For the fourth year in a row, CUnet and LeadsCouncil are conducting the Higher Education Marketing Benchmarking Survey to help our industry better understand how recent changes in higher education are impacting marketers and to identify current trends and best practices.

Last year, with input from higher education marketing professionals like you, we were able to create an insightful snapshot of marketing trends in higher education. The 2012 report helped to foster a better understanding of what is happening in our industry, and it provided useful statistics to higher education marketing departments across the country.

Results from this year’s survey will be analyzed against results from the past three years to develop the 2013 Higher Education Marketing Benchmarking Report. In return for your participation, you will receive a complimentary full copy of this report.

To participate in this year’s survey and sign up to receive your complimentary report, click on one of the following links:

• State sues Brockton for-profit school over ads ( Boston Globe)
• Local For-Profit University Pays Financial Aid Fraud Settlement ( KPBS)
• EdX Rejected ( Inside Higher Ed)
• Is Momentum Shifting For Private For-Profit Colleges? ( Seeking Alpha)
• WaPo Ducks Liability in For-Profit College Gripes ( Courthouse News Service)
• USC formally launches its online college ( Greenville Online)
• ‘Education Index’ Captures Online Learning Trends ( edSurge)
• A Vocabulary Site Shows How to Tailor Online Education ( The New York Times)
• Online Education Lifts Pass Rates at University ( The Wall Street Journal)

• Can Grand Canyon Lead For-Profit Out of The Abyss ( Investor’s Business Daily)
• The Future: Los De Abajo ( Counterpunch.org)
• For-Profit Fiasco: California Public Colleges Turn to Web Courses ( The Nation)
• MOOCs, Sensors, Apps and Games: The Revolution in Education Innovation ( The Washington Post)
• Big Data and the Big Opportunity to Reform Education ( Business2Community)
• The Minerva Moment? ( Inside Higher Ed)
• "Not about Doing Education on the Cheap" ( Bacon’s Rebellion)
• Stanford to help build edX MOOC platform ( The Washington Post)
• Utah surpasses all others in digital education, new study finds ( The Salt Lake Tribune)
• College Grads Earn Nearly Three Times More Than High School Dropouts ( The Wall Street Journal)

Leadscon 2013 is drawing to a close. It’s time for you to go out go out into the world. It’s closing time. Time to turn the light up over every boy and every girl. It’s closing time. You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay… err.. on the Leadscon convention floor anymore. After today, it’s done.

If you’re one of those folks dreading the end of Leadscon and returning to the slog of non-convention life, read on to see our second annual list of the five best bets for crashable conventions in Las Vegas, through the end of the week.

1. International Pizza Expo

Dates: 3/19 – 3/21

Location: Las Vegas Convention Center

Website: http://www.pizzaexpo.com/

Why should you crash it?

Over 6,900 pizzeria owners and operators are converging on Las Vegas this week for the 29th Annual Pizza Expo, a collection of educational sessions, cooking and baking demonstrations and something called “The World Pizza Games” which features:

• Freestyle Acrobatic Dough Tossing
• Fastest Dough
• Largest Dough Stretch
• Fastest Pizza Box Folding
• Pizza Triathlon

Still not convinced that this could be the most awesome event ever? There’s also an International Pizza Challenge where chefs are scored on crust, sauce, overall taste, creativity and visual presentation. No idea if the official title of the winner is The International Pizza Prince(ss), but, if it isn’t, it should be. And they have a craft beer pavilion. So, you know, they’ve got that going for them.

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Look, we all know that trust is important in many different aspects. As the higher education industry, both traditional and proprietary, comes under increased scrutiny by everyone from the media to government regulators. Even more important, though, is the effect that trust has on online transactions between sellers and buyers. Find the answers for how to create low-risk, high-trust relationships in online marketing at 9:20 today when CUnet Managing Director of Sales and Marketing Dale Leatherwood, Steve Rafferty, Founder & CEO of Active Prospect, and Ross Shanken, founder and CEO of LeadiD, participate in “I See What You See: Removing Risk & Adding Trust Into the Lead Generation Transaction,” a panel discussion moderated by Dave Scott, CEO of Marketfish. Here’s the official write-up:

In any transaction, online or offline, trust is key. Without trust, those involved spend more time dissecting others’ motivations instead of focusing on a mutual goal. When it comes to the online ecosystem, technology provides the promise of objective trust, reducing if not removing the risk for both seller and buyer. The world of online lead generation has reached the size, scale, and complexity where solutions to increase trust are being sought out by both buyers and sellers. Join buyers, sellers, and two purveyors of trust as they take the stage to discuss the latest advancements in removing risk from, and adding objective trust back into, the online lead generation ecosystem.

It takes place in Hall C2 at 9:20 a.m. Be there or be an equilateral quadrilateral.

Also, don’t forget to stop by booth 433 to enter our raffle (and, of course, chat it up with our fabulous associates). At stake, a $300 Lululemon gift card or an Augusta Sportswear gym bag. Come by, admire our fabulous orange shoes, and win.

As our home office shivers under the steady patter of sleet and freezing rain, some lucky CUnet employees are partying it up at booth 433 at this year’s Leadscon, beginning today at the Mirage Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.

Leadscon is always a blast, but this year looks to be even more exciting than usual. In line with our focus on strengthening campaigns and helping affiliates achieve better performance, visitors to booth 433 can enter a raffle to win a fitness gift bag.

