Oregon State University
College of Science.
Oregon State is a huge public university, with an incredibly personal approach to undergraduate enrollment. Here’s how our partnership with their College of Science helped increase their number of deposited students.
The Challenge
Oregon State University offers a world-class education at an unbeatable price point (especially for in-state students). But the marketing team in their College of Science wanted to do even more to help prospective students understand the value that awaited them in Corvallis.
However, like many colleges tucked into bigger university org charts, the College of Science marketing team sits outside the primary institutional enrollment marketing functioning. So while they can easily launch enrollment-driving awareness campaigns and other forms of outreach, they lack a built-in mechanism for marketing directly to students inside the traditional enrollment funnel in a personalized, high-touch way.
So this was the real problem we set out to help them solve: How can we use best-in-class digital marketing tools and forward-thinking enrollment strategy to catalyze a personalized recruiting effort?
The Better Way
During multiple recent yield seasons, we’ve helped OSU’s College of Science build a CRM-driven, automated, digital campaign that puts their admitted students directly in touch with academic advisors. The campaign combines email, text messaging, and custom web environments to learn about students’ intent to enroll, and then pushed that info to assigned OSU staff who could reach out directly to students to answer any questions they had, whether they were about academics, cost, or campus life.
Results
This personal, systematic approach helped OSU align its human resources with the students who were most likely to enroll. And it worked. The College of Science increased its number of deposited students for the first time in years.
total deposited students
For the first time in a decade, we increased our number of deposited students.
And that's the main thing about working with Waybetter— the results are there. They were responsive and on top of everything from our first meeting. And they are not cookie cutter—they listened to our specific challenges and adapted to fit our needs.