Leuphana University Lüneburg is a public university in northern Germany known for its interdisciplinary teaching model and innovation culture. With prospective students often researching multiple degrees across its College, Graduate School and Professional School, the university needed a scalable way to communicate clearly and consistently without increasing workload.
Before automation, responding to inquiries was a manual and repetitive process handled by different teams. Public universities are cautious with marketing automation because of strict privacy regulations and legacy workflows, yet interest from prospective students continued to grow. Mautic offered a flexible solution that could be hosted internally, allowing full control over data, processes and compliance.
The project set out to modernize communication with prospective students in a way that reduced response time, improved consistency and made messages more relevant to student interests while ensuring full GDPR compliance.
Mautic was implemented as a central automation platform serving all three schools and roughly fifty study paths. Prospective students now submit dynamic forms where their interests trigger segmented email journeys and relevant study information without manual intervention. Consent is tracked at every step, and templates ensure that messaging is consistent yet personalized with correct program contacts.
The new workflows led to a 75 percent reduction in manual communication effort and faster delivery of program information. Email engagement improved, and staff reported greater clarity and efficiency in managing inquiries.
Public universities often need modern automation while still keeping complete control of data and long term ownership. Many proprietary tools could not offer that balance. Each school at Leuphana needed flexibility, custom journeys and messaging that could adapt over time, without forcing a commercial licence or vendor limits.
Mautic worked because it is open source, fully self hosted and built with privacy in mind. The platform gave the university freedom to align automation with legal, ethical and institutional requirements. It also created room for future growth while keeping costs predictable and ownership in the hands of the university.
Leuphana now has a scalable automation setup that supports multiple schools and programmes while reducing manual work and improving the response experience for prospective students. The university can communicate in a way that feels personal, timely and respectful of privacy, which strengthens both trust and engagement.
This implementation has become a working example of how marketing automation can succeed in a public education environment when transparency and compliance are treated as part of the foundation. The university is now positioned for further digital innovation without needing to rebuild or restructure the system.
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