Reputation and profile, available programs, organisational structures, systems, policies and processes, staff capacity and capability differ at every institution. Student recruitment objectives may be broadly similar from one institution to another (increase numbers, fewer more productive partnerships and channels, improve or maintain compliance, recruit quality students, reduce cost of acquisition, improve customer experience, streamline processes etc.), but the road map for achieving success rarely is. Institutional readiness to support proactive recruitment strategies is a significant variable. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to improving student recruitment performance, but there are some fundamentals that are critical to the success or otherwise of an institution’s recruitment strategy.
Data
Where do students come from and how can we reach them? What do they want to study and where do they want to study? It’s difficult to answer these and similar critical questions without access to good data, but the data alone are not enough. Business intelligence and market research are key to developing targeted recruitment strategies, and to measuring performance and success. The best recruitment operations are always underpinned by access to data together with the ability to analyse data.
Lead generation (or, give me something to work with!)
Q: How many enquirers or applicants to I need to get one enrolled student?
A: About 4.5 applicants from 25 enquirers.
Data
Where do students come from and how can we reach them? What do they want to study and where do they want to study? It’s difficult to answer these and similar critical questions without access to good data, but the data alone are not enough. Business intelligence and market research are key to developing targeted recruitment strategies, and to measuring performance and success. The best recruitment operations are always underpinned by access to data together with the ability to analyse data.
Lead generation (or, give me something to work with!)
Q: How many enquirers or applicants to I need to get one enrolled student?
A: About 4.5 applicants from 25 enquirers.
And those are just the average numbers. If you are in the volume game, consider generating (and managing) 25,000 enquirers, to achieve 4,500 applicants, to commence 1,000 students in a given year. Consider also that your 25,000 enquirers might require 4 or 5 interactions or exchanges each during the enquiry process and you either need some help or a good lie down. Visibility, physically on the ground in source markets, via agent networks, and in cyberspace, directly impacts your institution’s ability to generate interest from prospective students. Once you have generated interest, you have something to work with. But can you handle the traffic - can your resources, systems and processes manage the volume effectively?
Go digital
A comprehensive digital strategy should be applied to every stage in the student lifecycle – from attraction, engagement, nurturing, conversion and enrolment through to teaching, graduation and alumni. Easier said than done. As global internet connectivity improves and smartphone adoption increases so too does the opportunity to reach prospective students more efficiently, wherever in the world they may be. The challenge for recruiters is to remain current with digital trends, including being able to engage credibly with a young and tech-savvy target audience across diverse markets. This requires an understanding of language preferences, search engine favourites, device popularity, social media trends and cultural inclinations, and how these impact attraction and conversion. A country-specific digital recruitment strategy might comprise:
Go digital
A comprehensive digital strategy should be applied to every stage in the student lifecycle – from attraction, engagement, nurturing, conversion and enrolment through to teaching, graduation and alumni. Easier said than done. As global internet connectivity improves and smartphone adoption increases so too does the opportunity to reach prospective students more efficiently, wherever in the world they may be. The challenge for recruiters is to remain current with digital trends, including being able to engage credibly with a young and tech-savvy target audience across diverse markets. This requires an understanding of language preferences, search engine favourites, device popularity, social media trends and cultural inclinations, and how these impact attraction and conversion. A country-specific digital recruitment strategy might comprise:
- dedicated landing pages or country-specific microsites
- investment in SEO and paid search
- lead generation partnerships
- country-specific content, including blogs, chat and social media
Now do that in your top ten markets. Top three? Have fun. The upside is that a digital approach to marketing, lead generation and recruitment might enable you to divert scarce human resources to focus on high-value high-return applicant management efforts at a later stage in the recruitment process, when prospects have a greater likelihood of conversion than at the enquiry stage.
App-arently the future
A 2014 Nielson report confirms what we probably already knew, that smartphone users are increasingly reliant on their devices when researching, comparing and purchasing goods and services online, including education. This is an important consideration as we develop a better understanding of Gen Y students’ purchasing habits. Institutions that are not discoverable, responsive to devices, engaging or personal will be overlooked by prospective students who will favour more accessible options. Students, like anyone, are looking to simplify and streamline their lives. An institutional app that follows the student from initial contact through to enrolment, graduation and beyond will become the benchmark of exceptional student and alumni engagement.
