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Get a Degree
Today there's increasing worldwide competition in the further education market as many new colleges and universities are popping up around the world and the lucrative international student market is slipping away.
One opportunity to leverage VDP in further education marketing is by making prospectuses more relevant. A university or college prospectus typically contains a lot of generic content covering all different faculties, courses, sports and activities — the majority of which is largely irrelevant to any single prospective student.
One good example of how you can relevance to prospectuses comes from Anglia Ruskin University in the UK, where prospective students can request their own personalised undergraduate prospectus and receive a personalised e-mail, webpage and prospectus (online and/or print).
Previously, Anglia Ruskin would mail out a 200 page generic prospectus to each prospect of which 75% of the content was not directly relevant to the individual. Anglia Ruskin worked with SR Communications to develop a cross-media acquisition campaign (using XMPie PersonalEffect) that includes:
» a personalised webpage and image produced on-demand
» a personalised e-mail containing personalised URL and personalised image (generated on-demand)
» a personalised URL with download link to personalised prospectus (generated on-demand)
By introducing personalisation into their application, Anglia Ruskin were able to prune back their page count by more than 70%. In total, each personalised prospectus saved the university 30% from the standard cost.
I decided to test this for myself. Posing as a 'prospective student', I completed their online form and received an e-mail directing me to my personalised webpage where I could download my personalised brochure at www.my-prospectus.com/Anglia/eliot. A few days later, the printed copy of my personalised prospectus arrived in the mail.
This is a slick application, but still has plenty of potential to take it past its current version and make it even more personalised and relevant.
My personalised image on my prospectus and webpage really didn't seem very relevant; my name on a flag looked a bit out of place — it's not the type of flag I'd expect to see popping up on their campus. Maybe putting my name on a banner saying "Anglia Ruskin welcomes Eliot Harper" would have been more effective.
There's also a lot of untapped opportunity for personalisation in the prospectus — although it included information on the courses I selected, it used the approach of stitching generic sections together. It would be better if they added a layer of personalisation, which could include relevant images and copy based on the information I provided.
Also the website, it's present form, it's just a personalised download page. It would be more useful if it contained hyperlinks to my selected courses and interests.
In summary, this is a good first attempt. Well done SR Communications. However, I hope they consider taking this application to the next level by making it even more relevant.
On a sidenote, it's interesting to note that prospects to the website were given an option to receive their prospectus by soft-copy only, but only 27% of prospects chose this option — the remainder preferred hard copy in addition to soft copy. Long live print!
Posted on Friday, 19 October 2007 at 1:56 PM | TrackBack: http://www.veedeepee.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/5