Using the Engagement Prompt to reach disengaged students

Using the Engagement Prompt to reach disengaged students

Info
The Engagement Prompt is a new automated email feature in targetconnect designed to help careers teams reconnect with students who haven’t yet engaged with the career service through your targetconnect platform. This article explains how the prompt works, how to activate it, and how it can support early student engagement with opportunities and events.

Summary

The Engagement Prompt is a new automated email feature in targetconnect designed to help careers teams reconnect with students who haven’t yet engaged with the career service through your targetconnect platform. This article explains how the prompt works, how to activate it, and how it can support early student engagement with opportunities and events.

The challenge

As every Careers team knows, reaching students who haven’t yet engaged with their career journey is an ongoing challenge. Thousands of students in their penultimate and final year are yet to access career support, potentially missing out on the guidance and opportunities they need to succeed.

Adding to that challenge:
  1. Over 40% of graduate-level roles are now posted between September and October.
  2. Employers are posting earlier, closing adverts faster, and receiving more applications than ever.
  3. By the time students return after summer, many opportunities have already disappeared.
The result? A shrinking hiring window that means students need to engage earlier to take advantage.

The solution

We are helping you to engage more students via the Engagement Prompt notification.

The Engagement Prompt email helps you reach, nudge, and reconnect with students most at risk of disengagement, at the right time.

By automating timely communications, the Engagement Prompt helps you:
  1. Drive awareness of live opportunities, events, and support services
  2. Initiate wider engagement with your services
  3. Strengthen graduate employability outcomes across your institution


 

Features of the Engagement Prompt

  1. Targeted reach: Focus on at-risk cohorts (e.g., penultimate and final-year students).
  2. Triggers: Alerts go to students who haven’t logged in or updated their profile in 12 months, aren’t subscribed to job alerts, and haven’t opted out of career comms.
  3. Automated delivery: Fortnightly emails across September and October, then optimised to monthly/semesterly based on engagement.
  4. Relevant, actionable content: Prompts link directly to jobs, appointments, and events in your platform (where enabled).
  5. Cohort-driven automation: Powered by targetconnect’s Cohort functionality, ensuring the list of targeted students stays dynamic and always up to date.

When will the Engagement Prompt be available?

The Engagement Prompt will be activated on your platform from Monday 15th September 2025. It will be sent to all students who have either never logged in or not updated their profile after this date.

Before activation, the targetconnect team will collaborate with Key Users at your university to identify the appropriate student cohorts.

If you prefer not to use the Engagement Prompt, it can be deactivated upon request. Should you wish to enable it again in the future, simply contact your Key Account Manager, who will be happy to assist.

 

Identifying target cohorts

The Engagement Prompt will be sent to penultimate- and final-year undergraduate students. To ensure accurate targeting, it’s important to correctly identify these cohorts within your student records. Each institution may label these groups differently, so please refer to your internal classifications. If you're unsure how to identify these students, we recommend contacting your IT team for support.

Example criteria:
Penultimate-year students
  1. Student type: Undergraduate
  2. Year of study: 2

Final-year students
  1. Student type: Undergraduate
  2. Year of study: 3 and/or 4

Once you've identified your target cohorts, share the relevant criteria with your Key Account Manager. The targetconnect team will then configure these settings on your behalf.
 

Proven impact: Durham University trial

A summer pilot with Durham University showed strong results:
  1. 21% increase in logins in one week
  2. 14% rise in job-related page views
  3. 63% jump in applications week-on-week
  4. 12% fewer emails sent, showing improved efficiency

Frequently asked questions


We already send newsletters and reminders. Why this?

This prompt saves your team time. It automatically pulls a snapshot of the latest opportunities, with links to events, and appointments, without any manual setup required. It ensures students who haven’t logged in still get timely, relevant updates.

What if we don’t have permission to contact students directly?

No problem. You can opt out of this prompt email, just let your Key Account Manager know.

Can students opt out of the prompt?

Yes, students can opt of receiving the prompt if they wish.

How will we know second and third years?

This will use our ‘Cohort’ based functionality. This is similar to tagging students, but instead of applying a tag against users, we set a list of criteria e.g. all students in a given faculty, year of study, course. Once that cohort has been set, students will fall in and out of defined cohorts based on their student data.

Can we change the frequency?

Not at this stage. As the new Academic year approaches, we’ll be sending this alert once every two weeks. We will look to scale back the alert from November based on engagement data.

Can we see the template before it’s sent?

Absolutely. This will appear in your platform as a new notification category, where you can preview the alert as you would any other alert.

When will we start sending the email?

The first email will be sent from Monday 15th September 2025.

Can we disable the alert?

GTI can disable this for you. By default, whilst we’re setting up the alert, it will not be enabled in your platform whilst we work with you on the cohort. Once the alert has been enabled, this is only something that GTI staff can update, but can be updated easily. This template has been locked down so that our eCRM team can continue to make changes to the template that will be beneficial across the board. This is again, something that we will be reviewing across the coming months.


What data can we see?

With this change, we will be introducing UTM tracking (that will allow us to see when links are clicked) against this alert so that we can measure the impact. We will be looking to introduce this data to the daily and weekly alerts and update your Looker reports so that you can measure the impact of these alerts.

Once you’ve created the cohort, which students within that cohort will receive the email?

Second and third year students (though we can enable for all) that have:
  1. Student profile flag set to ‘yes’ - Those that haven’t updated their profile since the last flag reset.
  2. Not subscribed to daily or weekly job alerts
  3. Not unsubscribed from daily/weekly alerts
  4. Not unsubscribed from this new engagement email