This week, we announced our 2011 Summer Release, marking DemandMarketer’s transition from an email marketing software to an online marketing platform, geared specifically toward the needs of higher education marketing and enrollment professionals.

From our work with colleges and universities across the country, enrollment managers and higher education marketers have to juggle their student information and CRM systems, Twitter, and Facebook accounts to communicate with prospective students. The new release of DemandMarketer provides the ability to integrate email message and social technology touchpoints, integrates direct response capabilities, provides automated workflow communications, optimizes send time based on contact behavior, and increases reporting and analysis capabilities for email, social, and web metrics – all in one online platform. Here are the key points:

Workflows With Integration Of Email, Facebook, And Twitter Enrollment Messaging
DemandMarketer now provides you with the opportunity to fully automate a multi-channel communication flow. Using a combination of triggers, filters, and actions, you have the ability to target prospective students based on their behavior, specific dates, and personal information. The intuitive drag and drop interface allows you to create a message flow which automates not only email messages, but also Facebook and Twitter communications.

Turn Direct Mail Into Direct Response
With Quick Response (QR) code management, create QR codes to include with direct mail pieces. Link your codes to web forms for inquiry capture and communication workflows to begin immediately engaging prospective students.

Deliver Emails When Your Students Want Them
Instead of sending emails at random times of the day you suppose are best for your target audience, enabling DemandMarketer’s send time optimization feature uses each contact’s history to determine the day and/or the time of day a prospective student is most likely to open and engage with your message. While you still have the capability to choose the date and send time, this feature lets you further optimize your campaigns and increase contact engagement.

Real-Time ROI Reporting To Adapt Your Enrollment Marketing Strategies
DemandMarketer includes a wide range of reporting capabilities which allow you to see exactly how, when, and where your contacts are engaging with your messages. With DemandMarketer’s updated Open Reporting, you can view opens by time of day, geographic location, and email client. DemandMarketer’s updated reporting capabilities also include the ability to automatically calculate and report the number of “likes” and comments on Facebook and retweets through Twitter.

We will be rolling out new functionality between now and July 1 in preparation for your summer and fall campaign planning, as well as offering support sessions to introduce the new capabilities. In the meantime, if you have specific questions, contact your account strategist.

And if you are not a client, call us too!

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.

Thanks to all attendees at the 2010 UC Systemwide Conference, Events & Catering Summit. I always enjoy speaking with collegiate conferencing professionals.

As promised, I am posting links to my presentation as well as the 2010 American Express/MPI FutureWatch report I mentioned (click the icons to download):

If you would like to learn more best practices in collegiate conferencing and events, I encourage you to attend the ACCED-I Annual conference in March 2011.

If we’ve heard it once from customers this year, we’ve heard it one hundred times. “My [insert name of college official here] wants to know what we are doing on Twitter.”

With the media hype, celebrity attention, and general curiosity, this funny-named phenomenon that simply lets us answer the question, “what are you doing?” is riding the tidal wave of novelty. So, is Twitter a channel that works for higher education marketing and recruitment?

Here are two thoughts to keep in mind if you choose to leap into the Twittersphere:

Read more… »