Q: Brookdale offers both Career Training/Professional Development and Lifelong Learning courses. We mail approximately 40,000 course catalogs to postal patron carrier routes with the highest concentration of customers/students. Our challenge is to increase awareness and generate registrations for our Lifelong Learning/Personal Development courses. We are looking to expand our carrier route mailings to specifically promote Lifelong Learning courses. We can identify carrier routes with the highest concentrations of customers in this market segment. Given budget constraints, our question is do we develop a brochure (e.g., six panel) or a postcard with a link to our Lifelong Learning website. The website has extensive information on our programs. With a postcard, we can obviously reach a larger number of households in our target market for the same cost as printing a smaller number of brochures. Any recommendations regarding this would be appreciated. Please let me know if you have any questions or need any additional information.
A: The answer is "yes." In today's competitive marketing environment most programs are finding that they are most successful when using a variety of marketing approaches. Market research presented by Paul Franklin at the LERN conference in New Orleans this month indicates that direct mail promotion (i.e., a brochure) is still the most effective way to market continuing education programs, and has the best response rate. Marketing is sometimes hard to think about. It is a "cost" but it also generates revenue. It is important to weigh the cost of your promotion against the benefit (registrations and income) that it will generate. Lower cost efforts often produce lower response rates, so there is no real gain in cutting corners on promotion. Ideally, you should be promoting your lifelong learning and personal enrichment programs in a separate catalog from your career training and professional development. While there is likely to be some overlap in participants, the two types of programs are appealing to very different motivations, and it is difficult to effectively market both types of programs in one catalog. It is kind of like promoting kitchenware and power tools in the same brochure. There will be some overlap of interest, but the audiences for power tools and kitchen ware are for the most part fundamentally quite different. Targeting either cooks or woodworkers will produce a much higher response to both products if you promote them separately. In the same marketing piece, if the cook in the house sees the power tool content first, the brochure might just go to the bottom of the birdcage without getting any more attention. Although you have extensive information on your programs available online, driving people to your website is not easy to do. The postcard is easy to set aside, since it suggests that more time will be required to really get information. Most folks are not eagerly awaiting information on personal development opportunities, so a postcard is likely to produce a disappointing result, UNLESS you include an incentive to visit your website. Once people are on your site, you need to keep them there, so something like an "online treasure hunt" where they will get a discount on registration if they find a certain symbol or icon on in your brochure information, or the opportunity to register for a free course will help engage them in your content. Postcards are also a good way to follow up with the mailing of a brochure. Your strategy, identifying carrier routes with the highest likelihood of responding and mailing to them, is a good one. Of course, once you have enrollments from these areas, add those names to your mailing list and make sure to market to this group. Work on developing a solid mailing list of customers, and then eliminate mailings to those who do not register over a two year period, as you are wasting your marketing dollars by sending brochures to people who have no interest in your program. You should be working creating an in-house list of best customers (those who sign up most often or spend the most money with you) because a multiple mailing strategy is the most effective. By sending a second mailing to your best customers, you can potentially increase your participation significantly. If you choose to go with a small six panel brochure, you need to make sure it will do the job for you. Because it will be small, it may seem insubstantial, and has a greater chance of being ignored than a more substantial mailing. Both the front panel and the mailing panel (readers will see one of these first) need to be high impact and sufficiently interesting and engaging to prompt the reader to look at the content of the flyer. If you do not get the job done on these two panels, your response rate will be lower. This brochure should include information about courses you offer with strong course descriptions and ideally, testimonials from past participants. The courses you do include should be those that are of greatest interest to your market. In a small brochure, you should also include a strategy to drive people to your website. Neither a post card nor a six panel brochure is sufficient alone to generate the kinds of enrollments you are probably seeking.