Husson University.
Husson University in Bangor, Maine is an outlier. In a historically difficult time to be recruiting traditional undergraduate students—and in an especially difficult region of the country to be doing so—Husson has had tremendous success. How much success? They brought in the largest freshman class in school history each of those two years.
The Challenge
Our partnership with Husson began because they were looking for a unique, effective way to share their amazing value prop with more students.
The good news was that, despite its relatively remote location, Husson was giving students many reasons to enroll. They have been diligent and tactical about adding new programs while also continuing to build out the programs that have sustained them for decades. (In addition to their well-regarded communications school, Husson also boasts the largest business school in Maine.) They’ve also managed to keep their cost in check—their advertised tuition, before any aid is awarded, is just $17,000 per year.
Husson’s primary goal in reaching out to Waybetter was to generate more interest (and enroll more best-fit students) through targeted name buys and personal, relevant, multichannel marketing campaigns, despite not having an in-house CRM solution.
The Better Way
We began our engagement by spending time on Husson’s campus and getting to know why students choose them. Then we helped them build profiles that made their name buys more precise, both in Maine and New England. We then began the process of reaching out to these students with personalized messaging that spoke to their academic and extracurricular interests. We even coordinated our efforts with Husson’s direct mail provider to reduce the time from inquiry to fulfillment—now students who respond to Husson’s search campaign receive mail immediately.
Results
The results are speaking for themselves: Husson is enrolling more first-year students than ever before and continuing to generate more interest in primary and secondary markets.
2016 & 2017
Record-breaking enrollment years
To read more about our relationship with Husson, check out this interview we did with their VP of enrollment, John Champoli, and their director of undergraduate admission, Adam Smith.
Waybetter gives us the edge.
They're customized to fill our gaps and to meet our specific needs. They've been an absolute win for us.