Sponsored by VisionPoint
To succeed at higher ed enrollment in an increasingly competitive landscape, you first need a seamless relationship between marketing and admissions. One should pick up where the other leaves off, so prospects feel supported throughout their college evaluation, selection, and transition.
If your institution does not have a seamless enrollment process where marketing and admissions work together as partners towards a single objective, then this is where you need to start.
Next, you must be able to see the whole journey of a prospective student from the very first touchpoint through inquiry, communications, application, admission, and matriculation. This is important because it is easier to adjust your approach and decide which channels are performing better than others when you can track the downstream impact of marketing efforts on enrollment goals. This relatively simple piece is one of the ways that modern institutions are winning. They have a “closed-loop” system that allows them to see prospective students at every stage. Then, after collecting enough data, they can then understand which marketing efforts are producing the most amount of enrollments.
Imagine being greeted every morning with a fresh report that shows you the exact number of students enrolled for the upcoming term – segmented by the marketing channel and campaign directly attributed to this total.
If you know how many enrolled students came from a specific channel and how much you spent on it, you then have what you need to calculate a key metric: Cost Per Enrolled Student (CPES).
When you begin to get to this level of data, you will quickly find that previous assumptions made based on either incomplete data or data based on an earlier funnel stage (inquiry instead of enrollment, for example) were incorrect. You can begin to see some things that looked promising from an inquiry or awareness standpoint but didn’t lead to full enrollments.
Another important metric to ascertain is student Lifetime Value (LTV). If you know this, you know your potential threshold for how much you can spend on recruiting a student and still staying profitable. Your CPES should be less than the average LTV per student. You need to know both numbers to see if you are on track or need to change your marketing approach.
Once you have the right data being tracked, predictive models can be leveraged to analyze how many students you could ultimately expect beyond what you can see today. Better yet, prescriptive insights such as media mix modeling can help you see which combination of marketing channels will most effectively lead to the outcomes you desire.
To meet enrollment goals today, you have to up your game and make data-driven decisions. Many schools are wondering how or looking for ways to do this. Lucky for you, we at VisionPoint have spent the last several years creating a new solution, Enrollment Drive, which does precisely that. We’re on a mission to help higher ed institutions succeed.
Attend our webinar "The Enrollment Growth Pivot" on February 22, 2022, to learn more.