For high school seniors, the deadline to choose their institute of higher education is rapidly approaching.   For the last 1-2 years, these students have been aggressively marketed to, often receiving several direct mail pieces on a daily basis.  College admission offices spend huge portions of their budgets on direct marketing – with their pieces often getting lost in stacks of mail on the kitchen counter.  The question then becomes – how can we make our message stand out without doubling or tripling the cost of our mailer?  Many schools have answered this question with Personalized URLs, and experienced incredible boosts in their response rates and ROI.  The value of using PURLS for higher education admission campaigns goes far beyond simply saving money.

Nowadays, most prospective students complete the college admission process online. Not only can students begin the search for their perfect fit online, numerous resources allow them to take surveys to compare schools, send test scores, and actually apply online as well.

Direct mail remains an effective channel – and adding PURLs allows colleges to stand out with  an interactive and personalized line of communication, ultimately making the largest possible impact possible.  Using data from admission testing companies, colleges can dynamically serve landing page content based on the student’s gender, potential fields of study, test scores, etc.   The PURLs will help them gather additional intelligence about their target audience, as well as track and analyze campaign results.

Below is one creative example of a Personalized direct mail piece:

Salem College Case Study – from DirectMarketingIQ.com

Salem College was particularly successful when adding PURLs to their admission marketing campaigns.  By adding a PURL to their direct mail piece, they generated a 4.4% response rate.   That’s a 308% increase from the year before, despite the fact that they sent out 20% less mail!  And 25% of these responders ended up enrolling at Salem College.

PURLS tend to be incredibly successful for targeting prospective college students and young people in general. Have you seen other successful PURL campaigns aimed marketing towards younger generations? Comment about it bellow and don’t forget to follow us on twitter @EasyPURL_NYC