OHO U: Enrollment Marketing

Pivot to Pandemic: Enrollment Marketing Strategies Amidst Uncertainty

Universities are used to evolving, and in the time of COVID, it has never been more apparent.  Enrollment marketing playbooks have completely gone out the window.  Miami Herbert Business School will talk about its immediate pivot to address the needs and wants of its target audiences, while being seen as a force for good.  They doubled-down on regional targeting, focused on the bottom of the funnel and opened new start dates for programs in January.  How they did this? They were agile acting through smaller teams, tight-knit collaboration with faculty and buy-in from its front line recruiters, all the while thinking of the safety of its consumer.

Cristina M. Raecke is the Executive Director of Marketing and Enrollment for Miami Herbert Business School. She oversees the school’s digital and non-digital paid strategies focused on increasing enrollment for nearly 20 MBA and specialized master’s degrees as well as the recruitment and operations teams and special online delivery initiatives.  

Cristina has 25 years of experience in marketing, recruitment, media relations, and business development. Prior to making her comeback to Miami Herbert, she served at the Executive Director for Recruitment and Marketing for FIU Online, Florida International University’s fully online division, and its over 60 online undergraduate and graduate degrees. Prior to FIU, she started her higher education career at Miami Herbert, leading the recruitment and admission teams as Director of Admissions.  

She has a diverse and rich professional background that includes working in the telecommunications industry with Lucent Technologies and Nortel Networks, as well as in the professional services arena with one of the largest law national firms, Greenburg Traurig.  She worked with the leading Spanish-language media company in the U.S., The Univision Television Networks, as Manager of Marketing and Communications for Univision, TeleFutura and Galavision.  Cristina also served as Manager for Marketing and Community Relations for the Miami Downtown Development Authority. 

She is a graduate from the University of Richmond and has an MBA from the McComb’s School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, where she was awarded a full fellowship through the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management.  She resides in Miami with her husband Alex, an Executive MBA graduate from the University of Miami, their 14-year-old son, Alexander, 9-year-old daughter Catalina, and their spoiled 100-pound Rhodesian Ridgeback, Dexter.

21 Things I Wish I Had Known About Slate When I Started Using It

If you’re a marketer who is new to Slate and you frequently find yourself looking for the closest wall to bang your head against, this talk will (hopefully) offer some relief—or at least the opportunity to commiserate. This session is geared towards helping marketers get a sense of what works, how it works, and some pitfalls to avoid as you build out your Slate instance. The central focus will be queries, reports, deliver, events, portals, and useful reference resources along with some tips, tricks, and meandering asides.

You will learn...

•  To identify and implement the tools, reporting and tactics that will have the biggest impact on your marketing efforts.

•  Examples of topics to be covered: With the email builder in Deliver, WYS(isn’t always)WYG—using responsive design, templates and other tools. Origin Sources are a marketers friend—how to set up and use origin sources to understand lead gen efforts and acquisition costs. Why aren’t multi-page forms a thing?—how to fake them and drive higher conversion rates.  And so much more...

Josh is lazy. This primarily manifests itself in his work as a constant search for low-hanging fruit and simpler ways to do things while achieving the same or superior results. His empathy for other lazy people also informs his decision-making and design processes in Slate where he strives to remove extra fields, additional clicks and extraneous steps. He’s spent the past 3 years at Wheaton College focused on Slate and the college’s enrollment marketing efforts. Prior to Wheaton, Josh was a content marketing consultant working with early- and growth-stage companies.

An Entrepreneurial Approach to Virtual Engagement

Babson College is a is regarded as one of the best colleges in the country for entrepreneurship. As the COVID-19 pandemic began to impact student recruitment and marketing, Babson made a decision to focus on the long game … Coming out of this unprecedented situation better and stronger. This candid conversation will focus on the process Babson went through when determining how to adapt spring events and fall outreach programs in support of new student marketing and recruitment … from suspending travel to developing continuous content and everything in between.

Courtney is a creative thinker and sought after leader in higher education, particularly in enrollment management and marketing (and fusing of the two). Most recently, Courtney has been showcased in and contributed to meaningful content University Business and Inside Higher Ed discussing Babson’s leadership and evolution in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Courtney also recently joined the “Farewell Fall Travel” webcast where she discussed how Babson has taken a unique approach to combine their legacy campus visit programs with virtual programs to fill the void of traditional travel opportunities. Prior to joining Babson College, Courtney has served as Associate Director of Admissions at Tufts University as well as a Recruiting Coordinator at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Gil is a recognized leader in enrollment management and marketing. Prior to consulting in edtech and marketing, Gil served in numerous enrollment marketing roles at the University of Hartford and the University of New Haven. Prior to his role at PlatformQ Education, Gil was the Director of Marketing at Chegg Enrollment Services where he led the development of their approach that combined digital marketing with lead generation which was later incorporated in to NRCCUA’s suite of services (later acquired by ACT). At PlatformQ Education Gil supports the development and execution of online engagement strategies and plans with a focus on conversion and enrollment yield.