April 13, 2010

E-mail Marketing as a Student Retention Tool

Apr. 13, 2010 at 11:44 AM | By Dan Obregon | Comment Count

"A focus on retaining existing customers is a logical objective for cost-conscious organizations trying to offset the impact of a recession. After all, it‘s far less expensive to retain a customer you already have than to find and acquire a new one."

These words jumped out at me today as I was reviewing MarketingSherpa's latest Chart of the Week. Perhaps not too surprising, the poll found that 88% of marketers surveyed found e-mail to be a very important tool in customer retention. What was surprising (to me at least) is the fact that use of e-mail for retention was viewed as being more important than the use of e-mail for new customer acquisition.

While you hear quite a bit about higher education institutions using e-mail to enhance their enrollment and recruitment higher education marketing efforts, fewer institutions have looked to leverage e-mail marketing to bolster their retention efforts.

This isn't to say that e-mail has not been used at all by advisors and faculty to communicate with students, in fact the National Survey of Student Engagement finds that it's the number one way that students and faculty communicate.

However, its use has typically been reserved for one-off communications, or one-to-one interactions, rather than to market student services available on campus. And, even those one-off e-mail communications are difficult to track so the institution has no way to see if students are actually reading their e-mails or taking action based on them.

Let's say you're looking to promote a tutoring schedule or invite students to a peer advising session, and you want to focus on getting students that are below a certain GPA.

Without the use of an e-mail campaign tool there's no way of knowing which students are actually reading your e-mails and which ones are not.

But with an e-mail campaign tool, you'll not only be able to see which students are viewing your e-mail, but which ones have actually clicked on your e-mail to sign up for your sessions.

As a result, you'd be able to follow up appropriately with individual students based on their response to your initial higher education marketing campaign.

By looking at which students are clicking on your e-mail links you'll be able to identify which sessions have the greatest demand or even which students are taking advantage of the services made available to them.

What about those students that don't take action on your e-mail? You'll at least be able to identify those more passive students (those that don't read or take action on your e-mails) by following up with a more high-touch approach like a phone call.

Even a small change can make a big difference

So this seems simple enough, but will having this kind of insight really have a material impact on student success?

When it comes to student retention, a small investment can protect a significant revenue streamby helping you retain more students. A report cited last year by InsideHigherEd found that, "an increase in student services expenditures of $500 per student, on average, would increase an institution's six-year graduation rate by 0.7 percentage points."

By contrast, your typical e-mail campaign tool will cost you FAR less than $500 per student, but could allow you to target students based on certain attributes or academic profiles, and connect them with the resources they need to achieve success.

Additionally, some e-mail campaign tools can even integrate with existing student retention technology being used on campus to raise alerts or schedule advising appointments, giving you the ability to touch students from multiple angles in an automated fashion.

Let's say you have a faculty member raise a flag for one student that's failing chemistry...you'll not only be able to reach out them one-on-one to discuss his issues, but you'll be able to include that student in follow up campaigns to promote or remind him about a Chemistry tutoring session available to him on campus.

Raising flags on student is an important first step to retention, and nothing will ever beat having that face-to-face interaction to identify a student's needs, but maintaining constant communication through automated communications can help you stay top of mind with individual students and allow you to track their progress quickly, thus allowing you to more easily segment those students that will require more time and assistance versus those that are responding to and taking action based on your outreach.

This could change with the use of the same e-mail campaign tools being used to recruit students and other higher education marketing efforts.