Higher Education
Enrollment is a system. Email is its engine.
Opens and Clicks has spent a decade running Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot programs inside higher-ed institutions and partner agencies. Slate handshakes, AMPscript that holds under load, journey orchestration mapped to your funnel, reporting an enrollment leader can read in 30 seconds.
The problem
Three patterns we see in nearly every program we audit.
Inquiry-to-applicant conversion stalls
Because journeys aren't mapped to the funnel. Generic welcome series can't make up for missing program-interest segmentation, broken Slate-to-SFMC handoffs, and AMPscript that silently falls back to defaults.
Yield emails miss
Because segmentation is one-size-fits-all. Admitted students aren't a single audience: they segment by program, decision-stage, financial-aid status, deposit behavior, and demographic factors. Most yield programs treat them as one cohort.
Slate, SFMC, and your SIS speak different dialects
And nobody is translating. Inquiries route to the wrong campus, deposit data lags, and reporting can't tell admissions whether the email even ran. We've spent a decade building the integration layer that fixes this.
The approach
Four phases. Repeatable, defensible, sequenced for procurement.
01
Audit the funnel and the stack
Deliverability, list health, segmentation logic, journey architecture, reporting cadence, Slate/SFMC/SIS integration points. Every layer documented, every gap prioritized, every recommendation costed.
02
Map every journey to a measurable outcome
Inquiry to applied, applied to admit, admit to deposit, deposit to enrolled. Each stage gets an outcome that ladders to your admissions or registrar dashboard.
03
Build the AMPscript, data extensions, and integrations
Real personalization, not merge tags. JSON/XML-driven journey orchestration. Data extensions that survive a Slate schema change. SSJS for the edge cases.
04
Report in language enrollment leaders can use
Quarterly readouts in enrollment-relevant narratives, not analyst dumps. Unique click rate translated into yield-relevant patterns. Trends called out. Anomalies investigated.
Solutions by funnel stage
Every stage in the enrollment funnel has a different email problem. We build for each.
Stage · Awareness
Reach prospective students before they search.
Awareness email is rarely email-only. It's the email layer of a paid-search and content program. We design awareness sequences that capture inquiries from search ads and partner programs, then route them by program interest and academic stage.
What we build at this stage
- Branded inquiry capture pages integrated with Slate or Pardot
- Program-interest pixel and form-field strategy
- First-touch nurture from sign-up to first email open
- UTM and source attribution feeding back to admissions reporting
Example: Awareness nurture for an online MBA: inquiries from paid search drop into a Slate inquiry pool, route to Pardot for a 5-touch nurture, and unique opens trigger a hand-off to admissions counselors.
Featured case study
Kaplan: CRM lifecycle marketing across the entire higher-ed audience.
Rebuilt the email lifecycle program for a leading higher-ed services provider. Coordinated journeys across SFMC and Pardot for prospects, current students, graduates, and alumni. 100,000+ students reached, 18% year-over-year new student lift, 12 university clients served.
Read the case study
Engineered across the platforms higher ed actually runs
Frequently asked
What enrollment marketers ask before signing.
“The kind of operator who shows up to a Slate-to-SFMC sync conversation already speaking both dialects. Rare.”
Next step