2. Analyzing emails

Colleges and universities are increasingly relying on customer relationship management systems, which analyze and track communications, to personalize their interactions with students. Some email tracking systems can record when students are most likely to open emails and send out messages accordingly. Coppin State University in Maryland recently adopted a communications solution from Microsoft that automatically schedules those messages.

“The system is so smart that it can predict that this student always reads the email at 11 o’clock in the morning, while this student reads the email at 10 o’clock in the evening and then will send the messages at those times where it’s most likely for that student to read,” he said.