Beyond just swag and marketing, though, CUnet is entering this year’s Leadscon hot on the heels of winning best-in-class awards for both our compliance offerings and Sparkroom, our award-winning lead management platform from LeadsCouncil.  Continuing our tradition of providing best-in-class thought leadership and solutions, CUnet’s very own Dale Leatherwood, Managing Director of Sales & Marketing, is sitting on the panel for “I See What You See: Removing Risk & Adding Trust Into the Lead Generation Transaction,” Wednesday at 9:20 a.m.

Also? We have ORANGE SHOES!

Have you seen them? Oh, who are we kidding? You could see these babies from space! You’ve probably seen these bright, fluorescent orange kicks gallivanting, prancing, tip-toeing and confidently striding across the convention floor and thought to yourself, “OH NO! PEOPLE HERE WALK SO MUCH THAT THEIR FEET BURST INTO FLAME! Oh, wait. It’s just a pair of spiffy orange shoes. Where do I get a pair like that?”

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Adapt or die. That’s the adage that comes to mind when I think about email marketing today, thanks to the dramatic uptick in smartphone adoption over the past year—a trend that’s showing no signs of slowing.

Now that emails are rendering more often on mobile devices than on desktop apps or webmail, your old creative probably isn’t performing like it used to. Just ask the client we featured in last week’s case study, who saw a devastating 40 percent drop in click rates over eight months.

If you want to cash in on the impressive ROI you stand to generate with email marketing, you have to acclimate to the radical changes shaking up this powerful marketing channel. Here are some tips to get you started on a path to mobile email enlightenment.

Think mobile first.

Mobile email renders already outnumber marketing messages opened via desktop apps and webmail—and it won’t be long before they eclipse both desktop and webmail combined. Here at CUnet, we already see this happening. So face it—this mobile thing isn’t going away. Make the mobile experience a priority now instead of playing catch-up later.

Get acquainted with responsive design.

Media queries and scalable elements enable emails to adapt to their rendering environment. An understanding of these coding techniques—and how they respond to email environments—is essential to the development of today’s high-performance email. So get schooled. Stat.

But don’t get carried away with the possibilities that responsive design presents. Remember—less is always more. Simple templates that respond elegantly to their rendering environment are going to perform well—and give you a lot less headaches during testing.
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Still haven’t taken the plunge into mobile-friendly email? Here’s a compelling case that’s sure to light a fire under your… uh, email marketing strategy.

While overall email marketing trends show about 42 percent of all email opens are on mobile devices, here at CUnet, our clients are skewing even higher. It’s not uncommon for us to see a single message’s mobile renders exceed 60 percent these days, though they more often fall into the 45 – 55 percent range.

As we’ve observed this ongoing climb in mobile opens, we saw the performance of some messages that don’t render so well on smartphones really take a hit. One CUnet client saw open rates on their autoresponder campaign drop 30 percent over eight months. During this same period, click rates dipped more than 40 percent. Ouch!

We had a sneaking suspicion that increased adoption of smartphones to access email was at the heart of this painful, downward trend. We’d been eager to transition this client to a fresh template, and once they had a close look at their plummeting analytics, they were on board.

The solution was a simple, streamlined, single-column template with responsive and scalable elements that would function just as well on a computer screen as on a smartphone or tablet. Our client wasn’t ready to rethink their strategy, so no changes to copy, calls to action or subject line were applied—making for a near-perfect perfect apples-to-apple comparison.*

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Greetings, faithful readers. It’s seven days since Social Media Week ended and we’re still digesting the amazing amount of information delivered there, but I couldn’t wait to bring you the above video. The “NextGen-Ed: Video Games, MOOCs, and Skill-Sharing” session featured Anya Kemenetz, a contributing writer for Fast Company Magazine that has also written several books on the transformation of higher education (full disclosure: I stole that phrase directly from the subtitle of Anya’s “DIY U”), and Gabe Zichermann, an leading expert on gamification with a list of achievements fair longer than I can do justice to. It was one of the most thought-provoking sessions at the conference, with topics ranging from Baumol’s cost disease (because, when you need a cost disease, nine out of ten experts recommend Baumol’s) to fluid intelligence (my coffee is still pretty dumb, though).  Give it a watch, if you get the chance. And now, another steaming plateful of higher education news headlines for you:

• For-profit schools group unveils best practices (AirForceTimes)
• Capital: Obama, Rubio Put Higher Education on Notice (The Wall Street Journal)
• Florida May Designate A Single University as State’s Online Hub (Sunshine State News)
• Is Online Learning Moving at a Dangerous Pace? (EDTech)
• Distinguishing Statistical and Substantive Significance in Studies of Online Learning (Education Week)
• Eric Cantor Promotes For-Profit Colleges In GOP ‘Rebranding’ Speech (The Huffington Post)

Facebook is making a big leap into the world of accountable advertising and analysis today with the acquisition of Atlas Solutions, a Microsoft ad-serving platform that provides better insight into purchase paths and conversion data. The acquisition is expected to be announced later today.

Ad Age broke the story about the imminent acquisition yesterday:

While the ad-tech world still debates the main reason for the deal – is it about Facebook proving that advertiser conversions can be attributed to its ads or about Atlas’ ad-serving tech helping to build a Facebook ad network around the web? (answer: probably a bit of both) – Microsoft already indirectly made its pitch to Facebook publicly…in a blog post seven months ago.

Among its advertising serving solutions, Atlas also offers clients engagement mapping services that move beyond last-click attribution models to offer clients step-by-step insight into the conversion process. In a case study published by Atlas that analyzes an Alltel media campaign, this technology accounted for 60 percent of search sales being reattributed to display advertising after examining the engagement funnel. The four display advertising partners analyzed effectively garnered an increase of 33 percent in their collective conversion rates.

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