October 2005 Lawlor Focus

E-Search

The ability to conduct an electronic Search for prospective students is appealing for a number of reasons, foremost of which is the fact that today's teens are online in droves and they welcome e-communications. Of course, sending an e-message is simply another logistical task, another part of managing the entire direct mail campaign.

Shelley Paolini, senior director of eStrategy for Ariad Communications, a relationship marketing communication firm based in Canada, encourages most clients to supplement direct marketing with an electronic campaign. "Direct marketing is an information-driven, relational marketing process, which allows organizations to deal one-on-one with a customer," explains Paolini. "E-mail marketing allows a company to deal one-on-one with the customer but makes a two-way conversation easy and immediate."

Comparing a university e-Search campaign to an acquisition campaign in which a business is trying to acquire new clients, Paolini suggests the principles of traditional direct marketing can be applied to e-marketing: select the right media, make the right offer, create a campaign that gets response and analyze the response to improve future campaigns. The unique nature of e-mail, however, adds some complexity, according to Paolini. "The most important things to get right first in e-mail are the 'from' line, 'subject' line and the preview pane. These components don't exist in any other direct marketing channel."

Even then, the content must be compelling enough to inspire the recipients to respond, perhaps by clicking through to the college web site or filling out an online inquiry card. And what is a "good" response rate? The Direct Marketing Association's 2004 Response Rate Report lists e-mail as the number one channel for ROI, when revenue, cost and response rates are taken into consideration. They show e-mail as having a 1 percent response rate compared to a response rate of 2 percent for direct mail. E-mail is rated higher, however, because the cost of e-mail can be as little as 15 percent of the cost of direct mail, thereby making the return on investment significantly higher.

President of NRCCUA Don Munce estimates that approximately 20 percent of the institutions that receive student data from NRCCUA use the e-mail addresses in a comprehensive e-Search strategy. "Our experience is that colleges have an average open rate of about 15 percent and a 1 to 5 percent response rate on their campaigns," says Munce. "There are great deviations from the average, however, as new techniques and messages are used, but we have seen very positive results from the institutions that have made a commitment to developing an e-Search program in conjunction with their traditional direct mail programs. The overall Search results can be increased by as much as 35 percent."

Lawlor Recommends

Search remains an important component in the enrollment process for most undergraduate colleges and universities. Supplementing a traditional direct mail campaign with an electronic Search campaign can increase response rates—and give you tremendous insight into the students receiving your messages. By following the metrics of the e-mail campaign, you can learn how well the message was received, what topics were most important to the recipients and which calls to action yielded the best responses. And, because of the dynamic nature of e-mail, the messages and web landing pages can be altered instantaneously to improve response rates in the future.

A smart electronic Search campaign relies on six fundamental steps:

• Segment your lists and target your messages. Craft messages that will pique the interest of specific groups of readers—from potential student-athletes to prospective biology majors to likely scholarship candidates—and include information and links to web pages that will be most meaningful to them.
• Customize the messages. When possible, personalize the message in the salutation and make the message as relevant to the recipient as possible.
• Include a call to action. The campaign's primary objective is to generate action. Whether the intended action is to click-through to a web site or to fill out an online inquiry card, focus on the message so the call to action is clear, obvious and easy to accomplish.
• Respect the reader. Make it easy and transparent for recipients to unsubscribe and don't e-mail them again if they ask to be unsubscribed.
• Measure and report. Be disciplined and thoughtful about the data. Analyze why certain messages did well and why others did not.
• Test, test, test. Consistently test and tweak messages to increase response rates and better understand your audience.

In the news

Getting Your Message Through

We all hate to receive spam e-mail, and we're glad when the filters work on our behalf. But, with filters operating at the ISP, corporate or home firewall, and desktop level, it's harder than ever to successfully deliver even legitimate e-mail messages from your institution to students.

To improve the chances that your e-mail messages will be read, you need to understand the basics of spam filters. SpamAssassin is the most widely used network filter. Like most other filters, it works by scanning the incoming messages and then assigning point values—both positive and negative—for various characteristics of the e-mail message. Red font, for example, is a trigger that adds points; too many images will raise the score; and the word "free" is a no-no. (To browse through the entire list of triggers, visit the SpamAssassin test page.) As an open-source program, SpamAssassin can be modified by the end user to be more or less sensitive; however, generally speaking a score of five or higher means your message might be labeled as spam.

A quick way to gauge how your message will be scored is to utilize a free online spam checker, like Ezinecheck.com and Site Sell Spam Check. Simply enter your final draft, and the spam checker will rate it. Remember, a lower number is better in this case, and any message that scores a five or higher might not ever make it to the recipient's inbox without a "spam" label on it.

2.021: That's the "spam score" assigned to the October Focus e-mail message you received. What elements of the e-newsletter earned the points? 1.2 points were assigned for using the word "university," .1 point was for "click here," .405 points for "click" and .312 points for "here."

Colleges Endorse Gap Year

Vice President and Dean at Colgate University Adam Weinberg is calling for a national conversation about instituting a year of service for all students between high school graduation and college enrollment, saying it would be instrumental for helping young people develop and understand the value of work and service.

"We see more and more kids showing up in college who are just not ready to learn," said Weinberg. "They are showing up with all sorts of stress-related disorders—cutting, eating and others. It is a generation of young kids who have been pushed from birth … and who probably need another year or two to be mature enough to be prepared."

It is not clear how many students are taking time off, but officials at colleges and universities nationwide report the number asking for deferrals is increasing—and that might be a good thing. A poll administered by The Princeton Review in 2003 reported that of 350 students surveyed, 55 percent of those who had taken time off said the experience improved their grades when they returned to school; 57 percent said their experiences away from the classroom benefited their job search.

From "Along the Road to College, More Teens Take a Detour" — The Washington Post, October 11, 2005.

Did you know?

Of the 357 institutions that responded to "The 2005 Study of Current Industry Practices for Undergraduate Freshman Inquiry Generation," 72 percent used e-mail as part of their direct marketing efforts, compared to 68 percent and 34 percent in 2003 and 2002, respectively.

More than half of the responding institutions indicated that their marketing efforts via e-mail were more productive this year than last year, while 32 percent indicated results were about the same.

The most frequently used electronic Search communications were personal e-mails with links to the admission web site, the school web site, a personalized web site or an online application. Read the results of the entire study by Ed Gillis online.