Best of CASE District I Award
 

Institution: Harvard University

Title of entry: Re-Engagement Campaign for Unsubscribed Harvard College Alumni in Reunion

About this entry: 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% of alumni with an active email address on file are unsubscribed from communications, including those about quinquennial reunions. Of this population, 81% are unsubscribed at the business unit level in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the equivalent of a global unsubscribe from Harvard College. As a result, Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) staff often hear from alumni in reunion 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%, with open rates surpassing 80% and click-rates 14%.

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

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.