For higher ed institutions, email remains one of the most powerful tools for engaging prospective students.
And with AI entering the picture, there’s a major opportunity to make it smarter, faster, and more personal.
Our recent Email and AI Marketing Masterclass brought together marketers and strategists across universities and EdTech to explore how AI and email can work hand-in-hand—not as a gimmick, but as a practical, scalable way to connect with future students.
Read more to learn what Bart Caylor, President & Founder of Caylor Solutions, Matt Larkin, Founder of Ed Tech Era and Nick Pottier, Head of Marketing Operations at UniQuest, had to say on the topic.
One analogy into how AI should be considered is, an intern is told to write an email to a prospective graduate student and is sent off with no context. No examples are provided, no tone guidance is given, no insight is shared about what matters to the audience.
What comes back is generic and forgettable—and rightfully so. It wouldn’t be the intern’s fault.
The same applies to AI. If the tool is expected to deliver polished results with little instruction, the output will almost always fall short as it wasn’t set up to succeed.
It should be treated like a conversation. Something must be given for it to work with. Questions should be asked. Prompts refined. Feedback incorporated.
The quality of the output is determined by how clearly the input is communicated. If details such as who the audience is, what the tone should be, how long the content needs to be, or what format to follow aren’t clearly defined, the results won’t meet expectations.
If a team doesn’t have a big budget or fancy tech, AI can still be implemented into day-to-day tasks. The biggest advice we kept coming back to in the session was: start with what you have, and keep it simple.
As Nick pointed out, there are tools that already exist within email platforms that institutions can start with. Most enterprise email platforms now offer out-of-the-box tools that can be dragged into workflows or applied to individual sends, allowing marketers to start small and begin learning where the limitations lie.
"You would ideally, at some point, want to create your own database, and have your own language. But beginning with these built-in tools is a practical first step", Nick added.
These tools won’t solve everything right away, he noted, but it will provide insight into how AI behaves, what it can offer, and where further customization might be needed.
Here are a few easy entry points:
Many email platforms like Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Adobe Campaign have built-in AI tools (like Einstein or Sensei) that help with send time. You drag it into your journey, and it learns the best time to send based on past engagement. No extra data science needed.
"The one-shoe-fits-all kind of model days are gone. AI is bringing in that hyper personalization at scale. We're seeing quite big number boosts by simply changing when we're sending something, not manipulating the content or subject lines." - Nick Pottier, UniQuest
During the webinar, Nick highlighted that send time optimization had delivered significant results. It was noted that no major changes were made to content or user journey flows; instead, basic checkpoints were added to determine when emails should be sent.
"Something as simple as that, has generated with our university group a 15% increase in open rates alone. So when you then incorporate the content elements, we are talking about 25% for some of our universities, which is absolutely fantastic", says Nick.
Subject line options can be generated by AI tools, tested in small batches, and evaluated for performance, offering a fast, low-risk way to gain actionable insights.
Instead of starting from a blank page every time, use AI to draft a few versions of your message. Pick the best one, tweak as needed, and go.
Lar
A very easy way to start exploring AI is to start with something simple and non-work-related—like generating a weekly meal plan. A free AI account can be used to try this out by prompting it with, “Help me plan my meals for next week,” and encouraging it to ask follow-up questions in return.
This low-stakes exercise is an easy and nonthreatening entry point into understanding how AI interacts, prompts, and refines responses.
A common fear is that AI will replace marketers or writers. But in reality, it’s more like having an extra set of hands to do the repetitive stuff so a greater focus can be put on strategy, creativity, and student engagement.
AI can help you move faster, test more ideas, and take some of the guesswork out of your process.
"Just remember AI doesn't replace people. It allows us to focus on what matters and what's important. AI takes away some of the mundane, repetitive tasks that we may be doing in our day that might result in us not having time to focus on innovation or pushing the envelope."- Nick Pottier
Good email marketing is dependent on segmentation, especially in higher education. However, it is not recommended that the entire CRM be uploaded into ChatGPT.
Instead, the following steps should be taken:
Names, emails, or any personally identifiable information should be removed.
These should be replaced with codes or dummy values.
AI should be used to help brainstorm segment criteria or messaging themes.
Natural groups such as undergrads, grads, adults, and international students should be identified. Different generations (e.g., Gen Z, millennials, etc.) should be considered, as they respond differently to tone, format, even emojis - time should be taken to tailor the approach accordingly.
Targeting the right audience at the right time
It's important to establish baselines. Therefore, performance metrics be reviewed—things like open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
Once that foundation is in place, the next step is all about identifying key segments. The performance metrics should be broken down by different audience segments because success depends on where a student is in the funnel:
Each of these groups responds differently—especially across generations. It was noted in our recent webinar that messaging that resonates with Gen Alpha won’t land the same way with Millennials or Boomers. That diversity was described as one of the biggest marketing challenges right now—one that AI might help navigate, but can’t solve alone.
It's important to mention although anonymized metrics can be pasted into ChatGPT and ask it to analyze trends, it won't be able to know the audience better than the actual marketer—it should be used as a second opinion, not a final verdict.
"A/B testing is still necessary, whether you're doing a non-AI versus AI model or variety of AI versus another AI and checking the output - because AI is constantly learning, and we want to make sure that it constantly learns." - Nick Pottier
If there’s one theme that ran through the entire discussion, it’s this: marketeers shouldn't wait to get started.
AI in higher ed marketing isn’t about reinventing the wheel. It’s about making the existing content more effective, your messaging more relevant, and your work more efficient.
AI allows professionals to anticipate whether something will be average, below average or above average in response, and then gives the space and opportunity to tailor the content for all of that.
"It means there's no need for individual things to be built; we can work off the back of a bank and then look at student behavior and generate bespoke journeys rather than have to build physical, individual journeys for each student", said Nick.
The idea is to start small and test one email - try one tool - build confidence.
As Bart put it: “The people who win with AI aren’t the ones doing the most. They’re the ones doing the right things, consistently.”
Hear more insights and watch the webinar on demand: