By Mike McGetrick and Ed Flaherty
Overview
Spark451 partners with several elite graduate schools across the U.S. to design and execute robust, personalized marketing campaigns. One such school, a client since 2015, partners with us on managing their prospect nurturing campaigns. Through the use of a segmented prospect communication strategy, Spark451’s campaigns with this institution typically yield average email open rates of 40%+ and click-through rates of 5% or higher.
On their own, these results are impressive. Over the last year, however, Spark451 implemented a Behavioral Marketing email campaign targeting website visitors, which blew these results out of the water.
Approach
The team at Spark451 are experts at delivering the right message to the right person at the right time; Behavioral Marketing is a methodology of doing just that. Spark451 created and implemented an email series triggered to send to visitors (tracked via a pixel) to a select group of pages from the university website. After 24 hours, a communication was automatically sent to the website visitor sharing additional, personalized information from the pages viewed while visiting the institution’s website.
Results
Implementing trigger-based web visit communications yielded:
94%
increase in email open rate
85% average open rate for each email
Over 90% open rate on an email
300%
increase in click-through rate
Click-through rates of 20%
Conclusion
As enrollment marketers, we like to control the narrative and cadence of our messaging in a linear flow. The problem is that our audiences are rarely ready to ingest our messages this way, preferring instead to do their own research when and where they are ready. By using behavioral targeting based on web visits, you can get the best of both worlds: Students do their own research, but you can supplement that with what you want them to know about that subject. For example, a visitor to your financial aid page should know about funding for graduate assistantships and unique scholarship opportunities.
We’d love to help you achieve a similar outcome using our technology stack or your current CRM. Reach out when you’re ready to discuss strategies and tactics we can implement to support your enrollment goals.