In today’s digital world, people expect highly personalized experiences from brands across all industries. Colleges and universities must be prepared to keep up with this trend to maintain their spot in an increasingly competitive market. 

There are many ways to personalize content in higher education marketing, but one of our go-to strategies here at MindMax is leveraging dynamic content.

What Is Dynamic Content?

Dynamic content is a snippet of code informed by prospect criteria that renders various personalized experiences in marketing materials. 

Like an advanced version of variable content—basic HTML like Hello %%first_name%% used to address recipients by name—dynamic content delivers personalized messages to individual prospects depending on where they are in the marketing cycle. 

At MindMax, we leverage dynamic content for our clients’ emails, landing pages, and forms, using prospect criteria such as:

• Information provided on a form 
• Historical data from a CRM 
• Specific actions taken (e.g., actions hidden behind a button click)
• Lead scores

Benefits of Dynamic Content in Higher Education

Keeping up with trends in personalization isn’t the only reason for higher education marketers to adopt dynamic content into their marketing strategies. Here are a couple of other benefits to consider: 

Leveraging CRM data more effectively

CRM data helps enrollment specialists prioritize who to contact next by assigning lead scores to each prospect. With dynamic content, schools can use the lead scores they already have to personalize marketing materials. 

For example, a prospect with a high lead score might receive an email with detailed information about a program. A prospect with a low lead score who is higher in the funnel would receive more generalized awareness content.

Maximizing internal resources

With higher education marketing and enrollment departments already stretched thin, any opportunity to maximize resources helps.

Dynamic content allows marketers to plug content blocks into an automated email sequence rather than creating separate sequences for each variation, enabling easier quality control and saving considerable time and effort that can be allocated elsewhere.

How to Use Dynamic Content in Higher Education Marketing

Still unsure how to incorporate dynamic content into your higher education marketing strategy? Here are some ideas for where and how to use it:

Emails 

At MindMax, we use dynamic content most frequently for emails. For instance, one of our clients has a promotional offer that changes monthly. Manually adding and updating the promotional offer in each of the nurture sequence emails each month would be incredibly time-consuming. So we use dynamic content instead. 

By adding a block of HTML code or even something as simple as a hyperlinked sentence to Pardot (that, in turn, generates a snippet of code), we are able to provide timely content to prospects while minimizing our workload (and maximizing our client’s budget)! 

Dynamic content also works with images such as email banners that target prospects at different stages in the enrollment funnel.

Landing pages 

Dynamic content can be used on landing pages to populate icons and calls to action (CTAs) depending on where a cookied and known prospective student is in their enrollment journey.

The student must have the programmed information on their contact record in order for the page to display personalized content specific to their program or area of interest.

Forms 

When a prospective student fills out a form, the subsequent “thank you” page should not be a dead end. With dynamic content, “thank you” pages can be used to show prospects a next-step CTA that is personalized to them. 

For instance, a prospective student higher in the funnel might be shown a CTA driving them to subscribe to emails or view a high-level overview of the program. The CTA for a prospective student in the consideration stage of the enrollment funnel might encourage them to view testimonials from the program’s alumni. 

Dynamic content could also take into account a student’s location after they fill out a form, sending them to a next page that directs them to sign up for a virtual or on-campus tour, depending on their location. 

At MindMax, we’re always at the forefront of innovative solutions that improve our higher education marketing services. Contact us today to learn more about how we can leverage the latest technologies to help your school grow enrollments.