Rarely does a week go by where I’m not asked by a client or conference session participant about e-marketing best practices. Usually the question goes something like this: “I’m trying to increase the engagement we’re seeing in our email campaigns. Are there new design or copy best practices I should be following to increase the amount of recipients opening and interacting with my messages?”

And here’s my response: The real opportunity, and the one that I see most enrollment marketers missing out on, is behavior-triggered email campaigns.

Since we wrote Death by a Thousand Cuts – The Email Marketing Practices of Undergraduate Admission Offices in 2008, most colleges and universities are at minimum are complying with CAN-SPAM requirements. Using behavior to drive campaign responses? Not so much.

Here’s the scenario I painted for client who asked me this question recently:

Let’s say a prospective student inquires about your project management certificate program. As any good web form should, the inquiry form has a relevant, well-written email that is automatically sent to the prospective student the moment they complete the inquiry form.

Now, if this student clicks on this first message about your certificate in project management, they will then automatically receive another email with more industry information, articles, and statistics four days later. Then, a week later, they’ll get another message with resources for professionals working in project management.

If they do NOT click on that first message, about a week later they are going to receive an email from your institution that provides an overview of the range of professional certificates that you offer.

Upon receiving this message, let’s say that our prospective student sees another certificate program that she believes may be more along the lines of what she’s looking for and decides to click on that information and explore it further. That action, clicking on a link to information on your Six Sigma program, perhaps, triggers 2 additional emails over the next two weeks with information about the program and a profile of an employer who has enrolled multiple employees in the certificate and speaks to how impactful it was to their organization.

Our sample prospective students in this case have now received a series of messages totally tailored to their behavior and implied, actual interest. And, here’s the best part. If the marketing team plans and creates all of these messages in advance, today’s technology allows you to set up workflows and these triggered messages all go out on their own.

See below for an example of what the communication flow and execution would look like in DemandMarketer, our cross-channel campaign management software:

Looking to improve engagement rates? Develop custom, behavior-triggered scenarios for message recipients. Students will receive timely, relevant information and you’ll achieve your goal of greater engagement with your email campaigns.

Earlier this fall, Hotmail declared war on graymail with a new set of filtering features and enrollment marketers need to take notice.

What Hotmail is categorizing as graymail are the messages that technically recipients have subscribed to (think Facebook alerts, Groupon notices, etc), but aren’t engaging with. Perhaps the message content isn’t compelling or their inboxes are being flooded. Whatever the reason, the reality is that they are not engaging with the message.

Earlier this fall, Dick Craddick, Hotmail group program manager, shared that a startlingly low 14% of email messages are actually person-to-person messages that we highly value. The rest? The gray area…containing all of those messages that we “requested” at some point, but may or may not value now.

What Hotmail Is Doing

According to Mike Hotz at ClickZ, there are several new features Hotmail has rolled out that will help users address the graymail issue:

1. Schedule Cleanup – Users will be able to set up batch deletions (automatic, everything other than the most recent newsletter, messages over a week old, and the like).

2. Advanced folder organization – users can automate the movement of messages from a sender en masse to a specified folder.

3. Flagging the top contenders – Messages can be flagged as important and will stay at the top of the inbox.

This is just one more step in the direction the ISPs began taking last fall with Gmail and Yahoo’s automatic sorting features.

What’s an Enrollment Marketer to Do?

According to new adult learner communication preferences research to be released at the 2011 UPCEA Marketing Seminar by DemandEngine, adult learners continue to prefer email as the top communication channel to learn about colleges and universities they are considering.

So, they want to receive email. How do we keep ours from falling into that non-engaged-with graymail category? Keep the following in mind:

Build a relationship – Email marketing success lies in the relationships you build, not just the feature set of your sending platform. Marketers that work to understand their prospective students and then deliver segmented, highly-relevant content to them are going to win the relationship race in the long run.

What works? For adult learners, consider content that updates them on the industry in which you know they either currently work or want to work. What’s the job market like? How can they prepare themselves to advance their careers?

For example, a private university in the Midwest marketing online healthcare programs has used a career guide for healthcare professionals to initiate and then cultivate relationships with prospective students. The email series focuses on the value of additional credentials in select healthcare careers, the reality that many healthcare systems either are or will be requiring this in the near future, and what salary projections look like post-credential.

Blatantly remind them why they are hearing from you – More and more, savvy email marketers are using the space above their messages to overtly remind the recipient why they are receiving their message. And many are also using that space to allow recipients to either manage their preferences or completely unsubscribe.

