5 EXAMPLES OF HIGHER ED MARKETERS GETTING IT RIGHT ON TIK TOK: As of November of last year, TikTok reached 1.5 billion downloaders, and higher education institutions have taken notice. Schools like BYU, Austin Peay State, and even the University of Florida are taking to TikTok (and succeeding). Here are 5 of the best examples of higher education institutions using the platform to drive high engagement with prospective students.
Why you should care: A majority of TikTok’s users fall into the Millennial or Gen Z buckets. Institutions are realizing the next generation of students is on this platform, and that it might be the best way to give prospects an authentic look into student life at the school (not just the academic aspect that they can find on your website).
WHAT DO WE MEAN BY PERSONALIZED EMAILS?: Personalization is more than just starting an email with “hello, <contact’s first name>. It looks more like a reminder email about what’s in your digital shopping cart, an email about renters insurance when you just signed a new lease, or even a bank that sends you an automated email with the findings/conclusions from your phone call with support.
Why you should care: Personalization goes beyond what you can accomplish via a traditional mail merge – it uses business rules to create trigger-based communications stemming from the advertisement your contact saw, the webpage they viewed, the admissions representative they talked to on the phone, or even an update in their personal information.
SO WHY ARE BUSINESSES DROPPING PERSONALIZATION?: In the next five years, 80% of marketers who have invested in personalization will drop their personalization efforts. Why? Businesses use an average of 17 different technology applications for customer data, and an average of 28 different data sources for analyzing customer engagement data. While you might know the name, email, and address of a contact out of your email automation system, you may not know the pages, content, or purchases the contact made because that information is housed in another system. To make personalization effective, marketers need insight into all of that data at once in one, easy-to-reference system.
Why you should care: Using personalization in student communications requires the coordination of disparate technologies, or, the use of one tool that effectively integrates with hundreds of others. To achieve truly successful personalization in communications you need the right marketing technology tool (hint: it might not be what you currently use).