Today, students can get just about any information they want to know about a college from the Internet. The competition between schools to get the right students for their schools is fierce. To recruit students, universities have to build and nurture relationships with potential students. This can’t be done with individual prospective students, of course, so what is the secret to using technology to start those important relationships and to bring students all the way through to enrollment?
The answer to higher education marketing is a technology-based recruiting system. With a suite of technological tools, a college can tailor their recruiting efforts for students and their recruitment officers. All this works together to support a school’s efforts to boost enrollment.
A recruiting system can give information about your college’s story, which is what students want to know about. In their search for the right university, they want to hear what sets each school apart, what its story is. Creating a marketing story and conveying that message across all recruitment outlets is essential. A recruiting system you can tell your school story in a way that engages prospective students.
Why is your university different from the rest?
Your university has to build and share its brand in the same way that a big-name retail brand would. It has to tell its history, core values, areas of research, about its athletic legacy, etc. All of this information is part of the school’s brand. You want to share this information to attract prospective students as a commercial brand would to attract customers. Students are looking for an institution that is the perfect match for their needs and hopes for their futures, and using a recruitment management system can help share the message that your school is the right fit for them effectively.
You want to share what sets your school apart from others. You need to know what motivates the type of students you want to attract, what they’re into, what they’re passionate about. You can then customize your message to meet their needs and adjust it by tracking data and analytics from all of your marketing efforts through the recruitment system. This will help your school’s story resonate with more prospective students.
Why you need a Recruitment Management System
Colleges often only attain about 34 percent of their enrollment goals, but, by using a recruitment management system, they can improve that number significantly.
Drip marketing is a central tool in our recruitment system. It provides a visual workflow builder to lay out the paths to conversion recruitment officers can create with their potential recruits. When a recruitment event starts the workflow, a recruitment officer can send out a welcome email and then send it again with a different subject if it isn’t opened.
Update your leads automatically
The lead can be updated to warm if the potential student opens the email, and the recruitment officer can see where any individual recruit is in the application process at a glance. They’ll get a quick idea of how they feel about hearing more from the university, and this empowers them to try new ways of reaching them if the student seems like they want to engage more.
With our automated funnel movement feature, officers can update lead stages automatically when a trigger event occurs. The officer will receive instant notification of each recruitment activity that happens that could result in enrollment. The officer can act right away to build that critical relationship with a possible future student. You can also sync complex business processes or create an interconnected system to update data in other marketing apps and customer relationship management systems that the university utilizes.
Send engaging email campaigns
With higher education marketing that is built on a technological base, you can use email marketing to nurture relationships with students who don’t want to engage in phone or in-person conversations about the university yet. With our easy-to-use drag-and-drop email builder and sophisticated and fun templates, recruitment officers can build personalized emails for different email lists. You can send a series of emails automatically to leads who are at different stages of the enrollment process. This helps them stay engaged and wanting to learn more. With the analytics available for our email tool, you can replicate emails that get plenty of opens and responses.
Use the email list feature to create lists that are representative of students interests, activities, and demographic characteristics so that your emails will reach them where they are at and demonstrate what your university can offer them. Smart list segmentation empowers your recruitment team to perform custom list actions, such as sending an email to all of the leads on a list or to a call center application that auto-dials students.
Use landing pages to attract more leads
With our recruitment system, you can also create well-designed landing pages that we host for you. You can capture email addresses of potential future students with autoresponders that will keep them engaged until a recruitment officer can reach out to them to answer their questions. We host these landing pages, but they are put onto your university’s website.
Integrate with other tools easily
This recruiting system can be easily integrated with all of the other marketing apps and tools the university uses to get leads from all sources and then to sync the data with your customer relationship management program. This reduces response time to students so that recruitment officers can keep those conversations going and increase enrollment numbers.
Get detailed reports
When your recruitment team uses the analysis tools available in the recruitment system for all its marketing outlets with its integration tools, they can change up anything that needs to be tweaked based on emerging trends. They can replicate what is successful. Knowing what your leads want and providing it leads to better enrollment statistics.
View everything in one place
Your recruitment team will be able to see their daily schedule on their dashboards and know who to follow up with and when. They’ll receive email and phone alerts on individual potential applicants, and each conversation (phone, email, or chat) is recorded in one place so they can quickly reference the content of their conversations with each potential enrollee.
In our powerful LeadSquared recruitment management system, marketing and recruitment come together for a better higher education marketing experience. It improves communication with future students and puts marketers and recruiters on the same page. It offers DIY tools, data, analytics, and cuts costs, all while driving the university towards better student enrollment.
