5 Ways That Marketing Automation Can Help Increase Enrollment

By DANIEL LUISE – March 16, 2018

Higher education is an extremely competitive space with most students applying to a handful of different colleges. If you’re a higher education institution looking for ways to improve your enrolment, marketing automation is here to help.

The key to improving your enrollment is to consistently deliver the right messages to the right students. Automated marketing solutions are ideally suited to this task. Here are five ways that marketing automation can help your institution start seeing an increase in enrollment.

1. Track prospective students based on their behavior and interests

A prospective student regularly checks your website for upcoming sporting events. What do they want?

If you haven’t been tracking this, you’ll never know. A key benefit of automated marketing solutions is that they help you track the behavior of prospective students. They can also help you identify a student’s interests. Perhaps a student who regularly checks the news of one particular department on your website has an interested in enrolling.

Tracking the behavior and interests of prospective students can ultimately give you an insight into why certain students don’t enroll and also help you identify highly interested students. This lets you focus on providing more information, help, and support to students who are more likely to enroll.

2. Deliver re-engagement sequences to maintain student interest

A prospective student who has been regularly opening your emails suddenly stops. What happened?

Automated marketing systems can automatically ‘tag’ students who haven’t been engaged in your campaigns and then start a new re-engagement sequence that will help to maintain their interest. If they all of a sudden stopped checking your emails, they’ve probably made a decision elsewhere. So, find out when or where you lost them in the enrollment journey, so you can correct it for the next student.

3. Tailor the information you send to students

What do prospective students want to study at your institution?

Bombarding a potential History major with sporting event updates might not be the best move.

Although some students are undecided when they enroll or even decide to change their major, a lot of students have decided or have an idea of what they want to study. Automated marketing solutions will make it easier for you to send prospective students only the information they want. This can help you identify their interests and tailor your follow-ups.

Did someone attend the fair for the school of management? Provide content about a recent business competition or opportunity your current students just participated in.

4. Make the best use of your marketing budget

Do you have an ideal student in mind?

Time and money spent on marketing campaigns are just wasted if you are trying to target candidates who have little chance of enrolling or succeeding at your institution. Automated marketing software enables you to make the best use of your marketing budget by honing in on the best candidates. How?

This software lets you create a ‘score’ for each prospective student by combining their GPA, test scores and signs of engagement such as link clicks and campaign opens. This lets you predict their success and helps your admissions counselors stay focused on the students who are statistically most likely to enroll.

With this “student scoring,” you can separate students into various groups automatically, based on the information you have about them. Making it is easier to engage with and learn about your students.

5. Free up your time

Do your admissions counselors waste time on menial tasks such as copy and pasting announcements into email campaigns?

Automated marketing solutions can free up your counselor’s time and let them concentrate on the most productive tasks. Marketing programs can monitor any RSS feed, pull the content and automatically create and send announcements to your students. They can do this whenever you update your website.

With the right marketing automation tool, you can easily have templated emails ready to go out with a simple text change or image swap. No more needing to create emails from scratch every time you want to make a simple announcement or send a reminder.

Marketing automation makes attracting and enrolling students cheaper, simpler and faster. The key lies in customization. You need to send highly customized messages to your prospective students and then monitor their behavior and engagement. By tracking whether students decide to enroll or not, you can identify areas for improvement and increase the effectiveness of your admissions department.