% Email Open Rate
Customer Profile
Oakland Community College, OCC, is a public community college. It is the top transfer college in Michigan, offering over 90,000 online and in-person degree and certification programs.
Campaigns Managed
The Objective
OCC wanted to increase registration rates and explore email marketing as an avenue for doing so. Their challenge was that they had no email campaign strategies in place or experience with automation and testing. Daniel Brian Advertising, on behalf of OCC, reached out to partner with us to solve the email marketing challenges OCC was experiencing.
Emails Sent
The Personal Touch Engagement Effect
Our first action was to strategize about how to personalize content. OCC provided us with three contact segments to work with: current students, guest students, and stop-out students. Contacts were put into groups based on their history with the community college. Current students were already enrolled with OCC, guest students were enrolled with a different college but planning on taking at least one class with OCC, and stop-out students had been enrolled with OCC in the past and had since withdrawn.
.
The Process
Our first action was to strategize about how to personalize content. OCC provided us with three contact segments to work with: current students, guest students, and stop-out students. Contacts were put into groups based on their history with the community college. Current students were already enrolled with OCC, guest students were enrolled with a different college but planning on taking at least one class with OCC, and stop-out students had been enrolled with OCC in the past and had since withdrawn.
We customized our campaign messages for each segment in order to increase our impact and provide relevant information to students. For example, current students were encouraged to choose classes and stop-out students were encouraged to return to OCC. Using segmentation, we could write targeted emails.
We then created a framework to help us measure the success of this campaign by analyzing open rates and click-through rates. We implemented A/B testing along the way to improve performance and learn what contacts responded to, then we relaunched emails for best results. We tested different messages, subject lines, and CTAs to fine-tune our emails further.
Campaign Results
Success with this campaign was dependent on recognizing and responding to patterns. This meant zeroing in on our contacts and identifying who we needed to send emails to, what we needed to send, and when we needed to send it.
In addition to using contact segments, we quickly realized that the outcomes of our campaign were time-sensitive. Open rates changed when school was in session versus when it was out-of-session. While some students such as guest students were most likely to open emails from OCC during summer vacation (with an average open rate of 32% and 15% during the school year), others such as current students were more likely to open emails during the school year (with an average open rate of around 26% during the school year and 23% during summer vacation). Stopout students also opened emails more frequently during the school year.
When we were able to better predict engagement, we could focus our efforts on the potential students most likely to open and interact with emails to capitalize on their activity. While we couldn’t make students more likely to check their emails, we could make sure that they were seeing useful content from OCC when they did. This strategy gave OCC a better understanding of what their contacts were looking for and made for more productive communication.
Engagement Indicators
As a direct result of implementing email campaigns, OCC has seen an increase in enrollment rates in the current student demographic. By engaging with students about the courses and programs available at OCC and reminding them about registration deadlines, OCC is able to connect with their students and provide them with valuable and timely resources. We hope to continue supporting OCC in their use of email campaigns to drive conversions and build relationships.