by denise cox and Ellie Cook

St George’s, University of London is a unique health sciences university with a stellar reputation as an academic and clinical hub serving South West London and beyond. It attracts students from throughout the UK and internationally. Using Newsweaver, St George’s has started using email newsletters to stay in touch with candidates while they decide which university to attend.

Challenge:

Ellie Cook, Student Recruitment and International Student Support Officer for St George’s, University of London, wanted to set up a suite of email newsletters that would keep the university front of mind at every point in the student university life cycle – from recruitment, application, offer to attend, and as student and postgraduate.

The first in the series of newsletters St George’s wanted to create would be targeted at candidates who had offers to attend courses such as radiotherapy and physiotherapy. The newsletter template design needed to work for this series – as well as meet the ongoing requirements of the complete suite of publications the university had planned.

Because articles inserted into the various newsletters were often very similar, St George’s needed a central archive so the editor could easily access and edit articles before inserting into a new publication.

Solution:

Newsweaver first created a very flexible wireframe template for St George’s that could expand as needed. The challenge of easily reusing content was addressed through the use of the Newsweaver content library. All articles and images inserted by the editor are automatically copied into the content library and available for reuse in every new publication. Ellie says articles are about 80% the same across different courses, so after copying one down into the latest publication she tweaks it as needed. “Newsweaver’s wireframe template and content library are essential to our publishing process because they have reduced the time it takes to create new issues. Plus, Newsweaver is so easy to use that I am training up our own staff on how to use it”.

Results:

With open and clicks rates consistently in the 60–70% range, it is clear that St. George’s are providing timely, targeted and relevant information. Ellie says they have been monitoring student networking sites to get feedback on the newsletters: “We have had positive mentions about the personal touch our series provides. This is exactly the impact we wanted to have.”

Watch out for April's edition of Springboard where we feature www.knuttelprints.com as our customer case study, and show how they have cleverly used their Facebook page to grow their subscriber database.

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