enrollment management best practices

enrollment management best practices

Institutions are facing a heavy decline in enrollments, and it has nothing to do with a lack of potential applicants. The reason is far more complex and multi-dimensional than you’d think – these colleges or universities need to work on better enrollment management strategies and follow through with leads to keep potential applicants engaged. Implementing the best enrollment management practices is the key to engaging with qualified applicants. Here are some of the best strategies.

Coaching Admission Representatives

Your admissions representatives work to represent your institute’s values while interacting with prospective enrollments. You need to train them on how they can provide potential enrollments with relevant information and answer their questions.

Most importantly, they have to be trained on how to quickly and effectively communicate the admissions process to students who may be new to the idea of it. Admissions reps make calls as well, so it’s crucial that you coach them on speaking with teenagers.

  • Train your reps to give lively training sessions on admissions
  • Train them for live calls with mock calls before letting them go live

Sourcing Your Leads

Delegate crucial tasks to other members of your admissions department, for instance, lead sourcing. This allows you to find qualified leads for programs at a much faster rate. All institutes have a different idea for what constitutes a qualified lead, so make sure that you define them to agencies according to your admissions plan.

Provide them detailed information so they know which indicators to track if they want to source qualified leads.

Qualifying Leads

Engaging with unqualified leads can render the enrollment management process unproductive and wastes precious time. Make sure that your admissions process is only forwarding qualified leads to your representatives.

They can determine whether a lead is qualified or not by sending a simple email campaign first or taking a survey. This can prevent them from wasting energy and time on countless unqualified leads.

Clean Up Duplicated Leads

If you aren’t regularly filtering your leads, there’s a chance that they’ve fallen victim to duplication. How? Imagine this: a prospect applicant may fill in an inquiry form on your website and may fill the same form again when it’s provided via an ad campaign or third-party vendor.

You may end up with a duplicated lead entry. Your admissions representatives may be putting in extra effort to convert two promising leads that are actually the same person. If that isn’t disappointing, we don’t know what is.

Make sure that such entries are cleaned out on a regular basis to prevent mismanagement when making calls.

Reporting on the Enrollment Inquiries

You need to employ a proper system that pushes reports and updates on qualified leads. This helps the admissions department track conversions. With an operational reporting strategy, your team can track down any leads that are stuck in the funnel by engaging with them. This includes sending an email on relevant dates, such as the day they are set to get their SAT results.

Investing in a Lead Management Software

Without a systematic approach to organizing your qualified leads and tracking them until conversion, the process of engaging with them can slow down, which affects enrollments. In this situation, admissions departments need to rely on proper lead management software like LeadSquared. You can check out our blog to know what is an education CRM and why the educational organizational need it.

This enhances productivity because admissions officers can work on increasing engagement with potential enrollments instead of focusing on routine tasks. LeadSquared allows your admissions department to track leads with a visual dashboard. Moreover, it prioritizes tasks so their work for the day is already planned out when they start the day. LeadSquared helps you perform enrollment and marketing tasks all in one platform like deduplication, email campaigns, workflows, inquiry distribution, etc.

Video Emails

Email campaigns are part of any institute’s enrollment-increasing strategy but very few manage to make it engaging enough. Sending emails to qualified leads with captivating video content is the way to go if you’re aiming for conversions. This boosts your visibility among leads, which increases the probability of your institute being a lead’s first choice.

Implement Social Media Retargeting

Social media retargeting works by tracking down users who showed interest in your institute’s website or social media accounts but may have gone cold before making a decision. With this approach, you retarget the user with specific and relevant content. One of the best marketing ideas to increase college enrollment.

For instance, prospect applicants who disappear while looking up scholarship opportunities on your institute’s website can be retargeted with content specific ads about financial assistance and scholarships.

Automation

Connecting individual aspects of the enrollment process in the timeline, such as emails, workflows, and retargeting helps increase productivity. You can set up automated workflows to create your custom inquiry distribution and lead prioritization. As a result, your admissions officers get more done in lesser time.

In addition, automating email campaigns removes the need for admissions officers to send emails individually. You can launch targeted email campaigns and automated them depending on your enrollment process.

List Segmentation

Aside from informational, engaging emails, you should be sending dedicated emails and scheduling calls. Then, segment them based on the user’s responses to emails or their activity on the website. It creates a timeline that explains how a user’s interest in enrolling increases over time.  You can even assign dedicated admission representatives depending on the type of student inquiries or lead stage.

Awesome Content Strategy

Don’t just spam potential leads with emails about the admissions procedure and selling points of your college or university – deliver engaging content that they’ll want to read anyway. Whether you give them tips on writing the best college essay or how to prepare for their college interview, all this content will be relevant to the prospect’s enrollment.

Publish infographics on your social media pages and work on a charismatic online reputation that resonates with teenagers.

Institutes need to put these management practices into effect if they intend to increase their enrollment numbers. It looks like a lot to change before the next admission season but starting somewhere is a significant step in the right direction.

Want to see LeadSquared in action?