University of Massachusetts Lowell – Optimizing recruitment to deliver personalized journeys

UMass Lowell
UMass Lowell

Company Size

5,001 - 10,000 emp

Industry

Higher Education

Headquarters

Lowell, MA

The University of Massachusetts Lowell Division of Graduate, Online & Professional Studies, partnered with Sercante to personalize and optimize their prospective student journeys using Salesforce Marketing Cloud and advance the recruitment lifecycle. As a result, they received over 1,500 prospective student responses in just one month and indirectly saw a 4% yield increase on graduate student enrollment.

The
Challenge

UMass Lowell

Fielding 20,000+ inquiries a year while delivering a personalized experience at scale

The University of Massachusetts Lowell, is a public university on a mission to prepare students for the real world by solving real problems and helping real people with an affordable, high-quality education.

  • With over 200 academic programs, the University of Massachusetts Lowell aims to provide personalized experiences for their students, relevant to their needs and their education goals.
  • Their Division of Graduate, Online & Professional Studies had a lean team that also fielded an average of 20,000+ requests for more information about the university a year, executing tailored experiences at scale needed to be done as efficiently as possible. 
  • The organization serves many different personas through its various programs, and each program has its own goals and objectives. They wanted the org optimized to be ready for tracking youth orchestra and alumni development as well as the other personas they serve. 
  • Their team had a marketing automation tool, but it was not fitting their need of being able to craft personalized prospective student journeys. They were limited to scheduling drip emails that had to be manually managed every step of the way. In addition, they had limited visibility into their marketing metrics and no way to personalize their messaging to scale to the level that was needed.
  • The team desired a more robust marketing automation platform to fit their needs and worked with an implementation partner to migrate onto Salesforce Marketing Cloud. After implementing the tool, they needed an expert to provide managed services and help supplement the team’s bandwidth, supporting them with the platform and collaborating to create the strategic, personalized student journeys they aimed to create.
The Partnership

A collaboration to optimize the recruitment process & supporting technology while tailoring prospective student journeys

The Division of Graduate, Online & Professional Studies team consisting of Executive Director Leo Rice, Manager of E-Marketing Nancy Currier, and Web Developer, Ivan Klimenko, were referred to Sercante by a peer in their network and met to share their goals.

Key goals and objectives:

  • In addition to creating personalized, student journeys, the team also wanted to increase the number of qualified prospective students for the recruitment team to build deeper connections with, and build enrollment.
  • After aligning on the next steps, the two set out to optimize their Marketing Cloud instance and their student journeys.

Client feedback

UMass Lowell

The
Solution

A streamlined process to field requests for more information and a personalized journey tailored to each prospective student

First the team turned to the 20,000+ inbound requests. There was an influx of bot submissions that caused a distraction from focusing on the real prospective students who wanted to learn more about the university.

Designing the customizations and recruitment tracking

  • Nancy and Ivan decided on a layered approach of using form honeypot fields and IP quality scoring.
  • Then to personalize the prospective student experience as they explore the 200+ academic programs available, the team configured data extensions and AMPscript in reusable content blocks to tailor the communication to each possible program the student could encounter on their journey.
  • To ensure that Nancy and Ivan had visibility into how the journeys were performing, Sercante and the GPS team set up email tracking in Salesforce for reporting, tied student responses to Salesforce cases, and used journey goal criteria to track applications.
The Result

The personalized prospective student journeys lead to more responses and, indirectly, higher enrollment

As a result, the University of Massachusetts Lowell team across marketing and recruitment had full visibility into the recruitment lifecycle and could provide a more connected, seamless experience to their prospective students, no matter who was interacting with them.

As prospective students reach out to request more information about the university, they have a frictionless experience exploring the 200+ academic programs through customized messaging all relevant to what they are looking for.

After launching the personalized journeys, the University of Massachusetts Lowell received over 1,500 prospective student responses in just one month, breaking all their previous records, and saw a 20% reduction in spam and bot submissions, allowing the team to focus on genuine student interest.

Indirectly, the university also experienced a 4% yield increase on graduate students who enrolled and had their best spring semester revenue on record.

The University of Massachusetts Lowell continues to build tailored journeys for target audiences such as admitted students who have not enrolled, students who have stopped for one or more semesters, and international students. The team remains focused on seeking how they can keep innovating and elevating the experiences they deliver to prospective students and current students to connect them with a high-quality education that prepares them for the real world.

We deliver results

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Prospective student responses

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Yield increase in graduate student enrollment