Stephanie Brady - Director of Admissions
Mississippi University for Women

Each year, we struggle at MUW with getting students to respond to an initial interest mailing. This interest piece or search piece includes general information about MUW, majors offered, and student life on campus. And every year, we would print thousands of these very general pieces for mailing. The problem was that we were mailing a very general piece to students who had very different needs and interests; all while hoping to get better results each time.

Weatherall presented the idea of personalization and variable data for our search pieces to help us increase our response rate. Using the proposed, each search piece would be very unique to the student that would receive it. By meeting that student’s specific questions and interests, our response rate should only increase. With the personalized variable data pieces that Weatherall introduced to us, it only made sense to at least test the hypothesis.

In 2005, we mailed 12,000 general pieces to students, resulting in a .5% response rate. In 2006, we have mailed 14,000 personalized variable data pieces and have accumulated a response rate of 2.67%. By giving the students exactly what they wanted to know, it has increased the interest in MUW five times over.

Not only did Weatherall present a successful idea in aiding us in casting our broad recruitment net, but they provide competitive pricing, excellent design work, efficient and effective turn around time, and a level of customer service that exceeds all of my expectations.