How a One-Person Marke­ting Team at UAlbany Increa­sed MBA Enroll­ments 27% With Marketing Automation

When prospective students reach out to the University at Albany’s MBA for Executives Program, they enter a recruitment experience that feels personal, timely, and intentional. Behind that system is a small team, and at its center is Don Purdy, the program’s director for the past 17 years.

Don oversees every part of recruitment and communication. He manages marketing, operations, and student engagement and bears full responsibility for bringing in each new cohort of students. “I never stop recruiting. It is a 365/24/7 operation,” he explains. “To me, the CRM is the lifeblood of this business.”

The MBA for Executives Program is the only one of its kind in upstate New York. It offers a concierge-style experience in which textbooks, course materials, international trip, meals, and parking are included in a single bundled fee. But the polished student experience is supported by a lean internal team. Don works full-time. His wife Julie, an intuitive life coach who supports the program part-time, handles catering and some operational logistics. All of the marketing and recruiting strategy sits with him alone. To keep the program healthy, he needs systems that give him leverage.

When Don first took over the program, he inherited ACT, a legacy CRM that captured information but did not support the automated workflows he needed at that time. “It was clunky. It did not do what I wanted it to do,” he says. After five years of pushing the tool as far as it would go, he knew he needed a new system.

His next platform, BenchmarkONE, offered basic campaign and pipeline features, but serious limitations emerged. Deliverability consistently hovered in a range that undermined his outreach efforts. Open rates on large recruitment sends rarely exceeded 18 or 19 percent. Email synchronization across devices was unreliable. Even small tasks required manual workarounds.

He evaluated as many as 10 CRM solutions, including Salesforce and a range of mid-market tools. Each platform had a critical weakness that ruled it out. Some required costly add-ons. Others had monthly send limits that did not fit his volume. Several lacked Outlook integration. Deal pipelines were MIA in a number of them. A few required multiple disjointed workflows just to send a single email campaign.

Enter ActiveCampaign. The difference was immediate. “During my search, I came across ActiveCampaign, and the skies opened up,” he says. “The more I looked into it, the more I liked it. It contained everything my CRM had, but more robust and much better.”

Once Don migrated nearly 4,000 contacts to ActiveCampaign, he began building a structured, automated recruitment program within the platform.

One of the first systems he put in place was a long-form nurture sequence for prospective students. Anyone who requests information enters a workflow of 15 or 16 steps. These touchpoints introduce the program, highlight the benefits of an executive MBA, and walks them through the application journey. He typically sends messages every seven to 14 days, a cadence that offers enough time between touchpoints while maintaining momentum.

He also uses the CRM to invite prospects to upcoming information sessions, and remind them of application deadlines. Information session activity triggers additional automations. Registrants receive event-specific reminders. Attendees receive tailored follow-up. No-shows receive different messaging that gives them a chance to join a future session. “I have a drip campaign for everything,” Don says. “If someone shows interest, I want to provide the right information at the right time.”

ActiveCampaign helps Don personalize communication at scale without adding work. Messages always include first names. Segmentation determines whether prospects hear about the MBA for Executives Program, the Evening option, or the Online track. Birthday messages go out each year as a friendly touchpoint, keeping the program top of mind.

The CRM has also enabled him to inform students and alumni about career opportunities and program and university news as well as upcoming events.

The CRM’s deal pipelines give Don clear visibility into each prospect’s journey. He can see who has inquired, attended an event, sat in on a class, started an application, and enrolled. Each stage offers a snapshot of pipeline health, making it easy to identify where prospects might need more support. All communication from Outlook flows directly into ActiveCampaign, even when Don sends messages from his phone. “With BenchmarkONE, if I sent an email from my phone, it would not show up. With ActiveCampaign, it always logs,” he says.

Active Intelligence has become one of Don’s most valuable tools. He uses it to analyze previous campaigns, identify what performed well, and generate new content based on the patterns that have worked in the past. It offers suggestions for subject lines, preheaders, visuals, and copy improvements. It also shows how his campaigns compare with those of those of other educational institutions.

Now, Don leverages Active Intelligence to help draft full campaigns for upcoming info sessions and recruitment pushes. “It can create the campaign for me. It has been fantastic,” he says. “To have Active Intelligence there as a trusted resource is game-changing.”

Active Intelligence also serves as a real-time advisor, helping Don refine his strategy. “I have Active Intelligence analyze my past campaigns and provide optimization recommendations in terms of subject lines, preheaders, and content,” he says. The suggestions are specific enough for him to implement immediately, and he adjusts his campaigns based on that feedback before launching new sends. “It tells me what to keep doing and what to improve, and those recommendations have helped me increase my open rates and click-through rates.”

For a team of one, AI has given him the leverage that would previously have required a dedicated marketer or an agency.

One of the clearest improvements Don saw after moving to ActiveCampaign was inbox performance. Messages that once struggled to reach prospects now arrive reliably.

Before adopting ActiveCampaign, deliverability challenges in the previous system held back his communication. Only a fraction of his large sends were opened. After the switch, deliverability climbed above 99 percent. It became one of the platform’s most essential advantages.

With stronger inbox placement, open rates improved across every audience. Prospects began engaging with the program’s messages at significantly higher levels. Alumni and current students now open more than half of the messages he sends. “People I hadn’t heard from in years suddenly began reconnecting with me,” he said.

“It was a night and day difference. People are now seeing my emails. They were not before,” Don says. “In fact, it had gotten so bad that I would have to message folks from my Outlook email client to check their spam folders to see the emails I had sent them. I converted a prospect into a student by doing just that last summer.”

All of these improvements show up in the outcomes that matter most to the program.

• Deliverability increased from an estimated 47% on the previous CRM to more than 99% on ActiveCampaign.
• Prospect email open rates increased from 18-20% to the mid- to upper 30% range.
• Emails to students and alumni frequently open at 50 to 65%.
• Enrollment increased by 27% in the most recent cohort.

These are direct outcomes from building a recruitment system that runs on ActiveCampaign rather than a patchwork of disconnected tools.

Don is currently exploring SMS as a way to reach prospects who respond better to text communications. He also follows ActiveCampaign’s product announcements, attends webinars, and watches for new features he can immediately integrate into his recruiting system. “I am an early adopter. ActiveCampaign imagines what is possible and doesn’t rest on its laurels. Other CRMs feel stagnant,” he says.

He also does not hesitate to recommend the platform to peers in higher education who are frustrated with the limitations of their current systems. “ActiveCampaign checks all the boxes. I rate it a 10 or 11 out of 10,” he says.

For a small but ambitious program, ActiveCampaign has provided the foundation for a recruitment strategy that is consistent, scalable, and deeply personal. Don now has a system he can trust and the capacity to build relationships at the level that keeps the MBA for Executives moving forward.

If you’d like to see how Active Intelligence and the rest of the ActiveCampaign platform can help you build out your own autonomous marketing framework, start a 14-day free trial today!