Integrated Campaign Drives College Program’s Enrollments
Challenge:
Tasked with attracting
and enrolling more students into its hospitality management program, the
admissions team at a small-town community college sought us out for marketing
advice and ideas.
Their motivation was
clear: Boosting the rolls would bring in more tuition-assistance funding from a
well-known hospitality company (the area’s third-largest employer), which
relied on the steady flow of program grads to staff its local workforce. By
finding and enrolling more students, all parties involved–the school, the hotel
chain, and prospective recruits from local lower-income families–would all
benefit.
Solution:
We designed and
deployed an integrated marketing campaign consisting of traditional and digital
elements. This included building a new mailing list by purging internal data
sources, selecting a third-party list, and merging the information into a
revamped database. We applied the rejuvenated list to a multi-piece direct-mail
outreach comprised of three colorful postcards mailed to targets residing
within 15 miles of the school.
Despite budget constraints,
we were also able to develop a strategy and creative for a small-scale Facebook
ad campaign, and refresh program content on the community college website. This
step included adding a free gated download (brochure with FAQ for capturing
email addresses), which we designed. To aid the admissions team in campaign
management, we also created a production schedule showing mail-drop dates, and
helped them select which website traffic and engagement metrics to monitor.
Results:
Overall, the school’s
admissions team (and the program’s hospitality-industry benefactor) were very
satisfied with our integrated approach to recruitment and enrollment. They were
particularly pleased with our emphasis on list quality, and complemented the
creative team on its imaginative social media advertisements.
Three months after
campaign launch, the client reported higher-than-expected results, including a
6.77% response rate for direct mail and a 311% increase in clickthroughs to
hospitality management content.