Kids can be notoriously fickle, whether it’s deciding to ‘de-friend’ someone on Facebook or waffling about attending several colleges that have accepted them. So Purdue University’s vice president for marketing and media, Teri Lucie Thompson, took a more proactive approach toward the problem, and in doing so, boosted the open rate for follow-up emails to accepted students by 7%, and increased the clickthrough by an impressive 33%.
One of the challenges facing Thompson was a long list of incoming freshman who had been accepted by Purdue, but hadn’t yet decided whether to attend. These were prime, opt-in email candidates, whose contact information had been gleaned from student applications, online queries, college fairs, campus visits and more.
At the same time, the school was searching for a unique identity to better brand Purdue in an increasingly loud and crowded marketplace. “My initial charge was to figure out Purdue’s value proposition in the marketplace, to elevate the brand and to email it to prospective incoming students, to get them to commit,” Thompson recalls. “We needed to ask, ‘What does the brand need to look like, and how do we achieve that?’”
The school turned to Washington, DC-based market-research company SimpsonScarborough, which did an exhaustive study of 5,000 people, looking closely at Purdue’s constituents as well as benchmarking against competitors. “We kept coming back to the same question,” Thompson says. “What makes us better, different, special?” And, equally as important, what would get those accepted students to say ‘Yes’?
“We discovered our students have lots of opportunities here for experiential learning, which they saw as a differentiator from other schools,” Thompson notes. “They want an opportunity to make a difference. Making a difference, making things, fits naturally into Purdue’s legacy.” Taking that thought to heart, Thompson reached out to boutique agency Ologie of Columbus, OH. They came back with a simple but effective tagline: “Makers, all.” The phrase combines the aspiration the school hopes to spark in its students, as well as being wordplay on Purdue’s athletic team name, the Boilermakers. “We then took the idea one step further with the headline ‘I am a Maker,’ and we were on our way,” she recalls. Thompson began incorporating the phrase around campus and in follow-up emails to students who’d been accepted, yet were still uncommitted.
Out of a mailing of 17,910, the open rate for the emails with the new emphasis sent to admitted students jumped to 72% (versus last year’s 65%), and the clickthrough rate hit a respectable 33%, up from last year’s 22%. Thompson says she’s “extremely satisfied” with the campaign’s results so far. “For each blast, we typically include two to three touches weekly or biweekly,” she notes. And they have some wide parameters with which to measure ROI. “We judge ROI by response,” Thompson says. “That is, students do not just open the email, but take an action based on it. That means they downloaded a Facebook profile icon, or downloaded a song, made an entry on the ‘Makers, all’ site, or simply downloaded a mobile background.”
Thompson and her team also began sharing the “Makers, all” message with the campus community at large. “We knew we needed support, and we wanted a cadre of internal ambassadors,” she says. “We had to make sure everyone on campus understands what makes Purdue better, different, special.” She did so by using building signage, window displays, and propagating the brand manifesto of “Makers, all” throughout the school.
Now, the university finally has a unified marketing message that’s having a real impact on current and prospective students. “‘Makers, all’ is uniquely ‘own-able’ by Purdue,” Thompson says. “This is a premium brand and needs to be treated as such.”
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