Not enough or entirely too complicated. That’s what we’ve seen when it comes to college-owned communication plans targeting prospective students.
We at Waybetter spend many hours and a lot of brainpower developing multi-channel marketing messaging to both attract, and appeal to, prospective students. We help you cut through the noise and determine which students are actually interested in your college or university.
Once we, or a Search partner other than Waybetter, go through the legwork of identifying the students with interest, we help nurture them while also passing them off to you. Why the hand-off? Because, of course, the institution itself has an enormous role in staying in touch with these students. In educating them, empathizing with them, empowering them, and eventually turning them into a deposit.
So, we’re on a mission to ensure that, after prospective students experience our campaigns, they’re receiving consistent and compelling messaging from the institutions themselves. Like other industries, in the higher ed world, that is achieved through optimal CRM setup and bulletproof email communication strategy.
All this to say: Guys, you need to have a good multi-channel comm flow for every stage of the funnel! And we think this could be a good New Year’s resolution for you.
Here’s some intel –
Recently, we took some time to study our own clients, as well as their competitors. We sought to discover what each institution did with students that were acquired and/or qualified by our campaigns (or similar). What happened to those students after we passed them off to the school?
And we learned that, unfortunately, too many enrollment teams fall short here. It’s not because you don’t know it’s necessary. It’s not because you don’t have the brainpower to do it. It’s because you are pulled in 100 directions with a number of competing priorities.
Some of the rattling, yet common, themes:
- No immediate email welcome message is configured. You have the student’s attention right now…capitalize on it.
- A welcome message may be in place but it drives no action and, on top of that, the student then doesn’t receive another touchpoint for days.
- No communication is planned for a certain stage. For example, Junior and Senior comm flows exist but no Sophomore flow. If a Sophomore in high school completes your RFI and expresses interest, they enter a black hole.
- Or, you have different workflows designed for the different cohorts but the content is not stage-appropriate. As you know, the way you talk to a Sophomore and a Senior in high school should be different.
- Broken personalization. A basic example would be when a student receives an email about the sciences when they actually expressed interest in foreign languages. Spoiler alert: This is usually a sign that the university has gotten too ambitious (read: complicated) with their approach to personalization and dynamic content.
- Inaccurate audience logic. This is an easy mistake to make and incredibly common but it sets a bad tone. In one case, we imitated a student and completed the RFI as an incoming Freshman but ended up receiving Transfer student information.
- Spelling and grammatical errors. Sadly, they are rampant but, of course, easy to fix!
- Major design flaws and/or a less-than-ideal mobile experience which reflect poorly on the institution, reduce read time and conversion, and lead to poor list retention (among other things).
- The mode of communication is not varied enough. A student receives print but never an email or, alternatively, the student receives a high volume of email but, despite never responding in that channel, he or she never receives anything via print, text, or other.
- Things feel inconsistent. Maybe there were too many authors/owners to begin with or maybe there have been attempts to optimize efforts over time but…no one had the time to do a comprehensive, holistic review of the communication experience and now things feel disjointed. As our President Rich would say: “too many Chefs ruin the stew”.
And the scariest part of all: email deliverability and inbox placement is not a consideration and therefore all email communications land in the students’ Spam folder. This is an enormously important topic and warrants a blog post of its own but, at a high level, please know that you need to focus on list health/hygiene and recipient engagement. Remove unsubscribes and bounces in a timely manner. Ensure your sending to only “good” addresses – meaning those with the proper syntax and those that actually exist. Develop a strategy to suppress unengaged students at set intervals. And the holy grail: develop compelling, truly helpful content that drives opens and clicks.
Make sense?
If not, here’s a “CliffsNotes” version of what you need to do in the new year: go back to basics and review your CRM and comm flow setup using the above findings as a guide of what to look for. If it seems insurmountable, reach out to us for help. We have a team dedicated to this sort of thing: technical configuration audits, experience audits, communication strategy, copywriting, etc.
A little bit will go a long way. We’re here for you…