If they are receiving your message because they previously enrolled in part of your certificate program, tell them. If they are someone who recently expressed interest in your program and this is part of your follow up, tell them. Simple statements like, “You’re receiving this message because you recently expressed interest in our Project Management Certificate program,” can go a long way at capturing their attention, reminding them why you are contacting them, and increasing the likelihood they engage with your message.

Monitor engagement… and act on it– Use your email analytics to understand who is (and who is not) engaging with your messages.

Often, marketers focus only on those that are engaging and just keep sending the same content to those that are not in the hopes that they’ll come back around. Instead of hoping, take a more proactive approach.

What can you do? For starters, identify contacts who have not opened anything you’ve sent in the past six months. Email them and ask if they want to continue receiving emails from you. Give them an opportunity manage their preferences (i.e. alter frequency of your message or even unsubscribe). If they don’t engage at that point, consider removing them from your list.

The Take Away

At the end of the day, marketers must focus on valuable interactions that build relationship. Too often, the focus is on the latest technology or a cool feature that’s available. Quality relationships will trump quantity of pushed-out-messages any day.

I enjoyed reading a recent piece from Rebecca Ruiz, entitled The Medium is the Message: Should a College Call, Text or Tweet? According to Ruiz, members of the millennial generation may be stereotyped as rabid text messagers, but a group of nearly 10 high school seniors and college freshmen agreed on Saturday that they would most like to hear from a college they are interested in by phone. The group of students, all from the New Orleans area, spoke during a session called “Technology in the College Process: The Student Perspective,” held as the curtain came down on the annual conference of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

In one exchange, a bewildered counselor asked, “You don’t want us to text you?”

A 12th grader replied, “If you’re going to use the phone, taking the time to call is a lot better, a lot more personal.”

Another revelation for counselors came when the students expressed little interest in connecting with colleges on Facebook, suggesting that a university’s presence on their news feeds was invasive.

“Colleges say, ‘Like us on Facebook’ — but that’s my personal time, I’d rather not,” one high school senior said. “I’d like to find a time in my day where I don’t think about the college process,” she said to soft applause from a few sympathetic audience members.

And I say, finally.

Over the last few years, we’ve researched and reported on the communication preferences of high school and adult students. At the same time we’ve spoken to a number of enrollment professionals who are incredulous when they see the results.

For example, students prefer using search engines, receiving direct mail and email messages to learning about your institution through Twitter and Facebook.

But, how can this be? Students live on Facebook, they don’t use email anymore, and as other vendors have told us in years past, they spend their time blogging and listening to podcasts. No, not if you compare their online behavior:

We’ve updated this research for high school students and we will be releasing the results this fall.

What I can tell you is the trends are the same. Focus on connecting with students and building relationships. Stop letting technology lead the conversation.

While email marketing isn’t as fun these days to talk about as say Facebook and Twitter, it remains a preferred channel of communication across all age groups. This fall we will be releasing some new communication preference data for high school students and adult learners. Unfortunately, higher education enrollment managers and marketers have not upped their email marketing games to compete for attention across online channels.

What’s missing ? A focus on email marketing basics. To move forward, focus on a new training regimen including these seven email marketing exercises:

1. CAN-SPAM Compliance – are you including a physical mailing address and a clear way for recipients to opt-out from your messages?

2. Anonymous Senders – reviewing hundreds of promotional email marketing messages from across the country it’s interesting to note how a majority are sent from anonymous campus employees such as admissions@, or info@.

3. Compelling Subject Lines – are you writing and testing subject lines to optimize open and engagement metrics? As a rule of thumb, key your subject lines between 45 & 60 characters in order to make the preview screen of most email applications.

4. Reminders – do you remind prospective students why they are receiving your email messages? You can do this by using subject lines such as “The information you requested” or by including the information in the message footer.

5. Control – are you providing email recipients the opportunity  to control the type of content and delivery frequency they want?

6. Engaging Content – can you move beyond an endless stream of application, visitation, or registration pushes to create compelling content?

7. Sharing – with engaging content, are you encouraging users to share emails through forwards and social sharing?

Email marketing remains a powerful communications channel for higher education enrollment and marketing professionals. Move to a higher level of performance by changing your approach from email as a monlogue to email dialogue.

At every opportunity, we urge higher education enrollment managers to take heed regarding their email behavior. Yet, our DemandEngine email inbox is filled with messages forwarded to us by high school students … most of it an array of poorly conceived and executed messages.

