Combining Online and Offline Data for Higher Ed Marketing

As a higher education marketing professional, you likely launch campaigns targeted at prospective students and families, current students, alumni, donors, sponsors, and community partners. No matter who you’re trying to reach, your audience members are complex individuals with their own interests and preferences. They interact with your institution in various ways, generating both online and offline data for your team to analyze.

Your success as a marketer depends on combining these data points to get a comprehensive view of your audience and target them appropriately. That way, you can address their pain points, personalize your messages, and build stronger relationships with them. Let’s explore how to integrate online and offline data effectively.

Think about all the different tools you use to execute your marketing campaigns. For instance, you may use an event management platform to run and promote events, an email marketing tool to launch email campaigns, and spreadsheets or physical forms to collect student and prospect information.

While all of these solutions serve a purpose, keeping these systems separate creates data silos, making your constituent data fragmented and difficult to piece together. Without unifying this data, you can’t get a full picture of your audience members.

Start by centralizing your data in one system, like Salesforce Education Cloud. This constituent relationship management system (CRM) is built specifically for schools and universities to better manage their data so they can easily communicate with students, prospects, applicants, alumni, and donors. Standout features include a recruitment console for organizing prospect data, an applicant portal and admissions console for managing the application process, student records to keep up with student interests and preferences, and an alumni portal and directory that allows you to connect with former students.

Even if all of your data is in the same system, you still may not be ready to launch marketing campaigns that seamlessly combine online and offline data. In some cases, it can be difficult to identify the same individual across different touchpoints.

For example, you may gather prospective student names and contact information from campus tours and store that data in your CRM. However, if you want to evaluate which of these prospects spend the most time on your website to determine their interest levels, you may come up short with only digital identifiers that don’t map neatly to the prospects in your database.

The solution to this issue is identity resolution, which is the practice of combining disparate identifiers into unified constituent profiles. As Deep Sync’s identity resolution guide explains, this process allows you to:

• Identify specific audiences for targeted marketing campaigns.
• Create custom marketing messages and creatives.
• Seamlessly integrate offline and online data for cross-channel marketing.
• Establish consistent, cohesive messages across all touchpoints.
• Attribute actions back to individual audience members.
• Better manage ad frequency and eliminate wasted ad spend.

By merging offline identifiers like names, postal addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses with online identifiers like Mobile Ad IDs (MAIDs), UID2s, Hashed Emails, and IP addresses, you can build unified constituent profiles that make it easy to understand and reach your audience members.

Let’s say you’re cleaning up your database before a major campaign. You may find that you have significant online behavioral data, but you know little about your audience members as people, making it difficult to personalize your messages. Alternatively, you may realize you’re missing certain pieces of contact information from your constituents that limit the channels you can leverage.

In these instances, consider using data enrichment to fill the gaps in your database. With the right data provider, you can append a variety of data points to your CRM, including:

• Demographics like age and gender
• Contact information
• Education
• Marital status
• Home ownership and property data
• Presence of children in the home
• Income
• Net worth
• Lifestyle information

This offline information helps you gain a richer, more comprehensive understanding of your audience that you can use to tailor your campaigns. For example, you may identify alumni who both frequently visit your website and have children. Then, you can invite these highly engaged individuals to a family-friendly alumni event.

Segmentation is the process of sorting your constituents into relevant groups based on shared characteristics. You can then use these segments to drive highly targeted, relevant campaigns that boost your return on investment (ROI). For stronger segmentation, combine online and offline data points.

Let’s walk through an example. Did you know that, on average, larger higher education institutions send new graduates 5.8 solicitations within the first twelve months of graduation? While it’s important to keep new alumni engaged, aggressive solicitation can turn them away and prevent them from building lifelong relationships with your institution.

However, what if you found that some new alumni have the capacity to give to your organization and have been spending time on your donation page pondering making a contribution? By combining giving capacity (offline data) and donation page activity (online data), you can create a segment of potential new alumni donors and direct your solicitations to these individuals.

You can also leverage your segments on your website. Kanopi’s higher ed website design guide recommends using online data for public-facing personalization by “track[ing] user behaviors and serv[ing] more relevant content on the front end” and leveraging offline data for gated content personalization so current students who log in can “access a customized dashboard with information relevant to their needs.”

Streamline the segmentation process using automation in your CRM. The recent Higher Ed Dreamin’ conference attended by Redpath consultants revealed that higher ed professionals increasingly rely on artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline CRM processes (like segmentation) and scale their operations.

Throughout your campaigns, assess how users interact with your content and what drives them to convert. By tracking cross-channel interactions, you’ll understand how your online and offline marketing efforts influence each other and which strategies are most effective.

For instance, you may send prospective students direct mail that helps them learn more about your school. Include a QR code that leads to a campus tour sign-up page on your website. That way, you can evaluate how effective your direct mail (offline) efforts are at increasing website (online) interactions.

You can also send surveys to event and campus tour attendees, asking them how they found your institution or event. Provide options like word of mouth, social media, email, your website, or college fairs to understand the most impactful channels for your organization.

Data is the key to personalized marketing, but when you leverage both online and offline data, you can gain even better insights into your audience, their interests, and how they prefer to interact with your school. For best results, invest in a CRM catered to your needs and work with a data provider that can take your marketing efforts to the next level.