Content and Communications Specialist

The Content and Communications Specialist supports UBC's undergraduate recruitment process by cultivating prospective student engagement through email and messaging campaigns, identifying audience segments for nurturing, and planning customer (student) journeys in UBC's Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) system. The role is responsible for developing and optimizing CRM campaigns to increase participation and engagement rates among prospective undergraduate students with UBC.

The role assists in the development and implementation of new email marketing initiatives, ensuring these are repeatable, scalable, and extensible across other marketing channels (such as SMS) as technologies emerge. Additionally, the role prepares reports on all campaign activities and brings knowledge of best practices to continually improve and optimize campaigns, as well as develop strategies for segmentation and personalization.

Key to this role is delivering timely and relevant content to students throughout the recruitment lifecycle from prospect, applicant, to UBC student. The role is integral to the achievement of the University's undergraduate enrolment objectives for UBC's Vancouver and Okanagan campuses.

Organizational Status: Reports to the Manager, UX and Content Strategy, and works within an integrated, cross-channel digital team. Works closely and collaboratively with the Manager, International Student Recruitment Technologies. Close consultation and collaboration with the international and domestic recruitment teams, as well as other key UBC stakeholders, is critical to the success of this position.

Work Performed:

• Plays a key role in the creation of the overall strategic email marketing and communications plan, shaping the content and campaign calendar within the cross-channel, integrated approach of the Recruitment Marketing and Prospective Student Engagement team.
• Balances the creation and optimization of multiple campaigns at once.
• Uses effective stakeholder management and consensus-building skills to set campaign goals and objectives among competing internal priorities.
• Liaises with internal stakeholders to achieve reachable targets, and to measure and report on target and goal success.
• Uses best practices to drive student engagement with email and other marketing channel campaigns, recruitment events, and other touchpoints available to our audience.
• Creates scalable processes that ensure best practices in campaign set-up, conversion, lead generation and nurture, engagement monitoring, and data reporting.
• Takes on an advocacy role for best practices, for a student-centred approach to email/SMS marketing and communications, for adherence to brand, and for a consistent and unified approach to messaging.
• Develops and implements comprehensive nurture-campaign plans for emails, e-newsletters and SMS channels.
• Pilots new approaches and tactics to ensure the recruitment teams are supported by continually improving campaigns and email communications.
• Schedules, coordinates, and executes all email campaigns (including lifecycle trigger programs, promotional campaigns, transactional emails, and others) to ensure students receive messaging and information on time and when it is most relevant and meaningful to them. Some of this work is deadline-driven and time-sensitive.
• In consultation with the Manager, International Student Recruitment Technologies and other key stakeholders, identifies market/audience segments to target.