The Anti-Melt Campaigns Working Right Now (And the Numbers to Prove It)

May 28, 2026 Enrollment Insights

A look inside four anti-melt campaigns Capture partners are running this summer — and what the live performance data tells us about reaching deposited students between May and August.

Summer melt isn’t a mystery anymore. We know roughly when it happens (late May through mid-August), we know who’s at risk (deposited students who go quiet), and we know that the institutions losing the fewest students are the ones still showing up in the inbox and on the website after the deposit lands.

What’s harder to find is current, honest data on what’s actually getting opened, clicked, and acted on right now. So we pulled performance numbers from four anti-melt campaigns Capture partners are running today across our enrollment marketing platform. Three are direct-action plays. One is a brand and belonging play. All four are aimed at the same window: the eight weeks where a deposit either becomes an enrollment or quietly doesn’t.

Let’s get to it.

1. The popover earning a 23% click-through rate

Audience: Identified 2026 deposited students visiting framingham.edu

The headline metric: a 23.33% click-through rate, with nearly every click coming from a deposited student.

The play: The popover lands on a deposited student already on the website and points them directly to the Accepted Students hub for Fall 2026. It’s not selling, it’s removing friction. The student is in melt mode — uncertain, distracted, second-guessing — and the popover says, in effect, “here’s the next thing.” A 23% CTR on an interruption-style format is exceptional, and it’s a clean signal that deposited students will engage when the ask is concrete and the timing is right.

Why it works: With identified targeting, (we know who’s deposited before they ever click), and a tight audience (one segment, one purpose), and a CTA that feels like help, this melt campaign is targeted, not cookie-cutter.

2. The triggered email converting 10% of opens to clicks

Audience: Identified 2026 deposited students

The headline metrics: a 23.73% open rate, a 10.17% click-through rate, zero bounces, and zero unsubscribes.

What’s interesting here isn’t just the click rate — it’s where the clicks went. The vast majority of clicks went straight to the “Next Steps” page. Not academic programs. Not student life. Next Steps. The behavior tells you what deposited students actually want from their institution in May, June, and July: a list of what to do next.

The opens-by-stage breakdown is also worth noting: more than half of all opens came from students who’ve already moved from Deposited to Enrolled. Anti-melt is not a one-and-done — students who say yes are still checking in.

Why it works: A Capture triggered email fired on identified behavior, narrowly scoped, with a message that matches the moment. Zero unsubscribes means the audience wants this email.

3. The triggered email pulling 36% open rates

Audience: Identified 2026 deposited and enrolled students visiting the site

The headline metric: a 36.67% open rate — well above what most institutions see on broadcast emails to admitted populations — with zero unsubscribes.

The reason for the open rate is the trigger: this email only fires when a deposited or enrolled student is actively on the website. That’s a high-intent moment, and the open rate reflects it.

Click distribution skews toward two destinations: the “Admitted Students” hub and the First-Year “Tailored Support” page. Two clear themes — what do I do next and who’s going to help me when I get there.

Why it works: A Capture behavioral trigger plus a clean two-destination message. Open rates this high happen when the email arrives because the student just signaled interest, not because it’s Tuesday.

4. The content that’s not really about the click

Audience: Identified 2026 admitted and deposited students with 2+ site visits

The headline metric: a 2.33% click-through rate — and that’s the point.

A 2% CTR isn’t the headline number for this kind of campaign. The headline is who is seeing it: identified admitted and deposited students who came back to the site at least twice. That’s brand exposure to a population that’s already engaged, served at the exact moment they’re back on the site reconsidering. The “Life at Brevard” landing page is about belonging, not logistics — and belonging is the message that fills the gap between “I deposited” and “I’m moving in.”

Why it works: Not every melt touchpoint needs to drive a click. Some need to remind the student why they said yes. Ambient on-site campaigns are only served to known admitted and deposited students — layered underneath the direct-action plays are how you keep both halves of the melt conversation alive.

The piece you don’t see in the dashboard

Open rates and CTRs are how you measure the campaign. They’re not how you save a student.

The reason these campaigns matter isn’t that they generate clicks — it’s that every click feeds back into the timeline view in Capture’s enrollment marketing platform, feeding Daily Visitor Reports, Counselor Copilot outreach and engagement scores that tell you who’s hot and who’s drifting.

When a deposited student opens that triggered email, clicks “Next Steps,” or engages with a popover, their counselor sees it. Not in a weekly report. In their student timeline, alongside an updated Capture Score engagement score and a full behavioral history of where that student has been on the site and what they’ve engaged with.

That’s the second half of the anti-melt motion most institutions are missing. The campaign reaches a few dozen students at scale. The counselor reaches the right few at the right moment, one at a time, with context — “I saw you were on the housing page this morning, anything I can help walk through?” — instead of a generic check-in. The campaign is the trigger. The counselor outreach is what actually closes the gap.

This is the difference between a triggered email and an anti-melt system: the data doesn’t end at the dashboard. Capture Identify confirms the student, Capture Nurture delivers the touch, Capture Score quantifies how engaged they are, and Capture Copilot lands all of it in the counselor’s queue with enough context to make the next outreach personal.

Three patterns worth stealing (before it’s too late)

Across the four campaigns, the same three things keep showing up:

1. Identified targeting is the unlock. Every one of these campaigns runs on Capture’s proprietary tracking tech, served only to deposited (or admitted-plus-deposited) students we’ve identified by name. Generic remarketing to anonymous site visitors doesn’t produce these numbers. Behavioral intelligence on a known audience does.

2. The melt window is May through August and the campaigns reflect that. All four are bounded to roughly the same 10–12 week window. They’re not running year-round. They’re running when the risk is.

3. Direct-action plus brand-and-belonging beats either alone. The popovers and triggered emails answer what do I do next. The toasters and lifestyle creative answer why did I say yes in the first place. The institutions seeing the strongest summer melt performance are running both at once, to the same identified audience, with messaging that matches what a deposited student is actually thinking in June — and routing the engagement data back to counselors who can act on it one student at a time.

Final thoughts

Summer melt isn’t a single campaign, it’s a coordinated set of touches, all aimed at students you already know, all delivered in the window where the deposit is most likely to slip away, all feeding back into the people responsible for getting that student to move-in day. The data above is what that looks like in the wild, right now, on live partner instances.

If you’re building (or rebuilding) your anti-melt motion for 2027, these are the patterns to start from.

Want to talk through how Capture can help with melt? Schedule a discovery call and we’ll walk through how our partner institutions are tiering, individualizing, and triggering behavioral outreach to mitigate melt, faster and smarter.