Meet the Broker: Liz Kistner, Enrollment Marketing Solutions
Today we meet Liz Kistner, founder/CEO of Enrollment Marketing Solutions, a Palatine, IL firm that specializes in brokering educational lists. Despite the economy, she reports schools are always mailing and marketing themselves.
After working at J.F. Glaser (now GlaserDirect) for nearly 20 years, she set out on her own three years ago, founding Enrollment Marketing, a company that brokers lists for continuing and professional education, executive and MBA programs, and even career and technical schools. “Really anything except for undergraduate,” she says.
She developed the interest in this niche early in her career when started brokering lists from the Keller Graduate School of Management of DeVry University.
“I found that I just connected with the academia industry,” she says. “I understand it, I know the marketplace and it just made sense for me to continue in that market. It was a no-brainer for me versus [things] like catalogers, nonprofit and credit card [marketing]. They just didn’t interest me.”
Despite the horrible economic times, Kistner reports success in her area.
“My business is doing really well,” she says. “We find that academia is almost recession-proof. They mail when it’s good and they mail when it bad because when people are out of a job they look to continuing education for increased job skills or maybe to transition to another industry.”
While many sectors have largely moved over to e-mail and other channels, a lot of schools still rely on direct mail because it reinforces brands and letters tend to be opened, she notes.
Looking ahead, Kistner foresees no major changes in the educational list business, which not surprisingly tends to be busiest during the fall enrollment period.
