Higher ed spends millions getting students in the door, but who is marketing to them once they are enrolled? Enrollment teams deploy curated email campaigns and optimized landing pages to attract the next incoming class, while advancement secures record-breaking fundraising benchmarks. In between lies the messy middle of the student journey, held together by a patchwork of disconnected messages.
With the predicted 13% drop in high school graduates by 2041 already underway, keeping students is just as important as enrolling them. Yet formal retention marketing measures remain a secondary priority at most institutions. Despite massive investments to attract prospective families and convert graduates into loyal donors, retention marketing remains a blind spot in strategic planning. Retention marketing isn’t simply sending students more emails; it’s the intentional coordination of communications, messaging, and student engagement efforts that help students navigate and succeed throughout their enrollment journey. Beyond enhancing the student experience, retention marketing becomes the heart of a school’s content and storytelling operations, simultaneously supporting revenue-generating efforts.
Hiring a student success communicator doesn’t automatically produce a strategy. Without institutional architecture that supports cross-functional work, those hires operate in isolation — doing good work that never connects, leaving siloed functions separated. The strongest retention marketing programs are built on both technology and human connection, making them scalable for any institution type or budget.
The Cost of Staying in Your Lane
Most student success practitioners rarely interact with university marketing departments, often viewing them as a function that serves external audiences rather than campus life. As a result, most central marketing leaders fear overstepping their scope to jeopardize relationships with both academic and student affairs teams.
At both my current and previous institutions, I’ve heard marketing leaders say they don’t want to be the “brand police.” The sentiment is valid, but the laissez-faire approach often leads to the inconsistent materials and seemingly outlandish requests that many central marketers are accustomed to seeing. When campus constituents lack the resources and understanding to uphold the brand, they’re left to act on their own interpretations. A few bad flyers may seem harmless, but they represent the confusing, transactional, and conflicting messages that ultimately undermine the promises made pre-deposit.
Much of this also stems from bandwidth concerns, which are felt equally on both sides of the campus aisle. Marketing teams are already struggling to mitigate burnout, redirecting requests from faculty and staff with empowering sentiments and a few relevant templates. In my previous work at Manhattanville University’s central marketing office, I’ve had to make difficult referrals to local design agencies, balancing operational capacity while ensuring campus partners don’t feel dismissed or forced to choose between limited budgets and critical marketing resources.
Even well-resourced student success units struggle to secure marketing support because institutions prioritize enrollment and advancement work. In my current role leading strategic communications and marketing at Fordham University’s Career Center, I’ve occasionally had to request support from the central marketing office when I’ve had no alternative. Understandably, my requests have not always been fully met, which puts me in a difficult position to underdeliver on a project that directly supports student success and relationships with hiring employers. While my team is fortunate to have a dedicated, full-time communications position, most of our sister functions across student success are forced to treat strong communications as a luxury they can’t afford.
How to Succeed in Student Success Communications
Whether you’ve been considering retention marketing strategies for a while or you’re looking to build it into your overall strategy for the first time, the best place to start is with an audit of current success-focused communications. Student-facing staff will be able to share students’ reactions, ranging from anxiety after an off-putting tone in an automated notice to confusion after a misaligned announcement schedule. When supplemented with an analysis of both marketing and student success key performance indicators, you’ll be able to determine which tactical areas need the most support and build out a long-term road map to bridge your gaps.
Borrowing from traditional marketing agency structures, centralized marketing teams can consider adding strategists whose roles blend account management and internal communications to better coordinate efforts across siloed teams. This new team would be responsible for centralized student-facing newsletters, editing web pages, reviewing the targeted outreach strategy, and supporting routine media requests, such as template-based graphics. If the team is composed mostly of generalists, these professionals can even support existing creative functions by taking on some photo and video coverage of student-facing events or identifying and interviewing students for stories.
Submission forms and ticketing systems treat campus partners like customers rather than collaborators, often unintentionally isolating key partners. The trust that comes exclusively with human relationships is critical in an environment dominated by diverse ideologies and internal workflows. With dotted lines to different student success functions, these roles would develop close relationships to understand departmental goals and offerings, and help campus constituents better understand how central marketing can support their work, thus increasing the effectiveness of both functional areas.
Especially now that most core communication touchpoints with students are digital, technology platforms serve as a critical foundation. Existing tools, like centralized self-service hubs and institution-wide event calendars, help connect the vast, multifaceted components of the student experience. Still, they can also be leveraged to integrate customer relationship management (CRM) modules common in more mainstream industries. Just as Amazon and Target provide personalized recommendations based on shopping behavior, student portals could share course recommendations from advisors, involvement and event suggestions based on behavioral activity, and even tips for services that students have yet to use. Your institution can begin with simple, seasonally curated messages based on broader trends or segmenting audiences based on defining characteristics, before expanding into more personalized targeting that depends on assigned student pools or automation technology.
In the Fordham Career Center, our technological resources often lag behind our ambitions. However, we have not let resource constraints prevent us from advancing our practices. Instead of generic email blasts, we identified the highest-impact segmentation parameters and focused on writing clear, service-driven copy. For broader campaigns, we leaned into universal seasonal themes that resonated across class years and disciplines. By identifying and eliminating just a few redundant communications, we saved dozens of hours weekly while delivering a more intentional experience for our students.
Retention as an Enrollment and Advancement Driver
Retention marketing can be an expensive endeavor, but the investment into these efforts doesn’t detract from enrollment or advancement work. In fact, these efforts are mutually supportive. When you help current students succeed, you naturally uncover the authentic stories that fuel future enrollment and alumni engagement. The on-demand video resource can be shown to prospects as a sample of what to expect when they enroll, the messaging that promotes unique electives can serve as the baseline for publicity outreach, and the internship registration campaign can be turned into stories for fundraising efforts.
At Fordham, I collaborated with the Career Center team to develop a playlist of essential career skill videos, ranging from “how to write a resume” to “how to research employers before applications and interviews.” These videos were originally developed to help offset long wait times for career advising appointments, but they have since been repurposed to begin collaborative relationships with professors, bringing career education to the classroom. Later, they support our graduates who are still seeking employment, boosting our landing rates, which are used annually in stories about Fordham graduates’ success for enrollment and development campaigns.
Institutions spend years refining the promises they make to prospective students, but the college experience only begins after students make their deposit. Retention marketing is the work of ensuring those promises remain visible after students arrive. Without that connection, even the strongest enrollment strategy risks becoming a one-time campaign rather than a sustained student experience.
