Focused on attracting new potential students to the University, the Marketing team wanted to find a more modern solution to managing their mailings.
Keen to include personalised elements in their mailed communications and wanting to escape the inefficient manual process of sending mailings by hand - the teams across the university began reviewing potential solutions.
Internally there was a desire for a more modern solution to facilitate outbound communications. After a collaboration between the
Marketing and Post Room teams at the University of Huddersfield, and an initial meeting with Brian Graham, Senior Relationship Manager at CFH, the Marketing team agreed to deploy Royal Mail Hybrid Mail on a trial basis, delivered as part of CFH’s partnership with Royal Mail.
After going through their internal due diligence processes and ensuring that Hybrid Mail was secure and GDPR compliant to the highest standards, the marketing team were able to get started trialling the platform in mid 2021.
As is often the case when making use of a new platform, the Marketing team at the University first thought about what they were looking to achieve. As the focus for the trial was student attraction, they took time to review trends in the education sector, where their target audience would be at in the journey, and how best to shape their communications from that.
After reviewing exactly what they were hoping their student communications would achieve and considering all the contributing factors to what the best approach would be, the University of Huddersfield marketing team settled on a Postcard format as the focus.
The Marketing Team use a combination of digital and physical touchpoints to reach their prospective students, but when it came to open day attendance communications, felt a physical mailing was the best approach. As students had shown an interest and registered for an event at this stage, a physical mailing both enforced their commitment, and gave the University an opportunity to reach their parents or guardians living in the same household.
The postcard format was chosen for several reasons. As their communications were often promoting or confirming attendance of open days across the year for different departments across the university, a compact reminder and confirmation with the University’s branding on it was seen as a good tool to keep prospective students engaged. The postcard would include a confirmation of the student’s booking, as well as helpful information like where to park and how to reach the correct building – all potential barriers to a student engaging with their recruitment process. Each postcard also included a personalised scannable QR code, to be used by staff at the University when signing event attendees in.
As most post delivered is seen by multiple occupants of the same household, ensuring that their communications were sleek, impactful, and gave a good impression of the University to all eyes that may pass over it ahead of the events was a key factor. As parents and guardians are typically a big part of the decision-making process for students looking at further education, ensuring that their communications were giving the right impression was essential for the University of Huddersfield.
Since the initial trial year, the University of Huddersfield have continued to make use of Hybrid Mail for their student attraction mailings. In the pilot year alone of using Hybrid Mail, the marketing team saved £30,000, covering the design, print and postage costs of these mailings. This was all while reaching students more effectively, spending less time on the manual process of dispatching mailings, and meeting the University’s student attraction goals.
The pilot in the Marketing team was so successful that the team found themselves thinking about how other departments could benefit internally. Katie Jagger, Communications and Marketing Specialist at the University of Huddersfield, has delivered a series of internal workshops to other teams at the University highlighting the benefits of Hybrid Mail since their successful pilot. The initial feedback has been positive, with other teams appreciating a tool that is easy to use, will save them time and money and has already gone through a procurement and assessment process internally to ensure it is secure and compliant.
Looking ahead at the future, the University of Huddersfield is keenly identifying new opportunities to make use of Hybrid Mail across other
departments. As some other departments are still using a more traditional mailroom process, the potential cost and time savings for other teams are still there to be gained. The marketing team are also looking to explore the possibility of mailing more personalised packs out to their prospective students, as well as exploring SMS options through the Hybrid Mail platform.
The process of adopting Hybrid Mail was really easy – Hybrid Mail is easy to use, with loads of support available to us along the way. Brian has been absolutely vital – if we didn’t have someone like Brian who really cared about the process and how we use it, the adoption wouldn’t have gone as smoothly as it did.
Katie Jagger,
Communications and Marketing Specialist - University of Huddersfield
