University of Washington Continuum College

The University of Washington Continuum College faces a distinctive set of challenges as a continuing education program that offers classes for students ages 6 to 86. They focus on providing an education that fits a variety of lifestyles.

This large variety of audiences means the school needs to be strategic and focused when it comes to communications. A varied offering of programs also means Continuum College gathers a wealth of data, but it must be easily sorted and organized.

UW Continuum College turned to Marketing Cloud to help build accessible, personalized communications at scale.

UW Continuum College has the opportunity and challenge of serving students in all stages of their educational journey. The affiliate continuing educational arm of University of Washington offers more than 40 programs, spanning from master's degrees to youth programs and summer sessions.
While the course and program flexibility is an asset to students, the marketing team grappled with the current state of their email marketing and learner outreach.

Before adopting Marketing Cloud, email was handled using templates or done manually. With their existing platform and marketing automation tool not syncing with their SIS, UW Continuum College had no ability to personalize the message or adjust to the audience. The team was making new emails on a per-email basis.

Their emails felt unresponsive and outdated. Additionally, the staff spent wasted hours customizing email templates for better student outreach. UW Continuum College needed a new way to efficiently and personally connect with their students.

With hope that alumni will return and continue to enroll in the many different programs offered, it’s essential that UW Continuum College maintain a relationship with students throughout their lifetime. Marketing Cloud allowed them to control their messaging and advertising processes while gaining the data insights they needed to make each email as effective as possible for both students and alumni.

“With Salesforce, we can do complex workflows and send the right information at the right time to our audiences,” said Linnéa Mobrand-Volper, Interim Senior Director of Marketing & Enrollment Services.

They’re also able to take advantage of Einstein features to fine-tune their messaging and further improve the impact of each email.

“We’re able to use time optimization features and fine-tune our emails for opens and clicks with every email we send,” said Kendall Omlin, Associate Director of Marketing, Salesforce Lifecycle.

Continuum College combines this automation with better insights and analytics reporting to continually improve.

Under Marketing Cloud, Continuum College has been able to craft individualized communication and marketing plans for each program they work with. This has allowed them to reduce the number of emails a student usually sees by 42%.

By optimizing their outreach, they were also able to increase the number of automated emails sent while reducing their manual email workload. Since implementing Marketing Cloud, their team of two have increased their automated sends from 5 to 90. Additionally, 80% of their degree partners use automated event messaging to alert their students about relevant events.

“This could not be possible without the extensive automation capabilities of Marketing Cloud,” said Omlin.

With these automations came more time for Continuum College’s enrollment coaches to dedicate to prospective and current students 1-on-1, allowing for a better student experience.

“I think something that’s unique to our organization is knowing that if someone does pick up a phone or send an email that there really is a person that’s going to work with them,” Mobrand-Volper said.

The school is further working on implementing text messaging into their communication repertoire. They are exploring all potential avenues to reach their students where they are, on their terms.

Continuum College also finds a lot of learning opportunities on Salesforce Trailhead and the active community that it attracts.

“It’s no secret Salesforce has a big, active community and we’re all involved in different ways,” Omlin said.

For over 100 years, the University of Washington Continuum College has used its unique structure and expertise to offer a collaborative environment in which to meet the needs of learners at every stage of their educational career.