In the realm of graduate enrollment management, effective and efficient email communication is paramount. Yet, graduate schools often find themselves grappling with limited resources and bandwidth to develop comprehensive communication strategies. Here is a breakdown of some of the tools and techniques to give your graduate communication campaigns a competitive edge.
The Problem: Graduate ≠ Undergraduate
It’s no secret that graduate and undergraduate prospective students are distinct cohorts with unique needs and expectations. Because of this, these two groups require custom solutions for email campaign development. A couple of differences between these two student populations:
Varied Student Backgrounds and Motivations
Graduate students come from a wide range of life stages and have a myriad of motivations for pursuing advanced degrees and certifications. From mid-career professionals seeking to advance their expertise in their field to recent graduates aiming to further specialize in an area of study. Understanding these differences is crucial in crafting effective communication plans.
Check out our Graduate Student Insights Report to better understand who your prospective graduate students are.
Different Content Needs
While traditional undergraduate content will often focus on topics like student experience, campus housing, and sense of belonging, prospective graduate students are often more interested in topics such as program flexibility/modality, cost and ROI, research opportunities, and program outcomes. This type of information can often require highly custom content based on a specific degree or program.
Leveraging Slate in Your Enrollment Marketing Strategy
Efficiency in a communications plan is critical, especially when targeting graduate students. By leveraging Slate, institutions can transform and elevate their communication strategies. Here’s how:
Building Full Funnel Communication Flows
Gone are the days of manual list uploads and one-off email sends. With Slate, institutions can construct dynamic communication campaigns that guide prospective graduate students seamlessly through every stage of the enrollment journey.
Considerations for Efficiency
Despite the uniqueness and complexity of the graduate population, efficient communication is within reach. Key considerations include data structure and integrity (good data in, good data out), inquiry collection (dynamic RFI, Single vs. Multi-value program field, etc.), deadlines (where is the data housed and how can it be referenced), and timelines (collecting future entry terms and how this impacts your communications).
By maximizing efficiency in these areas, institutions can accomplish highly custom campaigns that meet prospective students where they are with the information that they are looking for.
Tools for Efficiency
To streamline communication efforts, consider utilizing the following Slate features to construct dynamic and efficient email campaigns.
Rules and Populations
At the root of every effective drip campaign is a Rule and Population driving that campaign. Utilizing Rules and Populations for campaigns allows for a drip campaign to be set up so that manual list uploads and ad-hoc mailing sends are no longer required. Stay tuned for how this approach could change with Technolutions’ Deliver Campaign updates (not yet released)!
Translation Codes
Translation Codes allow for greater customizations to campaigns, not only within the mailing content, but also within recipient list building (deadline management). Translation Codes can also be used for dynamic email senders, reference program information, direct to dynamic call to action button links, and more!
Content Blocks and Liquid Markup
The power of Content Blocks and Liquid Markup is the key to creating truly custom and dynamic content for graduate student campaigns. With these tools, it is possible to build a single campaign for your student population that is custom and tailored based on their interests, timelines, and backgrounds.
Folder Structure/Naming Convention
When building campaigns, it is pertinent to develop standardized folder structures and naming conventions to better understand who is receiving what communications and what a population is driving. It is best to have these throughlines in naming so that there is clarity for what rule is driving the population and what population is driving the campaign.
Reporting
Now that your graduate campaigns are set up to communicate efficiently and effectively, be sure to employ the reporting capabilities in Slate to gain insight into your campaign performance. Doing so will open up opportunities to optimize in future cycles based on performance metrics. All of the work discussed in the previous sections will allow for clean, evergreen reporting within Slate.
Our Approach
Backed by industry research and best practices, Carnegie’s graduate-specific communication campaigns offer a transformative solution to the challenges faced by graduate schools in engaging prospective students.
By leveraging Slate and employing the tools and strategies outlined here, institutions can communicate with precision and effectiveness, ultimately enhancing the graduate student experience and driving enrollment success. Start a conversation to learn more about how we can help you optimize your graduate communications!