Stepping up to new challenges of college enrollment goals with tight marketing budgets
The task of building enrollments of non-traditional students has become more challenging with the improving economic conditions: fewer adult learners are re-training for new careers. Add to that, the new scrutiny on student loans, and everybody, community colleges to universities, needs to be smarter about using their marketing and advertising dollars to attract new students.
Direct Mail Marketing continues to provide a cost effective means to get the message into the hands of qualified prospects
This holds most true for college programs that rely on local markets for continuing education and other special offerings.
One of the most important pieces of the marketing plan is to match the intended audience with your message.
Whether you are sending catalogs or postcards, this is where the importance of finding the right mailing lists will come in.
- For general information about programs; look at your prevalent demographic groups and select a mailing list to match. This should help you narrow your mailing to people within certain income and age ranges.
- When looking for the non-traditional student, you can combine demographics with a person’s education level – consider a mailing list of people with a “High School Diploma but no College Degree”. You can even add in a self reported interest in career advancement.
- When promoting specialized programs for professional credits, such as nursing or teaching, utilize lists based on professional state licenses.
- You may want to send information on enrichment-type programs to everyone. In which case, a mail list that blankets your community and qualifies for saturation postal discounts will work best.
With the lowering of costs for short-run and digital printing, smaller mailings with a more targeted audience are becoming more feasible. Targeting mothers with young children is just one example of a niche campaign. Seniors in early retirement age might be another.
Be sure that the lists you buy are updated to US Postal standards with National Change of Address (NCOA) and CASS certification to assure a higher deliverability rate. Good mailing list brokers can help you select the best marketing lists for your campaigns.
ListAbility’s Consumer Education Level Mailing List is a comprehensive national list which combines powerful demographic qualifiers along with the level of education attained.
Matching the right audience with your message is a very important part of higher educations’ direct marketing campaign. Whether you are sending catalogs or postcards, it is important to find the right mailing list.
ListAbility is a mailing list broker with the expertise and quality data to guide you through the process of obtaining a highly targeted mailing, telemarketing or email list. A better list will pay dividends with the savings you garner in printing and postage – to say nothing of getting noticed by the right people!
