Marketing service providers should help your business:
- Drive additional enrollment and giving
- Improve marketing results
- Enhance targeted reach
- Reduce administrative costs
- Manage print budgets
- Maximize effectiveness with integrated marketing
Enrollment: Print is an integral part of an institution’s marketing. Whether it’s targeted direct mail, viewbooks, or campus marketing materials, all print contributes to increasing target audience engagement. Print yields the highest response rates of any marketing channel with direct mail being the lead performer. Marketing service providers should be sharing the latest methods to highly target your best prospective students or donors and engage and grow their relationship with your institution, all while minimizing the cost. Successful college and university marketers have latched onto the automation available to drive communications which are highly personalized and targeted.
Email has been an extremely popular channel for obvious reasons – the perceived low cost of execution, and the ability to drive and measure live engagement. With digital printing and technology integrations, colleges and universities are realizing the power of personalized communications through direct mail. Triggering email is easy, print shows a dedication to your admissions and development targets.
Results: The use of print by college and university marketers is on the rise and the reason is simple. Email campaigns have been showing diminishing returns for the past year. Universities are over-using their email lists, and the target students and parents are demanding more and more tools to block unsolicited or less important emails. The developers of email clients such as Gmail and Outlook are creating separate inboxes for social, promotions, clutter and other non-priority emails. The result is continuing declines in email opens and click-thrus. Print is always delivered and always seen, touched and experienced. Combining the power of personalization, behavior triggered print communications and direct mail creates a powerful, results-driven campaign.
Higher learning institutions are all about admissions and development lead generation and nurturing. Unfortunately, institutions oftentimes lose touch with their most promising targets because they simply don’t maintain consistent outreach. Automated print campaigns continue the nurture effort and the results are evident – more engagement and greater results.
Don’t hope that the ‘blast’ email actually lands in the inbox and gets an open. Know for sure that a high-quality piece lands in the hands of the student or family and provides a personal experience.
Extended Targeted Reach: Direct mail continues to be the best method to reach new potential students and donors. The ability to acquire highly targeted lists still remains possible in the direct mail world, while email lists increasingly become difficult to both acquire and build. Connecting with thousands of new targets can be instantaneous with direct mail, but it can take months to build even incremental email lists. Every college and university need to have new and accurate targets.
Direct mail improves your email campaign effectiveness. The ability to guarantee delivery is why direct mail is the best complement to email campaigns. Marketers can use the same personalization and customized communication techniques with direct mail as they can with email. The specific content elements a prospective student or donor viewed and even more of their behavior can alter a print piece’s content. Thus, making the use of direct mail a seamless extension.
Reduced Administration: The print needs of an institution range from simple business cards to brochures and marketing materials. But, the management of decentralized buyers, storage and location of materials, and even the ordering process can create unnecessary administrative time and challenges. Web2Print portals help institutions reduce the burden of design fees, eliminate delays due to proofing and changes and even protect brand presentation. These tools are great for expediting print orders, managing the various distribution channels needing your print, and of course, automating the personalization process. Institutions with multiple locations and multiple internal clients using print will benefit greatly from Web2Print portals.
Budget Management: Technology in the print world has changed the game. Short run digital printing reduces print obsolescence while meeting urgent delivery demands. Inventory management is easier with robust utilization measurement. And, the ability to target prospective students and donors with greater accuracy of predicted results, decreases costs at the same time as increasing engagement.
Marketing Integration: Print providers are a major part of marketing. When print marketing service providers and your marketing team work together the results can be amazing. The teams can collaborate on the cost per outreach and predicted response rates to determine the best multi-touch campaigns to implement.
Both teams are using and seeking data. Data can be a challenge. Everyone knows the fun of managing data on spreadsheets. Perhaps that’s not ideal, but it does work if it needs to. TAG’s experts can help you analyze and produce usable data whether from spreadsheets or professional systems. If you utilize any applications for e-commerce, CRM, or other data collection tools you can be assured we can integrate with that data for automated campaigns. Take advantage of the power of two teams collaborating and maximize marketing plan effectiveness by integrating your campaigns.
Learn more about how marketing print service providers can help your business achieve its goals by reaching out to TAG today.
