University of Southern Mississippi
Right Audience, Right Message
Better targeting boosts out-of-state reach.
The Long Game
The University of Southern Mississippi came to Spark451 looking to increase its out-of-state enrollment. Spark451 strategists developed a plan to introduce the university (known as Southern Miss) to potential applicants outside of Mississippi during their sophomore and junior years of high school.
From the results of the campaign so far, odds are that when those students choose a college, Southern Miss will be on their minds.
— Roy Lowrance , Managing Director, Center for Data Science
The List
Like many direct marketing activities, student search programs begin by creating a list of recipients. A list of people with little likelihood of opening or clicking through a message dooms a campaign before the first “send” button is pushed.
So Spark451 used our predictive modeling tool to craft a list of out-of-state students with a better shot of success. Our predictive model identifies prospective students who are most likely to engage with a campaign or apply to a particular college or university.
The Email
What do we want the reader to do? How do we get them to do it?
For all designers and writers, knowing what to leave out is just as important as knowing what to put in. For email designers and writers, it might be even more important.
We set out to design emails for Southern Miss’ sophomore and junior search campaign focused on the essentials. What do we want the reader to do? How do we get them to do it?
The answer to the first question was simple: click a link that takes them to a landing page. The answer to our second question involved some good ol’ fashion tricks of the trade: experience, best practices, and A/B testing.
52% out-of-state recipients clicked through compared to the A email.
In our B email about student life, we cut the word count, included a single call-to-action as a prominent button, and removed extraneous graphics. The result: 52 percent more out-of-state recipients clicked through compared to the A email.
Other differences in the B version: a readability score of grade 8 and a P.S. message with a link to the landing page.
52%
higher click through rate on student life email (out-of-state students)
40%
higher click through rate on student life email (in-state students)
The Landing Page
Building relationships with sophomore and junior students as they decide where to apply to college is vital for Southern Miss. To ensure that the university has the most up to date information about prospective students’ interests and where to contact them, we created personalized landing pages.
Rather than prompt students to fill it out like a typical lead-generating form, we simply displayed the information we had already and gave them the option to edit any inaccuracies.
To strengthen the success of the student search email and landing page efforts, Southern Miss and Spark451 have started their next collaboration: a suite of publications.
