CASE STUDY: Marymount University Promotes Summer Programs to Grad & Undergrad Students using Smart Segmentation

THE CASE: Marymount University offers a variety of summer programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. They have a fixed budget to send direct mail and email promotions to alumni, previous undergrad admits, graduate inquiries, and some outside lists of prospects. The challenge is how to promote the right programs to the right audience within a single cross-media campaign. Previous marketing efforts had involved a single version of a small postcard, and single follow up email. Marymount was hoping to increase interest in its summer programs by utilizing “smart segmentation” to send relevant marketing messages to specific audience segments based upon what undergraduate major or what specific program the prospective student was interested in. The target audiences were sub-divided into multiple segments (a total of 17 separate groups), which resulted in variable-data technology used in the printing, emailing, and personalized microsite. The various segments each received personalized messaging and relevant content highlighting specific summer programs within their interest category. For each target audience there was also a “general” segment for those prospects that did not fall within a specific category. The campaign involved Personalized URL Links (PURLs) as the primary call-to-action, and included Personalized QR Codes on each mail piece. The goal of the campaign was to drive all summer prospects to their personalized microsite and have them indicate which summer programs they were interested in.

THE RESULT: Above-average response rates (2-3x higher) from both in-house and outside list sources compared to previous single-channel summer marketing promotions. In-House prospects achieved over a 3% visit rate to the microsite, with 75% of them completing a survey expressing interest in summer programs. Prospects from Outside Lists averaged a 1% visit rate to the microsite, with 1/3rd of them completing the survey.

MEDIA CHANNELS: Direct Mail (using Variable Data Printing), Email, Personalized Microsites (both Standard and Mobile versions), Social Media, Personalized QR Codes.