Visiting secondary schools or making community speeches about your college are no longer necessarily the best ways to get potential students enrolled in your college. Competition is much fiercer today than it was in the past to get enrollment numbers up. There are more colleges than before, and students are much more discerning about where they spend the next few years of their lives earning a degree. While grassroots efforts to increase enrollment are still definitely important ways to get students to register for classes, technology plays a vital role in enrollment management.
Those grassroots efforts are aimed at creating a relationship with a potential student by putting a face with a name. Advertisements sent through the mail or billboards with information about the college invite students to visit or call the college to learn more about their academic programs, but the bottom line is the same: relationship-building is what gets students to want to enroll at a particular college. While the promise of a solid education in the department they’re interested in is also key, without someone to guide them through the enrollment process, students would not feel any sort of connection to the college.
Technology does not replace the need for building relationships with potential students. It is an essential tool that works alongside creating and maintaining relationships between colleges and potential students. Students today expect colleges to be responsive to their individual questions and concerns through technology, and they also expect colleges to share their stories about why they are the perfect match for the students through technology.
How Technology Fits In
At LeadSquared, we offer your recruitment personnel a suite of tools that will help them identify leads and follow up on them in a timely way. There is no need for a piece of paper and pen to remind a recruiter who to call each day or for the recruiter to try to remember who individual students are. With our integrated dashboard, recruiters can see their daily schedules and quickly see who to follow up with, and the system sends them phone and email alerts to remind them to follow up as well. All email, phone, and chat conversations are recorded in one place so they can nurture leads and guide them to registration.
Your recruiters have to share the school’s story with the people they are trying to recruit. They can do this through our drip email tool that lets them build custom email series that can be sent out to segmented lists of potential students. Recruiters can create stunning emails easily with our drag-and-drop tool with templates to make creating visually-appealing emails in minutes.
When emails aren’t opened, recruiters can send them again with a different subject line to keep the college at the front of students’ minds. Recruiters can send emails whenever they are most likely to be opened and deliver content that is relevant to their particular audience. This increases engagement and conversion rates, which translates into higher enrollment rates. By examining particular campaigns’ analytics, recruiters can see which campaigns are doing better than others and then replicate their successes.
Landing Pages
We host well-designed landing pages for your website domain so that you can get potential applicants’ email addresses and begin to build a relationship with them. With our autoresponders, you’ll get future students’ attention with the promise of personalized contact. All of the chats can be seen by your recruiters with reminders to follow up on them, so timely responses are not difficult and can be managed easily.
Customizing Interaction
Your leads want to be seen as individuals, not as just another enrolled student. With the ability to segregate leads based on demographic profiles, activities, interests, and more, you can create emails and other marketing materials that will resonate with potential students. You can perform custom list actions with our smart list segmentation, like sending all of the leads to a call center app for automated dialing.
Integration
Our technology integrates seamlessly with many other marketing apps and tools so that you can continue to capture leads from many sources and then sync data with your CRM tools. This lets you reduce response time so you spend more time building those critical relationships through conversations with students. When you analyze the data from your college from all its marketing outlets with our simple integration tools, you can quickly respond to trends and try out new engagement techniques to better connect with your target audience.
It is unlikely that your college has met its enrollment targets as just 34 percent of colleges do. Leveraging technology to tell your college’s story and conveying to potential students how it can help them achieve their future career and life goals is one of the smartest moves your school can make. You make it possible for your recruitment team to have more meaningful interactions with potential students with a single dashboard that puts all of the information they need in front of them. When a successfully-recruited student tells their friends about their recruitment experience, it acts as a referral for your college and can bring in more students over time without any extra work. By showing that you truly care about how your school can benefit students and about them as individuals, you will increase your enrollment numbers.
Technology is the most powerful tool you have to keep track of your leads, whether they are cold or warm, and to help you stay in touch with potential students. With the data analytics that we offer, you can see what is working well and what isn’t at a glance, empowering you to change your approach to marketing, if it’s required.
Tell your institution’s story with technology and personal interaction. This will encourage more students to enroll, and you’ll get much closer to achieving your enrollment goals – and potentially surpass them – than you ever have in the past.
