Muncie Times, Muncie, Delaware County, 6 June 2002 — Page 31
The Muncie Times, June 6, page 31
Email Saves University’s “Search” for Students
PHILADELPHIA - As David Eddy monitored the replies to his mailing, he kept thinking the same thing. “Omigod, omigod, this is horrible.” Drexel University’s postal mailing to PSAT test takers was not producing as many responses as previous years. Other colleges were having similar results, Eddy found has he talked to fellow admissions officers. But unlike the other schools, Drexel and its admissions director had something to fall back on: email messages. In fact, email was so effective that Eddy now sees the future more clearly than ever. “The time is coming when colleges arenit going to be mailing anymore,” said Eddy, director of undergraduate admissions at one of the nationis leading technological universities. Each year, Drexel and thousands of other colleges purchase the names and addresses of high school
students who have taken the SAT and PSAT tests. This results in a tidal wave of brochures, viewbooks and other fancy mailings to the nationfs college-bound students. Colleges refer to this as “student search.” But teenagers are much more attuned to electronic communication these days, says Eddy. Thatfs why he decided to supplement his mailing to 227,000 high school students with email messages to the 138,000 names that included email addresses. He worked with TargetX, a suburban Philadelphia company that makes it possible to send large numbers of targeted, personalized email messages. The results, said Eddy, were stunning. “I was shocked by what we got with email,” he said. “Pleasantly shocked.” Only 7.7 percent of the 227,000 recipients of the postal mailing responded to Drexel, at a cost of $3.45 for
each response. But the email messages generated a 13.1 percent response, at a cost of only 45 cents per respondent. “Email saved our search,” said Eddy. “If we had just done the traditional postal mailing and not had the forethought to add email, weid be in trouble right now.” TargetX was able to personalize each of the 138,227 messages by the studentis first name and academic area of interest, which really impressed Eddy. “We were able to personalize the ‘subject’ line so that each student saw their intended major even before they read the email. Then we addressed them by name and invited them to click on a link to learn more about that major at Drexel.” The message itself was in the form of a short letter, with Drexelis logo at the top of the page and Eddyis name and contact information at the bottom. TargetX sent what it calls a multi-part message so
that students who can view the graphic-containing HTML format would see that, while recipients whose email program wom't allow them to see HTML would instead get a plain text version. Both versions included the personalization and the links that allowed students to click through to Drexelis Web site. This email experience has provided an important lesson, according to Eddy. “Wei're going to be using much more email and Webbased communications at Drexel,” he said. “Students . today are so tied into the Internet and so used to communicating via email, itis only a matter of time before publications are gone. Not in the next couple of years, perhaps, but certainly in the next five to 10 years.“Wefre killing all those trees by sending out 36-page books. And now we see that kids are paying more attention to their email anyway.”
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