How can Direct Response Marketing
help Colleges and Universities
to Attract and Retain New Students?

Many not-for-profit public universities don’t have the budgetary allocation they would hope to be able to dedicate to attracting and retaining new students. On the other hand, this is largely due to the “x-factor” that is normally attributed to marketing expenses. If the Enrollment Management officer or the student recruitment officer were able to quantify the exact cost of attracting and retaining new students, he or she would have an easier time justifying a marketing budget. In fact, many not-for-profit universities have budgets that are performance-based; as recruitment practices draw more enrollments—and the efficacy of initiatives is proven—more money is allocated to recruiting new students.

This type of performance-based budget necessitates a form of marketing that can provide immediate quantifiable results. How much does it cost me to get new students? Where do I look for new students? How do I market to them? Direct marketing can answer these questions.

A common buzz-word in the media these days is “transparency”. In terms of advertising to potential students, technology has played an integral role in providing transparency. Direct online advertising agencies are able to determine exactly which advertisements are working, and which are not—the same goes for direct television agencies. New tracking technologies—made available by the advent of the internet—allow direct marketing firms to determine exactly which ad campaigns are reaching prospective students. The fact that direct marketing can yield quantifiable results may not be anything new, but the fact that interactive direct marketing can yield results in a matter of minutes, hours or days, rather than weeks or months, is something new.

How can a direct marketing agency help colleges and universities to attract and retain more new students with less money?

The short answer is this: by providing measurable marketing results in a short period of time. This allows colleges and universities to cut out the marketing expenses that don’t work, and allocate more money to the marketing initiatives that are yielding more applications and enrollments.

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