After purchasing lists of prospective students, how do colleges first make contact?

The above graph shows how college admissions offices prefer to make first contact with prospective students whose names they purchase from list vendors such as NRCCUA, The College Board, and ACT.  The data are drawn from Noel-Levitz’s forthcoming report, 2011 Marketing and Student Recruitment Practices at Four-Year and Two-Year Institutions.

As the data show, more than half of four-year public and private  institutions prefer to send an e-mail message to make first contact with purchased names, while many others prefer to send a self-mailer or an e-mail message with a link to a personalized URL. These three methods were the most popular three methods for making first contact with purchased names from among 10 methods analyzed.

For two-year public institutions, sending an e-mail message was also the most popular way of making first contact with purchased names. (Additional data for this sector are unavailable as most two-year public institutions do not purchase student names from list vendors.)

Other data in the report rank the effectiveness of 78 practices for marketing and student recruitment and examine the timing of first contact with purchased names and the general practice of purchasing names.  The report shows that purchasing lists of names of high school students is widespread among four-year campuses, while less than one-third (30 percent) of two-year public institutions purchase such lists.

Watch for the report to be released in June 2011 under “Papers and research” at www.noellevitz.com.