Many institutions and educational organizations are launching new websites these days. Many are not .edu websites, surprisingly. If you look at search engine records, this may be supported by the fact that many student prospects are not as aware of the .edu extension as we are in the education field. So one issue that tends to come up when talking with clients in this situation is whether or not they should purchase multiple domains. The best practice in most industries, not just education, is to buy common misspellings and alternative names that a customer might use for your website.

read more

The concept of integrated marketing is simple, all of the different parts of your marketing campaign are stronger when integrated than when managed separately.  This is an approach that the top marketing firms in the field have employed for their big-budget clients, such as major consumer oriented companies (think car, beverage, or fast-food companies).  But this approach is valuable to anyone that is spending dollars on marketing and can be implemented by anyone that takes the time to organize their approach a little more.  Here are some key elements of an integrated marketin

read more

On January 1, 2004, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act went into effect. This law is of particular interest to any education marketing effort that utilizes e-mail marketing. That really should be everyone! If you aren't using e-mail marketing yet, well, I'll leave that alone. But you really should be. Anyway, it is tough enough to stay on top of the trends of how to run an effective e-mail marketing campaign (hint, permission marketing is a big part), but to make sure you are legally compliant can add even more burden. So in effort to help, I'll outline the main things you have to watch out for. I feel a need to throw a legal disclaimer in here; I am not a lawyer, so you can't claim this as legal advice. I highly recommend that you develop email templates for your campaign and prior to any e-mailing, have your legal counsel take a look at it too make sure it is in full compliance. The template concept will help you keep the legal costs down, since they only have to look at it once, as long as you continue to use the template. Most good e-mail marketers will also do this for you, but again, they aren't lawyers, so I would always run the template past the lawyer regardless. Now to that list:

read more

This message was recently posted in Google Analytics about a data error they experienced. It is not likely to affect most institution analytics accounts in the long-term, as most are not collecting e-commerce data, but there may be a short term delay in information reporting. Here is the message from Google:

read more