Do all the students you enroll show up in the classroom?
162 of the 400 schools we audited say they don’t. About 42% of them don’t- a painfully sizeable chunk.
What’s worse, they withdraw right before the session starts, leaving little time to enroll replacement candidates. There are reasons, of course:
- They enroll at another school.
- They decide that the time is not right.
- They uncover some information about your school they don’t like.
But, it always means a bunch of frustrating calls for the admission reps, and a revenue loss for the management – both entirely avoidable in most case.
Why does this happen?
Because conventional thinking ends the enrolment funnel as soon as the student enrolls.
Ending your process funnel means you have stopped talking, it never means that the student has stopped listening. They’re still browsing the internet looking for reviews on you, still getting offers from other admission reps and still speaking to people, trying to figure out if choosing you was really a good decision.
It’s a war of stories. And you’re leaving yourself miserably exposed if all you’re giving them is a welcome kit and some brochures.
How do you avoid it?
Here’s the catch- you can’t take a lot of your rep’s time in trying cover this.
Enrollment communication is the perfect blend of stories and timing. Whoever tells the more inspiring story at the more critical time wins the trust of the student. And it’s simple (if not easy) to do it correctly:
1. Pick your stories.
Nail down the content you want to send to people based on the program they’re enrolled in. Keep it simple, make it inspiring and get them excited about joining you.
Testimonials, alumni employment highlights or a video showing the day in the life of a student are some strong stories to start with.
2. Setup an automated engagement logic.
Use your enrollment system to create a post-enrollment workflow. Get creative, blend channels – emails, texts and phone calls– to keep candidate invested. Add every person that enrolls to this engagement workflow for continued nurturing until the first day of class.
Logical automation makes it easy for the rep to keep up the conversation without spending A LOT of their time and energy on it.
3. Measure, experiment and repeat.
With an enrollment solution like LeadSquared, you can start this off at your school within one day. The harder part is improving thereafter
You need to measure the number of leads that remain after every step of the workflow. If you see anything unexpected at any point, find out what caused it, try something else, then measure yet again.
In Conclusion
42% of career schools losing enrolled students because of a slight oversight is no trivial matter.
But (as we saw), it’s not that hard to start containing these drop-offs either. It’s just a matter of keeping invested in your candidates even after they have enrolled. After all, if you stop caring right after enrolment, why shouldn’t they?
Key is, stay interested to keep them interested. To sum it up –
- Keep up regular communication with enrolled students until the session starts.
- Automatically share the right stories at the right time, using the right channels.
- Measure the effectiveness of every single story, at every point.
- Test, change, repeat
So, ready to stop enrollment drop-offs at your school? Take a demo to see how LeadSquared helps you set this process up in a day.
