After Utilizing an Omnichannel Approach UCSF Sees Significant Increase in Continuing Education Marketing

May 14, 2021

Continuing education marketing has historically relied exclusively on direct mail to ensure they meet their enrollment goals.  For many years this has worked well.  Attendance goals are met and certificates are issues.  However, we’ve been seeing declining nurses and doctors continue for several years.  Medical educational facilities are having to become more and more competitive in order to fill their courses.

UCSF has provided great courses over the years, but they’ve experienced lower performance in their continuing education marketing and were intrigued by Propelo Media’s omnichannel marketing approach.  While still rooted in direct mail, the omnichannel approach attempts to identify email addresses and mobile devices of everyone on the target audience list.  This provides a more holistic and powerful campaign.  Campaign recipients get multiple touches, from both offline and online media.  This leads to higher market penetration, increased remembrance, and much stronger conversions.

As every good marketer knows it’s always ideal to test into a new marketing effort.  We wanted to develop a campaign so UCSF could evaluate how they have historically marketed, and how they could do it differently.  The A/B test we constructed randomly segmented half of the target audience to receive only direct mail.  The other half would get both direct mail and a digital reinforcement of email and targeted display media.  So, Group A would get just direct mail, where as Group B would get direct mail and on average 10 additional digital ads reinforcing the mailer.

At the conclusion of the campaign the results were analyzed and the data showed conclusively that Group B, the omnichannel group, accounted for over 215 registrants.  Group A, the direct-mail only segment, showed that if the entire target audience list had only gotten direct mail they would have only had 71 registrants.

The test campaign has proved so successful that we’re already rolling out multiple continuing education marketing campaigns for upcoming courses in 2021.

If you’re interested in seeing how an omnichannel marketing campaign could boost your marketing efforts give us a call at 415.648.7787 or shoot us an email at ideas@propelomedia.com.