Integrated Campaign Drives College Enrollments

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.