Enrolling students in your university is no easy process. You want to increase your enrollment numbers, but you may not have reached the enrollment figures that you’ve hoped for. In fact, just about 34 percent of universities are able to achieve their enrollment goals. To up those numbers, your organization has to work smarter, not harder.
The key to doing this is to use strategic enrollment management to get all of the recruitment and marketing information in one place with data from various marketing sources so that decisions can be made about how to try to best reach students. The data, your organization uses to make recruiting decisions, is based on current information about engagements with emails, social media posts, etc.
Strategic enrollment management is critical to relationship-building with students, and relationship-building is what future students expect from their university. They can access information about any university in the world with just a few clicks on their phones, tablets, or computers. They can compare information easily about various academic programs and university characteristics.
Your University’s Brand
Reaching individual future students where they are and conveying your organization’s message about how you are an integral part of their futures is critical to improving enrollment numbers. You have to tell them what makes your organization stand out among other similar universities.
Building your organization’s brand across all of its recruitment and marketing efforts is critical. Future students want to know what your institution stands for, what sets it apart from others they’re considering. Is it your unique areas of research, a state-of-the-art facility for engineering, great student life programs? Bringing all of the aspects of your university into one story that you can tell your applicants is pivotal to their becoming students.
You want to deliver the message of your university’s brand just as a retail store would to get new customers. Future students want to know what will interest them about your school. That story, told compellingly through a customer relationship management system for universities, is just the tool that helps you improve those enrollment numbers year after year.
Before you can use the strategic enrollment system to improve your enrollment numbers, you’ll have to do more than the market research than you’re already doing. The CRM helps you dig further into what motivates potential students and what they are passionate about.
When you see the different engagement levels with various email campaigns, social media posts, etc. in the analytics that the program offers, you have the information that you need to change up future student engagement tactics. A CRM lets you track data and analytics from your recruiting and marketing efforts so that it strikes a chord with prospective students.
What Can Strategic Enrollment Management Do?
A strategic enrollment management system helps your organization convey your school’s story and brand to students in a meaningful way.
Marketing automation:
The visual workflow builder of the drip marketing feature of our program helps your recruitment team manage interactions with possible future students. When an event triggers the recruiting department’s workflow, a recruiter can send an initial welcome email. They can send the same email with a different subject if it is unopened after a certain period of time.
With its easy drag-and-drop tools and templates, recruiters can use email marketing campaigns created just for potential students at various stages of the enrollment process. This helps them stay engaged and wanting to learn more about the organization. By targeting particular email lists with certain emails at the right time in the enrollment process, enrollment numbers can improve. If an email is getting great engagement, then you can replicate it. Smart list segmentation allows you to perform custom list actions, like sending an email to all of the leads on a list or even to a call center that auto-dials possible future students.
Moreover, we host well-designed landing pages that you can put on your website (keeping your domain) that will help you get students’ information. Autoresponders grab potential students’ attention and keep them engaged with the promise of a real person reaching out to them soon to answer any questions they have.
CRM:
Having a good CRM that tracks everything that happens with your students would help a ton. For example, you can update the lead to warm if the student opens an email campaign. This lead management feature helps make your admissions officer’s life easier. The officer can see where all recruits are in the application process at a glance, and this can help them gauge how they feel about moving forward with the enrollment process. This empowers the officer to try different methods of reaching out to them if the potential future students seem receptive.
Additionally, you can update lead stages automatically through automated funnel movement. This happens when a trigger event occurs. The recruiters receive instant notification of an event that can lead to enrollment. This empowers the recruiters to act immediately to create and nurture relationships with possible future students. Email marketing is another extremely helpful feature of the program.
You can also sync complex business processes or make an interconnected system to update data in other marketing apps and CRMs that your university utilizes. This allows the university to capture leads from many sources and sync the data with the CRM program. This cuts down on response times, helping you to create and build more meaningful conversations and relationships
Our strategic enrollment system brings together all of the data from your various marketing outlets so that you can identify emerging trends right away, tweak how you reach your audience, and then repeat what is successful. Your student recruitment can see their day at a glance on their dashboards and get detailed reports to their emails. They’ll know who to follow up with and when. They’ll get an email and phone call notification in order to contact each individual potential applicant. All conversations, whether phone, email, or chat, are recorded in one place so that recruitment officers can remember each person they have communicated with and plan the next steps as they guide each person towards enrollment.
With our powerful LeadSquared strategic enrollment management system, your admissions and recruitment teams will improve communication and relationship-building with future students, and it helps keep marketers and recruiters on the same page. This connected system reduces costs, workload, response time, making it easier to work smarter, not harder.
