Higher education marketing teams are often responsible for far more than recruitment campaigns and enrollment communications. They support a wide range of audiences, initiatives, departments, and institutional priorities. Admissions, advancement, student services, academic departments, alumni relations, athletics, and campus leadership all play a role in communicating with the communities they serve. The challenge is not simply creating communications. It is coordinating them. As colleges and universities grow, communication responsibilities often become distributed across multiple departments and stakeholders. While this structure allows teams to communicate directly with their audiences, it can […]
Higher education marketing is often discussed in terms of campaigns, communications, and enrollment goals. While those priorities are certainly important, they only tell part of the story. Many organizations focus on a relatively small number of customer segments. Colleges and universities, on the other hand, communicate with a wide range of audiences that often have very different needs, interests, and expectations. Each audience plays a different role in the institution’s success. As a result, higher education marketing is often less about campaign management and more about audience management. Every Audience […]
Higher education marketers are being asked to do more with less: fewer resources, tighter timelines, and increasingly complex audiences. At the same time, prospective students, applicants, and alumni expect communications to feel relevant, timely, and personal. That tension is where many institutions struggle. The answer isn’t sending more messages or adding another channel. It’s building hyper-personalized journeys powered by CRM data and marketing automation — journeys that adapt to real behavior, reflect true interests, and move students forward without manual effort. Why Personalization in Higher Ed Has to Go Deeper Personalization in higher ed has historically been surface-level: a […]
Email and SMS are two of the most effective channels in higher education marketing. Used well, they keep prospective students informed, motivated, and moving forward. Used poorly, they create noise, confusion, and disengagement. Right now, many institutions fall into one of two traps: they either overuse SMS without a clear strategy, or they underutilize automation, relying on one-off sends and manual workflows. The issue isn’t the channels themselves. It’s how they’re orchestrated. Email Still Does the Heavy Lifting Despite constant predictions of its demise, email remains the backbone of higher-ed communication. It’s where institutions can: Where things go wrong is volume and relevance. Too many campaigns […]
When higher ed email performance slips, the instinct is often to tweak subject lines, resend campaigns, or add another reminder. But in many cases, the real problem sits under the hood. Poor data hygiene, unclear consent practices, and declining deliverability quietly undermine even the most thoughtful email and SMS strategies. And because these issues don’t always surface immediately, they’re easy to ignore until engagement drops and conversions stall. Why Data Hygiene Is a Marketing Issue (Not Just an IT One) CRM data fuels personalization, automation, and reporting. When that data is incomplete, outdated, or inconsistent, everything downstream suffers. […]
