KVU serves as a clearinghouse of online degree courses and programs offered by participating colleges and universities located primarily in Kentucky. KVU launched in the fall of 1999 and has grown quickly, enrolling approximately 6,400 students during the Spring 2002 semester.

Basically, like most marketing departments in the field, Patrick and her staff of two webmasters and a public relations specialist were looking for an inexpensive, yet effective, way to connect with their current and prospective online learners. "Since our Internet usage rate (in Kentucky) is right at the national average and growing, we felt we needed to get in front of our potential users with the medium they use (e-mail)," says Patrick.

With the help of KVU’s Webmaster Melanie Weaver, who was hired in her position, in small part, because she had experience in managing mass e-mail projects, the department invested in an $80 mass e-mail program called Group Mail. The marketing team then created a snappy e-zine to blast out to 6,000 e-mail addresses comprised from current and former KVU students and faculty, as well as from various e-mail distribution lists from the Kentucky Virtual Library, Kentucky Virtual High School, Kentucky Virtual Educators and Kentucky Virtual Adult Education, all of whom are partners in the state of Kentucky’s current virtual education initiatives. Additionally, Patrick submits the e-zine to the appropriate state authority, who then forwards it to thousands of state employees.

Thus far KVU has published four e-zines that "showcase all the online opportunities in the state," says Patrick. Each e-zine highlights and links to pages on the various KVU, and its partners’, web pages. At the bottom of each e-zine, recipients are offered the option to unsubscribe. Additionally when visitors from the e-mail navigate to the KVU website, a six-step, pop-up form to subscribe to the e-zine appears. The form requests their name and address (including e-mail address); and asks such questions as are you a prospective or current student, faculty member, media or other; what programs are you interested in; what degrees/licenses are you interested in; and how did you hear about KVU? "We write an HTML version and a text version, and both get sent out simultaneously (through Group Mail)," adds Leaver. Depending on the recipient’s e-mail reading software capabilities, either the HTML version or text version is displayed. The e-mail addresses are input and contained inside the Group Mail database, which personalizes every e-mail salutation and automatically sends out each email one at a time. For an e-mail blast to about 10,000 addresses, it takes about 14 hours overnight, says Weaver.

In addition to their initial list of 6,000, of which only three recipients have thus far requested to unsubscribe, the pop-up subscription-request form has added another 4,000 opt-in email addresses, and growing, to KVU’s mass e-mail database. "On this very feature alone, we got a 14 percent opt-in when we sent it out in January," says Patrick. "We are building on this. This is not spaming. This is relevant content that we are sending to a targeted group who needs this information. . . This is a gold mine for us. The ROI is phenomenal. Our website traffic more than doubles on the day that we send out an e-zine. And it will stay high for three days."

Patrick adds that the success of her mass email campaigns will be eventually incorporated into a customer relationship management project that Kentucky Virtual is currently developing. This will allow her to add more sophisticated and absolutely necessary back-end tracking and reporting options and drivers to the KVU e-zine database functions,

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