its Stop-Out Marketing
Orange County’s nine community colleges and one continuing education center serve almost 150,000 students each year and combined have for a total yearly economic impact of over $6 billion.
Orange County’s nine community colleges and one continuing education center have long formed the cornerstone of career education and skills training in the region. But like many regions following the COVID-19 pandemic, they found themselves hit hard by significant declines in continuing and returning students. The award-winning regional Future Built campaign was already targeting new students, but the region saw an opportunity to recapture former students while also boosting overall awareness and enrollment in Orange County’s credit and non-credit career education programs.
To better understand the reasons for this decline and chart a path forward, GradComm started with research. A survey of over 600 stop-out students led to significant revelations about this audience’s key concerns, obstacles, hopes, and media preferences.
Armed with this data, we developed a robust regional social media campaign in English and Spanish highlighting short-term certificates, a key interest of this group. College-specific texts and emails were developed and deployed as well as a short-term certificate landing page to target the address needs of this audience and to support conversion.
Based on our research, GradComm created regional and college-specific campaigns targeting stop-out students based on their own reported challenges and needs. In the campaign’s first month, more than 25,000 visits to regional and college-specific websites were generated and smashed industry standards for engagement.
Some highlights include:
- 100,000 emails were sent to stop out students with a 59% open rate.
- 150,000 text messages were sent with over 16,000 clicks from returning students to individual college pages.
- The short-term certificate page received 10,600 page visits.
- 60% video completion rate on YouTube.
- 9,500 website visits to regional landing page from TikTok alone.
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