Stewart360 manages email marketing for colleges and universities, sending on each school’s behalf to prospective students who want to learn more. Every campaign carries the institution’s branding, runs on a fixed 16-week schedule, and speaks to the specific things students ask about, whether that’s the business school, the arts program, or a scholarship opportunity. For an agency running that kind of segmented program across several schools at once, the platform has to hold up to put the agency’s name and reputation behind it. Ten years into using Emma, Stewart360 has built its process around the platform and recommends it to the schools it supports.
higher open rates using Emma
higher click rates
students reached with every campaign
“We’re very specific about the vendors we use, because every vendor we use in one we also want to recommend to the schools we train. Emma is who we use, and who we recommend.”
Marketing Project Coordinator
Stewart360 is an enrollment marketing agency that runs email programs for colleges and universities. When a prospective student reaches out to a school to indicate their interest, Stewart360 takes that inquiry data, breaks it down by what the student asked about, and sends content matched to that area of interest. The emails carry each school’s header and footer and link back to that institution’s application or admissions counselor, with buttons placed high enough that a student can apply, plan a visit, or learn more without scrolling all the way to the bottom of a page. Roughly 90% of the agency’s work is in higher education, with some recent expansion into other industries. Stewart360 also trains school teams to run this kind of email marketing in house, which means the tools it uses become part of what it teaches.
A single Stewart360 campaign is more likely to consist of thirteen emails rather than one. The team crafts messaging for up to ten student segments within the same send, so a student who asks about business hears about the business school, and a student looking for financial aid learns about scholarships. Multiply that across several institutions, each with its own branding, its own audience of prospective students, and its own approval process, and the send volume adds up quickly for a team this size.
The calendar is just as fixed as the segmentation. Each school runs a 16-week series in which the first ten emails go out weekly on Thursday at 4:00, and the last three are spaced one week apart. Students are removed from the list as they apply or opt out, so the audience shifts underneath a schedule that still needs to go out on time. Stewart360 needed a platform that could carry all of that without a person overseeing every individual send, and one consistent enough to recommend to the schools it partners with.
Stewart360’s program works with Emma’s features, used consistently for a decade across multiple higher education institutions.
Established templates are an Emma feature that the team would least want to give up. Because a single campaign can contain up to ten written variations, starting messaging from templates that are already built and approved is what keeps that volume workable, and each new round becomes a matter of writing into a known structure instead of wasting time trying to determine the best layout for each new message. Ten years of campaigns with Emma have helped them refine those templates into something the team can move through quickly.
Every institution sits in its own subaccount, so branding, lists, and reporting stay cleanly divided even with multiple campaigns in flight. Emma’s Brand Manager feature and tiered account structure ensure that each school is sending on-brand communications that support their organizational reputation.
Automation and scheduling are what turn the 16-week communication series into something that runs on its own, no manual intervention required after setup. The team schedules the first ten weekly sends and the final three follow-ups in advance, then lets them go out every Thursday at 4:00 while opt-outs are automatically updated on the appropriate lists along the way. That ensures the team can focus on creating better messaging for the next round of communications, and less time manually tracking every send.
Compared to the platforms Stewart360 used before Emma, open rates are now 15% higher and click rates have increased between two to three times what they were before. Engagement holds from one email to the next instead of tailing off partway through a sequence, which is an important metric considering the context of a 16-week series sent to the same audience. Opt-outs show similarly positive results: out of a list of about 21,000 high school juniors and seniors who have started their college search, weekly opt-outs have settled around 100, down from roughly 1,000 early in a program.
That reliability is why Stewart360 is comfortable attaching its name to Emma in its training. One school it coaches chose a different vendor and saw roughly 6% opens, with click rates under 1% on the identical emails. About four weeks into a 13-week campaign, the school asked Stewart360 to take the sends back over, and once they moved into Emma, engagement returned to the agency’s usual range, with several hundred students clicking through on each email.
Ten years in, Emma is both the platform Stewart360 runs on, and the one it points other institutions toward. Because the agency is deliberate about the vendors it recommends, that endorsement rests on a decade of its own reporting. As Stewart360 continues training school teams to run enrollment email themselves, those schools start from the same platform and the same practices the agency has spent a decade refining.
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