OREANDA-NEWS. March 17, 2015. To help higher education institutions enhance student engagement and retention, Oracle today announced Oracle Marketing Cloud for student engagement. The scalable, industry-specific solution is designed to help marketers in higher education institutions of all sizes improve student success by enhancing targeting and engagement, and improving orchestration of student marketing efforts across multiple channels.

Higher education institutions are going through a rapid transformation that is influenced by changes in government and shifting student expectations. These changes combined with increased competition for enrollment, increasing dropout rates and new funding criteria make it more important than ever for higher education institutions to implement marketing programs that can both attract and retain students and engage alumni.

The new Oracle Marketing Cloud for student engagement solution provides advanced targeting and segmentation capabilities that help marketers in higher education institutions address these challenges and deliver the right messages to the right students at the right time. The scalable solution features pre-built data models and customized campaign templates (based on industry best practices) focused on student outreach and retention that help marketers rapidly deploy effective student-centric multi-channel campaigns.

“We are using Oracle Marketing Cloud to engage our large and diverse student and alumni base with highly targeted campaigns,” said Jessica Stutt, marketing automation specialist, University of New Brunswick. “Since implementing Oracle Marketing Cloud, we’ve been able to convince more and more stakeholders that segmenting and targeting is much better than batch-and-blast. We’re now seeing average open rates of 39 percent – and we’ve only just begun.”

“The higher education landscape is rapidly transforming, thanks in part to shifting student demographics, diminishing enrollment, raising expectations, escalating dropout rates, and new funding criteria imposed by local governments,” said Mark Armstrong, vice president, Oracle Higher Education. “At Oracle, we are committed to leveraging our extensive insights across a range of verticals to deliver the industry-specific, multi-channel marketing solutions that reduce marketing complexity and enable more effective and meaningful audience engagements.”

To enable greater insights, Oracle Marketing Cloud for student engagement easily integrates with Oracle’s Content Marketing, Social Relationship Management (SRM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and AppCloud solutions, delivering the most complete view of each student.

“By leveraging Oracle Marketing Cloud for Student Engagement, higher education institutions can build a stronger student experience by managing every interaction in their journey across channels and devices,” said Jason Rushforth, vice president, Industry Solutions & Emerging Channels, Oracle Marketing Cloud. “Oracle Marketing Cloud for student engagement is yet another example how Oracle uses its expertise to help solve complex industry-specific marketing challenges.”

Key benefits include:

Oracle Marketing Cloud for student engagement helps higher education institutions to:

Build stronger student experiences: By managing every interaction in students’ higher education journey across channels and devices, the new solution helps higher education institutions to shift the focus from managing transactions to building student relationships, resulting in improved outreach, retention, and student success.

Increase student engagement: By delivering timely and relevant content that prompts students to take action and stay engaged, the new solution increases the chances of students staying on track, achieving greater performance and reaching their academic goals.

Manage multi-channel interactions: By enabling higher education institutions to provide a cohesive, personalized, and multi-channel student experience, the new solution helps optimize operational efficiency and institutional performance, improve recruitment effectiveness, and further enhance student engagement.

Oracle Marketing Cloud for Student Engagement is one of the capabilities within Oracle Student Cloud, a complete, modern student solution designed to meet the needs of 21st century education, and adds further depth to Oracle’s portfolio of industry-specific marketing solutions.

Oracle Marketing Cloud now has industry-specific marketing solutions for higher education, manufacturing, wealth management, insurance, asset management, sports, entertainment, nonprofits, and life sciences. Each industry product is developed with the industry user in mind, incorporating marketing, content, and data analysis best practices.