Boosting enrollment numbers is a goal of just about every university. In fact, just about 34 percent of colleges meet their enrollment goals, so that leaves hundreds of educational institutions that are not able to achieve the number of students they want to enroll every year. Higher education management has to include a comprehensive student enrollment strategy, and having a cohesive story to tell through the college’s branding outreach efforts is critical.
One of the best ways to reach students is through an admissions CRM, or customer relationship management system. These are very similar to what retail brands use to engage customers and take stock of how their marketing efforts are doing. Customers, and students, today expect a brand to resonate with them on a personal level, and a college has to build individual relationships with their potential students if it wants to enroll them.
Aspects Of Higher Education Management
Build a Good Brand
A college has to know what motivates its potential applicants. What makes them tick? What makes them think that your college might have what they want in their future higher education institution? With this knowledge in hand, a college can build its brand so that it engages potential future students.
Just as a retail brand sends out messages that target different sections of its market, a college must do the same. While the central message of the college’s value remains the same, the message of how it can meet the needs of individual students changes, depending on what the students want from their college experience.
Developing a coherent branding message is critical for any marketing campaign to work. Sending the right messages out and sending them in a way that resonates with the target audience is what an admissions CRM can help a college do. It provides them with the data needed to analyze various marketing campaigns and outreach efforts so that they can be adjusted to get better engagement. If a particular effort is not producing the results desired, it can be quickly identified and tweaked so that it does, for instance.
Use an Admissions CRM
An admissions CRM does not replace the college’s efforts to recruit students through a variety of channels, such as email or social media accounts. It helps to bring the results of all of those efforts into one place so that recruiters can better stay on top of how far a lead is in the process of enrolling and take timely steps to make sure that they apply and formally enroll.
Relationship-building through the consistent application of the college’s brand is what gets students to enroll. It might be a billboard or a postcard in the mail that gets their attention initially, but when the potential student takes a step to engage the college in talk about enrolling, it’s critical that they are noticed as individuals and that a recruiter follow up. An admissions CRM provides a central place for recruiters to take charge of the many leads they have so that they can effectively guide the potential students toward enrollment.
Engage with Email
Through segmented email lists that target potential student populations based on demographics, activities, and interests, among other characteristics, recruiters can share the story of the school: its core values, history, vision for the future, areas of research, etc. They do this through our email tool that empowers them to build custom email series that are sent out to those lists at just the right point in the recruiting process. Recruiters can easily build these emails with our drag-and-drop custom email builder and with templates to create visually-appealing emails quickly.
Build Responsive Landing Pages
With our well-designed landing pages, potential students’ attention will be drawn to the promise of a person reaching out to them shortly through our autoresponders. The college gets to keep their website domain, and we host the landing pages to get potential applicants’ email addresses so that recruiters can get started in building those critical relationships.
Use Data and Integration
Our program integrates easily with many other marketing tools and apps that the college already uses to capture leads from various sources. The program then syncs the data from those sources with our CRM. Then recruiters can analyze the data from all of the leads and compare it to their marketing efforts to find out what is working. If a particular email is getting lots of engagement, for example, recruiters can replicate its structure for a future email. Admissions officers can also analyze all of the data to quickly respond to trends and try out new engagement techniques to better connect with their target audiences.
Build Visual Workflows
Recruiters no longer have to sift through dozens of voicemails or emails to try to find information about one particular candidate when they are following up with them. Our visual workflow builder puts all of the information they need right at their fingertips in a centralized dashboard. All of their conversations with potential students are recorded, whether they are emails, phone calls, or chats. This makes it easy for recruiters to quickly remember who they need to follow up with any particular information about individuals so that they can help move the lead toward enrollment.
Additionally, recruiters can see where leads are in the application and enrollment process so that they can choose the right methods of reaching out to them. Phone and email alerts are sent to recruiters through the systems reminding them to follow up with leads, so recruiting is much more efficient with our admissions CRM. Recruiters can focus on building relationships and getting enrollment numbers up.
Technology is a powerful tool in higher education management. It doesn’t replace recruiters’ work at all, but it instead helps them to do their work more effectively. It cuts down on time spent responding to individual leads and can save money by bringing information from all of the marketing outlets to one location so that more time is spent building relationships with leads. Marketing and admissions are on the same page when the college uses LeadSquared’s admissions CRM, and that can also help up the school’s enrollment numbers.
