Drive Enrollment Through Realignment, Not More Investment

In times when budgets freeze or shrink and you are asked to do more with less, there is a split in the enrollment community regarding whether colleges and universities should always be open to learning about best practices, ideas and solutions in the marketplace OR circle the wagons, fire up the team and hold tight to what they have until the current financial storm passes.

Many administrators at colleges and universities have a fear of learning about innovative solutions and services designed to help them meet their enrollment goals. Admissions and enrollment officers have a lot on their plates today and fear that asking to learn more about a new solution will:

1. Divert their focus from their existing workload, which already commands time from their nights and weekends
2. Result in an awkward sales pitch where a “salesperson” claims to know more about their job than they do and spouts the need to make an investment in their systems
3. Result in a prolonged project with ballooning add-ons that comes in at 40% over budget in order to work correctly

A Forgotten Approach to Learning About New Strategies and Solutions
In contrast, many of the institutions we work with bring us in to help them analyze and realign their enrollment communication mix (in person, print, phone, Web, email, social media, etc.) to get better results under their current or a lower budget, rather than talk to them about the benefits of making additional investments in their admissions marketing strategy.

This article outlines strategic approaches to help you maintain a top-down view of your enrollment strategy while controlling costs up front and incrementally improving your target enrollment metrics.

Three Approaches to Improving Your Results
The question of how to approach this fall’s enrollment cycle largely depends on your perception of your institution’s last enrollment cycle. Did you receive your target number of inquiries and apps? Was your yield and start rate where you wanted it to be? Did the timing of inquiries, apps and deposits fall under your strategic time line? Was the quality and diversity of your incoming class in line with your goals?

The following are three approaches to maximizing your results and return on your investment going into your next enrollment cycle:

1) “Last cycle’s results were good.”
Questions to ask:

• How can I lower my costs?
• How can I improve my results even more without increasing my budget?

The most effective enrollment strategies continuously make changes and vigorously look for ways to improve. Outside of higher ed, we can look at Amazon as a model. Amazon.com has been known to change their homepage multiple times a day or week based on feedback and data collected, regarding how well they are hitting certain conversion metrics with a specific layout. On-campus thought leaders are always learning more about how they are performing, what other schools are doing and the new ideas in the marketplace.

Learning does not involve a commitment of any kind. However, if you find a solution that can improve your metrics or lower your cost, be prepared to make that change. Instilling this culture in your team, current solution providers and future partners lays the ground work for continuous innovation.

2) “Last cycle’s results were ok, but I suspect they could be better.”
Questions to ask:

• How can I improve my results under my current budget?
• How much am I spending on each touch (communication) throughout the enrollment process, from first contact through start?
• What percentage of those touches result in the prospective student completing the call to action?
• If I shift resources from one channel to another, or from earlier in the process to later, can I impact my results?

Click on the image below to see a simple example of how you might analyze post-inquiry communication and make changes that impact next cycle's results:

3) “Last cycle’s results were unsatisfactory.”
Questions to ask:

• Which components of my enrolment communication process are effective and which are not?
• If I shift resources in underperforming steps in the communication flow from one communication channel to another, can I impact my results?

Identify the Weakness: Prioritize your challenges by analyzing the individual components of your enrollment communication flow.

• Is the top of my funnel large enough?
• Am I getting enough inquiries and responses to my search campaigns?
• Am I moving enough of those interested students to apply?
• What percentage of my accepted students are enrolling at my institution?
• Am I starting all, or almost all, of my enrolled students?

Once you have identified the weakest phases of your enrollment funnel, assign a cost to each touch in that phase. Then identify which communication channel and messaging results in the prospective students completing the call to action. As I laid out in option #2 above, think about decreasing resources and funding from non-performing communication and shift it to new solutions or existing touches that are getting results.

Questions or ideas? Email or Tweet Josh Paul or visit JamesTower.com.