Direct Mail Brand Awareness Campaign
Chestertown, MD | Completed 2024
Washington College had a vision to broaden their market reach, streamline their communications, and increase student enrollment. Their marketing and enrollment teams sought to unite their efforts to effectively promote Washington College in local communities as well as within three new territories they had never been before spread out across the United States.
The primary campaign objective was to increase enrollment by:
- Organizing a robust communication strategy through emails, SMS texting, and print mailings to nurture and ultimately enroll students.
- Differentiating Washington College from other similarly named institutions and small private schools.
- Employing creative digital marketing strategies to generate a higher concentration of names at the top of the funnel.
The team gained valuable insights from internal and external stakeholders, including the leadership team, enrollment team, marketing team, current students, alumni, faculty, and staff. This helped us understand Washington College’s unique identity and how to position it competitively in the higher education landscape. Through these insights, we discovered why students choose to attend Washington College, how to expand into new markets for Washington College, and what prospective students want to know about Washington College.
With this data, we developed strategic drivers to guide the creation of an enrollment strategy. This phase involved leveraging both internal and external research to shape the communication strategy. Our roadmap included content for emails, postcards, and SMS texts, along with a communications calendar and metrics for evaluating success and identifying areas for improvement.
Although regional differences necessitated running three separate campaigns, our “Not that Washington” campaign quickly proved successful. This campaign effectively differentiated Washington College from other institutions with the same namesake and clarified its location in Maryland. Our digital marketing efforts significantly boosted brand awareness, and our email marketing campaign generated a substantial number of qualified inquiries. Following the launch of the campaigns, we built reports within the CRM to enable the Washington College team to easily track the success of each campaign.
By engaging with key stakeholders and developing a comprehensive enrollment strategy—which included list buying, digital marketing recommendations, a communication plan, and CRM optimization—we crafted creative assets and measured the effectiveness of each effort. This holistic approach significantly boosted both brand awareness and qualified leads for Washington College.
Related work
Explore our insights on branding, marketing, engineering, and architecture, tailored specifically to the higher education sector.
