Genesee Community College

Genesee Community College (GCC), located in Batavia, New York, is one of the oldest community colleges in the State University of New York system. GCC’s Recruitment Specialist had been doing the same traditional mailings for high school juniors. After a while, responses had started to plateau.

GCC hired CLARiGO to explore the possibility of using variable data printing and one-to-one personalized marketing as a way to reinvigorate response rates. An innovative way to market was needed to break through the clutter—updating the previous years materials wasn’t enough.

Campaign One: Pizza Box Open House Invite—A Winner

GCC designed a personalized, dynamic mailing card—in the shape of a pizza box. When the student opened the card, personalized type flashed her name written in pepperoni.

Chiara, a prospective student, received a personalized pizza she wouldn’t forget.

In addition, a GURL (Generalized URL) was included to track students who registered on the web so they could be targeted in future mailings. GCC plans on doing a similar mailing this year using PURLS (Personalized URLS) with customized student information. Each URL is designed for each student (for example, www.genesee.edu/chiara.smith).

The result of personalized marketing and CLARIGO’s expertise lifted the response rate and  ROI. A large number registered online, thus providing more data for further targeting in future mailings.

Campaign Two: Pizza Die-Cut Open House Invitation

Another open house card mailing was die-cut to be shaped like a piece of pizza. The name of the student was personalized and included in the headline.

The copy asked the student, “How many other schools have sent you a piece of pizza lately?” And that is exactly why this piece broke through the clutter. Once again, CLARiGO maximized results.

Thanks to CLARiGO’s dynamic, creative marketing ideas this piece out-performed the control.

Campaign Three: Sandal Open House Mailing Segmented by Gender

GCC came up with another winning creative campaign to publicize the annual spring open house. In past years a fashion show coupled with an open house attracted over 1,000 students. But more students were needed to reach enrollment goals.

A sandal was a perfect attention grabber. But what sandal design to use? The list was segmented by gender, and selecting a personalized sandal design that would appeal to each recipient was the goal. GCC’s marketing budget was also spent spent more effectively, as a correlation analysis of prospects’ addresses against those of recent enrollees allowed the mailing list for this project to be cut by about 40%. The attendance at the 2008 open house was up 36% compared to the previous year.

Campaign Four: Cell Phone Message Increases Re-Enrollment

Mailings of traditional re-registration materials were not getting a good response consistently. In particular, GCC wanted to increase response for the Advanced Studies program. An innovative cell phone card captured student attention with an image of a customized text message.

In summer 2007, this VDP mailing was sent to college stop-outs—students that had been working toward a degree and then missed a semester because they failed to register for classes—to encourage them to re-enroll. It was the only outreach to that target audience. Re-registration enrollment in the program set all-time records.

All photographs by Michael Mandolfo