With dynamic content, you can deliver more relevant emails by serving customised email content based on audience profiles and/or behavioural information.
Increase the open and click rates of your university’s email marketing campaigns by incorporating right-fit dynamic content. When leveraged consistently and thoughtfully as part of your broader student recruitment strategies, it’s a key driver of student conversion.
With student conversion in mind, we’ve outlined three steps to planning a dynamic email marketing strategy that maximises student engagement.
How to use dynamic content to optimise email engagement and student conversion
1. Identify the most relevant student segments
The whole purpose of dynamic content is to deliver highly relevant content to your key audiences. When planning your campaigns, customise the content of your emails based on variables that actually matter to your student audiences.
Think beyond basic demographic personalisations like country, region or city. Some of the best campaigns we’ve managed on behalf of our university partners have been when we’ve customised content based on students’ specific courses of interest.
2. Audit your database
To ensure the relevant dynamic content variation gets into the right hands, your student data has to be accurate and up-to-date. This tends to be the most challenging part of implementing dynamic content successfully at higher education institutions.
It’s absolutely critical that you have clean student data that integrates effectively with your email marketing platform. If your data isn’t in good shape or your database doesn’t play well with your email marketing platform, you’ll run into problems.
Make sure you understand the health of your database early so you can account for any data cleansing or integration requirements – and costs – in your plans.
3. Agree the scope of your campaigns
Dynamic content can be utilised to tweak content based on any data point available, such as country of residence, language preference or course interest. A recent campaign saw us deliver 153 variants of an email, delivering course information specific to each offer-holder ahead of their upcoming arrival at university. This granular, focused messaging achieved an average open rate of 78% and an average click through rate of 26%, which surpasses the offer-holder benchmarking figures across our partner base of 67% and 22% respectively.
The more you can personalise, the better. But, don’t bite off more than you can chew. Consider your audiences, your objectives and the resources you have to pull everything together.
In addition to the data requirements mentioned earlier, you need the right people to write the email copy, build the emails, set up the logic to trigger the dynamic content and test the emails across international browsers, email service providers, and devices. The more granular the dynamic email campaign, the more time-intensive it is to deliver.
Learn more about embedding dynamic content in your student recruitment strategies
Since 2013, we have managed over 33 million student communications. Through this experience, we have developed a niche in dynamic email marketing for higher ed. Our expert team plans, executes and optimises these programmes for universities in relation to segmentation, data integration, workflow and logic, monitoring and success measurement, and data protection and processing regulations.
Chat with our team to learn more insights from our experience and how we can help you achieve your student engagement goals.
