The Delicate Art of Avoiding Market Saturation,
Improving Lead Quality
& Empowering the Student

Patrick Sutton

March 28, 2007

In corporate marketing, market saturation and consumer desensitization are pitfalls that frequently detract from a successful advertising campaign. To deal with this, savvy advertisers and marketers have come up with strategies that allow them to avoid saturation, improve brand image and increase lead quality.

Although comparatively new, the multi-billion dollar Enrollment Management industry is susceptible to the same problems as the mature corporate marketing industry. One key differentiator between the two industries does exist: not-for-profit schools were not built to make money, they were built to provide an academic service. Building and maintaining a reputation for academic excellence and exclusivity is of the utmost importance; some institutions have spent decades building and refining a brand. What’s more, in many cases, the brand—academic integrity, excellence—is more important than the profitability of an institution.

This difference makes the task of marketing on behalf of not-for-profit schools particularly difficult. Fortunately, sophisticated marketing methodologies exist that allow enrollment marketers to reach prospective students, without sacrificing the “brand” integrity that academic institutions have spent so long building.

Direct Response Enrollment Marketing is a simple multi-step process that initiates contact with prospective students in a meticulous, and quantifiable manner.

The first step leverages rich-content in order to initiate a response from a prospective student. Using content to attract students ensures that each request for follow-up information is genuine."Empowering the student" refers to the fact that in Direct Response Enrollment Marketing, prospective students initiate contact with universities, rather than the reverse. Enticing students with free information—course catalogues, articles, advice—allows marketers to eliminate the possibility of a “miss-match”, or unsolicited contact.

The second step involves follow-up marketing. Interested students react to content by initiating a phone call, or filling out an online form. The forms and phone calls are received by academic advising centers, which are staffed with enrollment specialists, or academic advisors. By managing both the distribution of media and the follow marketing process, enrollment marketers are able to track the efficacy of each individual marketing campaign, and piece of creative.

Because channels and materials that do not yield results can immediately be eliminated, direct response marketing ensures that colleges and universities can market to prospective students without over-saturating the market.

Below is a table that describes some of the features of Direct Response Enrollment Marketing that become available to colleges and universities when they contract one firm as an Agency of Record, or “AOR”.