College Web Guy

Numbers for Summer Enrollment have been steady for several years, but this year our university decided to try for an improvement. As early as February, a meager budget was established for a wide variety of promotions: postcards, Myspace ads, radio spots, …etc.

Here’s a little something we didn’t spend ANY money on. Three of us sat down to brainstorm ideas for an email that would be sent to all students, and the end result is below.

Many an hour was spent searching for “the” image. The instant I laid my eyes on that photo, I knew it was “the one”. To not use it would be a crime. In a way, the photo is open to interpretation. Is he Mr Lazy, or is he simply Mr Burnt Out? Regardless, I couldn’t have found a better image if we hired a photographer and staged it ourselves.

HTML Email. How I love thee

HTML email is a tricky, albeit controversial thing, and the time I spent designing it was dwarfed by the time spent ensuring that it would display correctly in our campus webmail app as well as a wide variety of other email clients, as a big percentage of students have their email forwarded to less cumbersome email providers (which is another subject entirely)

Oh and Outlook, wonderful sweet Outlook. It won’t effect the outcome of the promotion because hardly a student uses outlook, but you know, the people who decide on your pay raise, well, they do. Make sure the thing renders correctly in the boss’s and boss’s boss’s email client, or you’re an idiot:

The email directed recipients to a site built specifically for current students. I had fun with this one, and somehow managed to get away with writing all the copy:

You’ve sold me. Now what?

As to what happens when the student is moved and convinced by our promotional materials, and begins the process of trying to find out which summer courses are available, well, that part of this promotion was the most difficult to handle. I could break out into song and mourn the user experience shortfalls of our online admissions and registration systems,  but I won’t. Let’s just say I’m an advocate for improvement.

The Postcard.

We decided to mail out postcards to recent high school graduates in the metro area, as well as local college students who attend universities elsewhere who are perhaps home for the summer. We were able to obtain this targeted data through various channels. Ask me how. And I don’t know.

I’m proud of my postcard though. Designing promotional objects for mail, you want to fabricate something people will take a second look at, or of course they’ll throw it away immediately.

The postcard prompted people to go to the website below, where they could find out about summer courses, credit transfer issues, and the process of enrolling. They could even sign up for email updates. Interesting was the data we collected from our web traffic. On the first few drop days (thats when physical mail gets put in physical mail boxes, for you digital people) we didn’t have a great deal of site traffic. Over the next few weeks though, our visitors and page views swelled in number. Its as if moms and dads got the postcard and stuck it on the fridge, and only after a week or two of badgering were able to motivate their recent high school grad to investigate further.

There were additional parts of the Summer Enrollment campaign I had a hand in: MySpace ads, additional postcards, and a few other mini sites dedicated to particular audiences, but I’m most pleased with the items above. We made sure to use unique urls for each promotional channel, that way we’d be able to examine our web traffic and analytics to find out what worked, and what didn’t.