About Exeter College
Exeter College is an outstanding Ofsted rated Further Education College in Devon. They provide higher education courses for post 16 students, apprenticeships, and offer adult learning courses as well as degree level qualifications for students across Devon.
The challenge
The college needed a GDPR compliant platform to communicate with current year 11 students, aged 15 – 16 who were just starting their FE journey. Their goal was to maintain and improve the engagement touchpoints to ensure that as many students as possible joined the college in the following academic year.
Exeter College required a system that could allow for multiple content creators and marketing executives to login and create professional emails that delivered the brand message right to prospect students and their parents inboxes.
Due to the age of potential students, the college required an organisation that was familiar with processing data for under 18’s, experience with educational governance and an organisation that held the appropriate certifications for Data Processing and Data Protection.
The solution
Exeter College chose NewZapp as their supplier for student recruitment communication due to NewZapp’s experience in Educational Marketing with institutions such as The University of Leeds and City College Plymouth.
The College wanted to make sure that they protected the colleges web domain so NewZapp provided them with a dedicated IP reputation and email monitoring service which isolated their mass mailing and their internal emails sent through Outlook. This allowed the teams to create dedicated mailboxes for the various marketing functions at the college.
A further requirement of the college was the ability to add multiple users to multiple accounts through the use of a site wide licence. This requirement would allow the college to coordinate marketing activities across the various Exeter sites. NewZapp facilitated this requirement and provided every user with their own unique username linked to their email address and their own choice of password; this meant that the users individual actions would be logged on the audit trail log in the system which would allow the Data Controllers and Marketing Manager to monitor users activity adding a layer of transparency in their work.
One of the goals that Exeter College discussed with their dedicated Account Manager was to improve the attendance of their Open Events for potential students year on year. They wanted to make the process of confirming registration for the open event, sending out collateral such as attendee brochures and reminders and then gathering feedback after the event as simple as possible. Their Account Manager provided them with a simple solution which was to link a web form to their NewZapp Account and then to create an event series automation which could be edited and maintained for each event across the calendar year.
The results
Exeter College are able to communicate directly with potential students who are looking to enrol with the college in the following academic year. Through the use of the NewZapp software, the college is able to maintain communication touchpoints and have generated a higher level of attendance to open events which has led to improved enrolment rates year on year.
"The NewZapp system has provided the communications and marketing team with the ability to communicate with students and parents in an effective way. We have seen improved engagement levels for all of our types of mailings to prospect students and their parents which is increasing year on year. This year, with the ability to create a sign-up form and automate open event registrations and correspondence, we have had over 2000 signups the first month of advertising the event."
