Getting the word out to your potential students that you are the right school for them is tough. It’s more than just setting up your school’s website and advertising a bit on social media. Your prospective students want to engage with their future school on a personal level in a world that is full of impersonal advertising. Today’s students know how to use technology to find what they’re looking for in their education, and it’s vital that a college knows how to utilize technology for student recruitment and not alienate them.
Technology is what should drive your student recruitment campaign if it doesn’t already. If you’re not seeing the results that you want, it is time to reconsider what your students need from you. Your school may be where they possibly spend the next few years learning. They want to know what you have to offer them as individuals and as future professionals. Your institution can use technology to tell its story in a way that will resonate with its pool of potential future students.
By combining the power of the marketing department and technology with the drive of the recruitment section, your enrollment can increase significantly.
Find Out What Your Students Want
It’s more than just finding out what your students want from an educational institution that will help them want to apply to your school. You have to learn what motivates them. When you know your audience, you can better adjust your marketing to meet their needs. Using technology tools, you can find out what resonates with your audience by keeping track of the data and analytics that result from each of your student recruitment and marketing efforts. You can then adjust in real-time and make improvements.
Brand Your Organization
Each brand out there has a story. That story connects with their audience, and that is what keeps their clients coming back. Define your organization’s story. What is its history, and where is it going? Develop a story to tell students that will attract and resonate with them on a personal level.
What is it about your organization that students will want to learn more about and engage with? Utilizing your website and social media outlets is the best way to get the word out there about what your organization can provide students. They have many choices, so why should they select you?
Leverage Technology to Connect with Potential Students
Since just 34 percent of colleges reach their enrollment goals, it makes sense for your organization to use technology to get the students it needs. For example, one way to do this is with drip marketing. You can use our visual workflow builder to plan out the conversation paths you can create with your students. When a trigger starts your workflow, you might send out a welcome email, and then resend the same email with a different subject if it’s not opened or update the lead to warm if the prospective student opens the email.
Additionally, you can automate funnel movement to update lead stages automatically when a certain lead activity occurs. You can also get instant sales notifications if an admission activity occurs that could lead to enrollment. That empowers your admissions team to take immediate action to create that relationship with a potential student. Other helpful tools are the ability to sync complex business processes or create a connected system to update data in other marketing apps and CRMs the institution utilizes.
Email Marketing Can Create Relationships.
Use beautiful emails from our drag-and-drop builder and our many templates to create personalized content to send to your email lists. This can help keep your institution at the forefront of the minds of your students. Your student recruitment team will not need any coding skills to create stunning emails that engage and get positive responses from potential students. Delivering your emails whenever you want and making the content relevant to your audience means that your engagement and conversion rate increase. When you see an email campaign is working well with the email analytics we offer, you can replicate it in the future.
Landing Pages Keep Your Potential Students Involved.
By putting our well-designed landing pages on your site, you can keep your website domain, but we host them. You reap the benefits of creating engaging landing pages that start possible future students on the path to enrollment. With autoresponders, you get future students’ attention with the promise of personalized contact. With landing pages that students respond to, you’ll be able to up your enrollment rates.
Customize Your Interaction.
You want to reach your audience and create a personalized relationship with them all the way through to the registration process and the first day of class. By segregating your leads based on demographic profiles, activities, interests, and more, you can create emails and other marketing data that will show what you can offer your student. Using our smart list segmentation, you can perform custom list actions like sending all of the leads on a list to a call center application for automated dialing. Do more with less work.
Our technology can be integrated with many other marketing apps and tools so that you can continue to lead capture from different sources and then sync data with your CRM tools. The syncing of all of this information empowers you to reduce your response time significantly so that you create more conversations and relationships with potential students. By analyzing all of the data that your institution generates from its various marketing outlets with our simple integration tools, you can react to trends, try new techniques and better reach your target audience.
Your student recruitment team will be able to see their schedule on their dashboard each day. They’ll know who to follow up with, and the program will help them call at the right time by sending email and phone alerts. All email, phone, and chat conversations are recorded in one clean area so that your admissions officers can effectively cultivate leads and guide them toward enrollment.
The recruitment process and marketing efforts combine into a powerful program with LeadSquared that can increase communication and success on the part of both departments. You can save the institution money with a connected system that provides integration, do-it-yourself tools, data, and analytics that can effectively increase student enrollment.
