From the Nominator

"For email marketers in higher education, one of the most challenging audiences to target is unsubscribed alumni. This cohort represents alumni who have opted out of institutional messaging—intentionally or not—and now have limited outreach options.   

For Harvard College, approximately 18 percent of alumni with an active email address on file are unsubscribed from communications, including those about quinquennial reunions. Of this population, 81 percent are unsubscribed at the business unit level in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the equivalent of a global unsubscribe from Harvard College. As a result, the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) staff often hear from alumni at reunions who question their unsubscribed status and wonder why they miss out on reunion-based communications.  

To address this, the HAA engagement marketing team developed a re-engagement strategy for unsubscribed alumni in reunion that uses mail-merged personal email outreach through Outlook to inform alumni of their unsubscribed status and offer a straightforward way to resubscribe to reunion-based communications. Now in its second year, this campaign has led to re-engagement rates exceeding 50 percent, with open rates surpassing 80 percent and click rates at 14 percent.   

As part of this campaign, the HAA has also initiated automated emails for unsubscribers that confirm an unsubscribed status within 24 hours and provide an immediate option to opt back in. These automated emails have achieved resubscribe rates upwards of 17 percent.    

The data and reporting collected from this campaign demonstrate that alumni who have opted out of email communications are open to reconnecting when reached the right way."

From the Judges

This entry from Harvard was particularly impressive in its simplicity and the ability for any institution to replicate its success and serve as a good model to re-engage the disengaged. They were able to target a very specific set of constituents for a specific goal and demonstrated their success through the data shared in the materials. This initiative will surely serve as a good model for future initiatives.