Consider the new Auto-Unsubscribe function (and policy) now available to Gmail users.

We don’t think you should be burdened with managing messages you don’t want to receive. We do our best to put messages in Spam when we’re pretty sure you won’t want or need them. But everyone has different preferences about the mail they want to see. You may not want to read any messages sent by a certain company or mailing list, while another Gmail user finds these same messages to be valuable.

To help solve this problem, we’re providing you with an unsubscribe tool for some messages. You’ll see the unsubscribe tool when you mark a message from particular types of mailing lists as spam. If the particular message is a misuse of a mailing list you like to receive, you can Report spam as usual. But if you never want to receive another message or newsletter from that list again, click Unsubscribe instead. We’ll send a request to the sender that your email address be removed from the list. It’s that simple!

Keep in mind that mailing lists may take up to three days to process your unsubscription request, so it may take a few days for you to stop receiving mail from the list. Also, please note that we are unable to provide the Unsubscribe option for all mailing lists.

For your protection, Gmail won’t display Unsubscribe for lists that are known to be owned by spammers. When you don’t see the unsubscribe tool for a particular newsletter or mailing list that you trust, check the actual message for unsubscribe options, or try contacting the list owner about removal (you should only do this if the list owner is trustworthy and not a spammer).

Email marketing sits at the top of the food chain as a preferred method of communication by adult learners. Yet, many continuing education units take a lazy approach to their email efforts, batching and blasting an endless stream of ‘apply-now’ or ‘register-now’ messaging.

Providers are ramping up their intelligence in an effort to shield their customers from irrelevant and irresponsible email messages.  Cranky student recipients become a ‘communication attrition’ risk, thus potentially closing a valuable channel for enrollment dialogue.

In this 2011 OCHEA presentation, discover a five-step process to creating a winning email marketing plan that engages prospective students and cultivates their interest through to enrollment.

There’s a subtlety to higher education email marketing that is quite often lost in the ‘batch a list and fire away’ approach many colleges and universities take today.

It’s the little things however that build trust and create value in your email marketing efforts. The marketing team for Georgia Tech’s Distance Learning and Professional Education unit understands this.

The team has a standing practice of providing whitelisting guidelines with their email marketing messages. Through an ‘above the fold’ link in their messages, they post extensive instructions for the subscriber to do this.

Because the instructions are actually hosted on their web site, it adds credibility and increases trust.

Little things

At DemandEngine, we have long been proponents of using email as a dialogue channel for higher education enrollment marketing. As any relationship, trust builds when there is an equitable exchange.

Internet Service Providers are launching more ways to gauge the strength of your email marketing relationships. Google’ Priority Inbox, a new feature of Gmail, is designed to help its customers manage email overload:

“Gmail’s servers look at several types of information to identify the email that’s important to you, including who you email and chat with most, how often you email with these people, and which keywords appear frequently in the emails you read.”

As email messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you. You can help it get better by clicking the or buttons at the top of the inbox to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important. (You can even set up filters to always mark certain things important or unimportant, or rearrange and customize the three inbox sections.)

What does this mean for higher education marketers?

• Email with information that helps prospective students during their decision cycle.
• Remind prospective students why they are receiving your message and send them info they are expecting.
• Focus on relevance – an essential component of email communication.

It’s time to get serious with email marketing.

Google, the world’s largest search engine recently announced a new way for U.S.-based Web users to make calls directly from it’s popular email service, Gmail. The new service offers free direct calls to the U.S. and Canada and represents the company’s latest foray into the world of telecommunications. The move helps drive users to Gmail, an email service actively used by more than 200 million people.

I had the opportunity to speak on the topic of adult learning marketing at the recent Noel-Levitz conference.

What are some of the common pitfalls faced by professional, graduate, and continuing education units across the country?

1. No focus on the top of the funnel

• Revolving direct mail and email list rentals for one-off course or program promotion
• Lack of a clear follow-up communications plan
• Large direct mail sends with little ability to track results
• No ability to track effectiveness of campaigns

2. Lack of a central data repository

• Many units manage prospect data in a series of Excel spreadsheets, if at all
• Failure to update prospect records when mail is returned

3. No means to manage progress of interested students throughout the funnel

• Most lack of a systematic communication plan to cultivate the interest of students

What strategies should professional, graduate, and continuing education units employ?

1. Develop and manage a central database of prospect data

2. Employ effective online marketing strategies

3. Close the enrollment marketing loop