Relationship-building with students is critical for your university to reach the enrollment numbers that it has set. Without personalized relationships in the recruitment process, students are likely to move on to another university that makes more of an effort to reach out and connect with them as individuals.
But how you can you do that for each and every prospective student out there? They are all so different and have different dreams and backgrounds. It’s not impossible, although it looks like it from the surface. So what do you have to do to reach and connect with your students where they are?
CRM for universities is the answer and the way forward. Customer relationship management is no longer just for retail companies. Reaching individual prospective students and telling them how you are integral to their futures is required. Especially, if you are going to help your organization stand out among other universities that offer similar programs and benefits.
Students today have more access to information about the institutions they want to attend than ever before. They can switch back and forth between tabs about programs, class sizes, athletics, and more in seconds. They can close those tabs from the schools that don’t resonate with them on a personal level just as quickly. To be competitive and get those students to apply to your school, you have to show what you have to offer by telling a coherent story of your university’s brand.
Your Brand Story
Your university has a history, a vision for the future, and a story to tell. Its areas of cutting-edge research, core values, and other aspects of it that set it apart from other universities are what you want your prospective students to know about. Weaving a coherent and cohesive story together, that is the same across all of your social media outlets, website, and your in-person recruitment efforts is pivotal to getting students interested, applying, and then actually enrolling in your school.
You have to deliver the message of your brand similar to a retail brand to attract new customers. Students want to know what will engage them and interest them about your school. Telling a story of your school in a compelling way through a CRM for universities can be the central tool that helps you convey that message effectively.
You first need to know what your students want from a school. What motivates them? What are they passionate about? A CRM for universities program can give you just that information. You can change up your brand’s message to meet their needs as you gather data from your various recruitment campaigns and efforts.
A CRM lets you track data and analytics from your recruiting and marketing efforts so that it strikes a chord with prospective students. They want to know what makes your institution better than all the others they could apply to, and a CRM is what your university needs to get potential future students to apply there.
What Can a CRM for Universities Do?
Most colleges reach just about 34 percent of their enrollment goals. With a CRM that conveys the school’s brand to potential applicants, that statistic can improve significantly.
Drip Marketing
One of the most helpful tools in CRM is drip marketing. It provides a visual workflow builder to lay out the paths to conversion you can build with your future students. When an event starts off your recruiting department’s workflow, a recruitment officer can send out an initial welcome email. Then they can send it again with a different subject if it goes unopened.
Lead Management
Another choice is to update the lead to warm if the potential student opens the email. Then the recruiter can see where all possible recruits are in their application process, and they’ll know more about how they’re feeling about possibly moving forward with the application process. This empowers a recruiter to try different methods of reaching out to them if the student seems receptive.
Also, with automated funnel movement, you can update lead stages automatically when a trigger event occurs. The admissions team can get instant notifications of an event that could lead to enrollment. These types of tools let the department act immediately to build that critical relationship with a possible future student.
Email Marketing
Additionally, you can use email marketing to build and nurture relationships with students who are not at the point where they want to have real-time conversations about enrolling. You can build emails from our drag-and-drop builder and use several templates to personalize content to various email lists. You can create a series of emails that can be sent automatically to leads at different stages of the enrollment process. This helps keep them engaged and wanting to learn more about the organization.
You can up conversion rates by specifically targeting particular email lists with certain emails at the right time in the recruitment process. With the analytics available for our email tool, you can replicate a future email that is successful in getting engagements.
List Segmentation
One of the best features of our particular CRM for universities is that you can create personalized relationships with future students through email lists that reflect their interests, activities, and demographic characteristics. This empowers you to show what your college can offer them. Smart list segmentation allows you to perform custom list actions, like sending an email to all of the leads on a list or even to a call center that auto-dials possible future students.
Landing Pages
Use our well-designed landing pages on your site to engage potential students. Your organization keeps its website domain, but we host the landing pages. Autoresponders grab potential students’ attention and keep them engaged with the promise of a real person reaching out to them soon to answer any questions they have.
Integrations
You can integrate our CRM with all of your other marketing apps and tools so you can capture leads from many sources and then sync the data with our CRM program. This reduces response times to future students, and you can create and build more meaningful conversations and relationships, which turns into more enrollments. Analyze all of your data from your various marketing outlets with our integration tools so that you can see emerging trends, try new ways to reach your audience, and repeat what is successful.
Dashboards
Your student recruitment team can see their schedule for the day on their dashboard each morning. They will know who to follow up with and when. They will receive email and phone alerts to contact individual potential applicants. All conversations, whether phone, email, or chat, are recorded in one place so that recruitment officers can remember each person they have communicated with and plan the next steps as they guide each person towards enrollment.
In conclusion
Marketing and recruitment come together in our powerful LeadSquared CRM for universities. Your admissions and recruitment teams will improve communication and relationship-building with future students, and it keeps marketers and recruiters on the same page. This connected system reduces costs, workload, response time, and makes it easier to work smarter, not harder.
