If you operate an educational establishment, attracting new students within your catchment area is essential. This was the case with Richmond-upon-Thames College in Twickenham.
Like many providers of further and higher education, this West London college was keen to present itself to local secondary school pupils as the natural next step for their academic careers.
To this end, the college instructed SDS to run a campaign that targeted the homes of children of GCSE age (14 to 17).
This campaign was to provide these children and their parents with specific information of the courses provided at RUTC.
RUTC’s catchment area covers 520,000 homes across five London boroughs. Previous approaches to distribution had left a significant number of target homes unaccounted for and the college were also keen to reduce wastage.
SDS defined the target audience for RUTC using our bespoke insight models and data profiling techniques. Following this, SDS compiled a sector ranking report that revealed a total of 65,700 target homes within the college’s catchment area of 520,000. This amounted to 13% of the overall figure. We planned a 3-tiered approach to distribution.
01
Postcode sectors that scored highly received full sector coverage. We delivered to all 26,000 homes in these sectors, including our 18,300 target homes (71%).
02
We utilised bespoke SMART mapping to identify areas that had lower overall penetration, but still contained a significant number of target homes. This technique provided us with 40,000 homes, of which 34,000 fell into the target demographic (85%). Using blanket delivery would have required a volume of 246,000 to reach these homes.
03
For the remaining 13,400 target homes residing in low-scoring postcode sectors, we utilised Partially Addressed Mail to reach them directly.
Our distribution schedule allowed us to reach all 65,700 target homes with a quantity of just 79,400 items, meaning 83% of marketing literature was reaching their key audience, compared with the original figure of 13%.
As a result of increased enrolment figures and open day attendance attributed to the campaign, we have repeated the campaign for RUTC on two further occasions.
Opening Times
Monday – Friday: 9am – 5pm
Saturday: Closed
Sunday: Closed
