Why is personalisation key in engaging your alumni?
Noise, there’s plenty of it, 1000s of inbound emails from various email lists that users have signed up to. Most of them get deleted, or worse, users unsubscribe from them.
So how can you stand out amongst the crowd?
Quite simply, it comes down to personalisation.
If you can personalise your communications, or even better, tailor them to a persons’ specific interests, then you are significantly increasing the likelihood of that person opening the email – and then engaging with it. Personalised email marketing campaigns have open rates 29% higher and 41% higher click-through rates than those of regular emails.
What are the benefits of personalised alumni communication?
1. Increase email ‘open’ rates
2. Reduce the number of people that unsubscribe from your emails (it is incredibly difficult to get those who unsubscribe to re-register).
3. Show alumni you value their time by not sending them irrelevant content
4. Encourage engagement by providing content that is of interest to alumni
5. Build stronger relationships with your community
All these lead to a more engaged alumni community…
“When alumni are engaged, they become more willing to lend their time and resources to their alumni community.
This can be beneficial for past students and institutions alike, in that it creates a network of individuals who can contact, support or collaborate with each other for business-driven ventures.”
The above was recently left as a comment on one of our Linkedin posts and summarises the challenge perfectly, if content isn’t relevant to the audience, many will disengage.
So how can you take personalisation beyond emails and apply it to your wider engagement strategy?
For the same reason that people are less likely to engage with generic emails, the vast majority of alumni are not interested in content relating to events they didn’t attend, years they were not at the school, college or university, or clubs and performances that they and their peers didn’t participate in. Tailoring your content therefore avoids wasted use of your resources and maximises the impact of messaging, but how can you do this without spending hundreds of hours bespoking everything you do?
The first step is to segment your audience as much as possible. You will doubtless have at least some basic information, given all alumni passed through your organisation at some point, but the more detail you hold (and critically, can keep up to date), the more explicit you can be in your personalisation:
1. The dates they attended your school or university
2. The subjects they studied
3. Their house or college
4. The teams/clubs/organisations they participated in
5. Demographic details
6. Employment information
Aside from collecting this as students leave the school or university, the primary method is encouraging them to complete online forms/questionnaire. This represents one of the major challenges our clients raise with us, as to get people to provide and maintain this information you almost always need to provide something of interest in exchange.
This data can then be used to regularly share content based on the audience segmentation. For example, if you’re about to refurbish your theatre for the first time in fifty years, then who better to start the fund raising with than those who studied, or were involved in, drama during the 1970s.
This general level of specificity, targeting cohorts and interest groups is powerful in itself, but even more appealing is content that is specific to the individual. This approach is very rarely taken beyond a select few VIPs or for merge fields such as names and addresses as it is too resource intensive a process for most organisations.
So how can you generate personalised and tailored content?
This is where we come in 😉
SocialArchive® is a digital archiving and engagement platform…
Your archival content is uploaded to the platform (either by you or us), organised through the use of folders and/or tags and analysed by our automated facial recognition and character recognition. It then provides the tools to easily share subsets of this content (called galleries) to your audiences, with just a few clicks you can find and share material relating to specific topics, places, clubs and organisations and even people. There’s no need to spend hours searching through the archives collating photos from different events/decades.
This is a new concept, SocialArchive® is the only platform giving you the tools to both securely store your archival material AND those to run this as your own social media platform, easily sharing with your audience, at your complete control, and benefit from the engagement data which comes from that activity.
Want to take personalisation to the next level?
What if you could email your alumni community and let them know that 1000s of people have been tagged in content from your archives and why don’t they login to your community platform to find out if they’re one of them? Or, help you identify people in particular photos that were at school/college/university at the same time?
Pushing personalised content to users, such as photos, mentions of them in publications, or documentation from their time with you that they can then show their children or grandchildren is a level of personalisation that has never been available previously.
Recently we launched ‘That’s Me!’ A brand-new feature to the social archive® that automates personalisation across your published archive.
Just by tagging oneself in one image, users are AUTOMATICALLY provided with their own ‘That’s Me!’ gallery showing all the published images of them picked up by our facial recognition system, a fantastic snapshot of their time with you!
Once users have associated their accounts with their image they can be notified any time they’re tagged in new content, giving them a reason to keep coming back and giving you an understanding of what content they are interested in.
Not only will you be saving your history for posterity but you’ll be turning it into a whole new engagement method for your alum.
Contact us today with any questions, or to arrange a demo.