Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management is set to further fine-tune and expand its direct marketing, which it began overhauling last year. The efforts more than quadrupled enrollments in Kellogg's executive education program.

Later this year the Evanston, IL graduate school plans to send its first-ever targeted e-mails to promote its courses, which larger companies use to supplement their training programs.

Executive education marketing director Eric Fridman hopes to start this campaign by the second half of the year.

In the last six months of 2003, Kellogg more than quadrupled the conversion rates to its mailings to 0.43% from 0.1% during the first half of the year and saw its response rates increase 60% to about 2.8%, Fridman said.

The school's executive education budget is less than $1 million. This year, Kellogg will also look into predictive modeling for mailings and will try to do more cross-selling.

Kellogg has reworked its direct response space advertising — expanding from publications like The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Financial Times to such targeted trade titles as CFO and CIO magazines. Kellogg hired Leo Burnett USA for this project.

The combination of the terrorist strikes of Sept. 11, 2001 and the slowing economy had caused enrollments in many of Kellogg's executive education programs like finance to fall as much as 20%, said Fridman.

Traditionally, Kellogg promoted its more than 35 executive programs through direct mail and direct response space advertising targeted at midlevel and senior executives at larger corporations. The school relied essentially on blanket mailings to its house file of past participants and brochure requesters, said Fridman.

Overall, Fridman said, Kellogg sends out about a million mailings a year. Its database contains nearly 100,000 names and includes such information as classes previously taken and the companies where the students work.

One of Kellogg's biggest challenges was last fall, when it cleaned its database and created profiles of students based on their interests.

In the process, Kellogg discovered the kinds of companies that have been sending their people to Kellogg programs for years. In addition, the school found it had been attracting significant numbers of international executives.

Kellogg also began using D&B iMarket lists. “We changed the entire list rental plan, and began targeting by companies for deeper executive penetration,” said Cyndi Greenglass, president, agency services for Diamond Marketing Group, which helped Kellogg implement these changes.