrelate with institution’s outbound marketing activities, such as trade shows and events. For example, universities may implement email campaigns that concur with in-person events. This means that the messaging of these campaigns change when sent to someone who registered, attended, or did not attend. Emails may also be automated to be sent out after a certain period of time. For instance, students that did not attend a certain event may receive an email a week later suggesting a similar upcoming event.

Appealing to the interests of a diverse audience, with a diverse range of interests and problems requires tailored messaging in real time, which traditional email programs simply are not able to do. In order to send an email tailored to students’ needs and wants, triggered communications meant to encourage further engagement can be sent. For example, if the student checks a web page about a certain graduate-level law class, you may email information about alike classes, along with details about your entire graduate program.

Finally, let’s put it all together using a fictitious example and see how marketers may use automated email campaigns to engage prospective students. The student does a StudyPortals search for “engineering programs”. He/she goes to the university’s landing page and fills out a form to download a document called “how to choose an engineering program.” This triggers an automated welcome email. The student is added to the foster stream. Over the next few weeks, the student receives two more automated emails with links to other content relevant to prospective engineering students, both of which he/she opens. In case the student keeps showing interest in any of the programs by, for example, sharing an article on social media network, it triggers call to action for the recruiter. Using the knowledge from the behaviors of this prospective student, the recruiter sends an invitation email to register for a campus tour. After the tour, the student is added to the follow-up campaign inviting him/her to apply.

Conclusions

Some of the systems that offer this functionality are: “TargetX”, Data Harvesting’s “Student CRM”, Jenzabar’s “Recruitment”, and Symplicity’s “Ascend”.

For advice on selection of your CR system, please contact Thijs van Vugt.