A 2014 Nielson report confirms what we probably already knew, that smartphone users are increasingly reliant on their devices when researching, comparing and purchasing goods and services online, including education. This is an important consideration as we develop a better understanding of Gen Y students’ purchasing habits. Institutions that are not discoverable, responsive to devices, engaging or personal will be overlooked by prospective students who will favour more accessible options. Students, like anyone, are looking to simplify and streamline their lives. An institutional app that follows the student from initial contact through to enrolment, graduation and beyond will become the benchmark of exceptional student and alumni engagement.
A web of intrigue, or an intriguing website?
Everyone is trying to convert prospects into enrolled students. Most businesses fail to convert anywhere from 90-98% of hard earned website traffic, so obviously your prospects aren’t just interacting with you. You’re competing for their attention with everyone else. How can you convert an interested prospective student before your competitor does?
Your website underpins your entire online presence - all roads must lead here. A website audit is a great place to start. Understanding your prospects’ behaviour whilst on your site is critical and can be done via Google Analytics. Here you can see your site’s wins and losses, and where you have opportunities to improve web performance. It’s all about stickability. Are you complementing your campaigns with dedicated landing pages? Can prospective students find the information they need, quickly and easily? Can visitors make an enquiry via web-form or chat?
Go it alone or BFFs?
If you want to go it alone, stop reading this now and get back to work – there’s too much to do. Otherwise, keep reading while we consider some partnerships you need to activate to help you achieve your goals.
International offices tend to focus on their Best Foreign Friends – recruitment agents, in-country representatives or partner institutions overseas. Of course they are important, and you need a strategy to manage those relationships and monitor performance. But there’s some important stakeholders closer to home you need to cosy up to.
Since you never have enough resources to do everything you’d like to, your Best Faculty Friends should be your first port of call. Ultimately that’s where the students end up anyway, so figure out a way to utlilise faculty resources to their benefit and yours. Devolved structures within universities often mean that international offices have not enough or little direct control over the marketing resources required to develop, implement and support specialised international marketing and recruitment strategies, so it’s not just faculty friends you need to cultivate. “Who manages our Instagram account, again?” Central marketing teams should be besties with their international office colleagues anyway – you’re all on the same side, aren’t you?
Program focus
One way to win over your BFF’s in the academy is to focus on program recruitment. There’s at least a couple of ways to go about it.
The first will require an understanding of demand at the program level, and some neat low-cost promotional strategies, but that’s where digital recruitment steps up to the plate. Virtual fairs, utilising your prospect pool, drawing information from your website, and driving interest through your key recruitment channels, facilitated by real time advising by faculty, can be done from your desktop, with not an airport lounge in sight. In-country events can also be organised - obviously more expensive – but however you go about it, targeted program level campaigns can be highly effective.
Another approach is cohort recruitment from overseas partner institutions into specified programs. This is a step beyond stock standard articulation arrangements, and requires a solid relationship and shared objectives with your partner, but can be highly effective not only in increasing numbers, but also balancing market shifts that impact retail (i.e. agent) recruitment activity. And the most successful program collaborations lead over time to spin off collaborations between partners including two-way student mobility, staff mobility and research collaborations. Where do I sign up?
Process improvements
We’ve hinted at this already – no point generating lots of interest if you can’t respond efficiently and effectively to convert prospects into students. This applies to managing enquiries and applications, getting offers back to applicants quickly, following up offers that haven’t been accepted, processing acceptances and starting the visa application process. When was the last time you conducted a process audit? And what about your BFF’s in the academy? Encouraged by your program level campaigns, are they working diligently to turn around the more difficult applications so you can get a timely response back to students and agents? Or are they buried under a pile of term papers? Can you help them and help yourself by strategically utilising automation technology to streamline your conversion and engagement with prospects?
So that’s a lot to think about if you want to improve student recruitment performance. Did we mention having a plan (which is where you need to start)? Hang on, I think there’s one in this drawer.
Stephen Connelly Stella Haros
GlobalEd Services Blue Rock Concepts
www.globaledservices.com www.bluerockconcepts.com.au
This article appeared in the July 2016 edition of the AIRC Insider
Everyone is trying to convert prospects into enrolled students. Most businesses fail to convert anywhere from 90-98% of hard earned website traffic, so obviously your prospects aren’t just interacting with you. You’re competing for their attention with everyone else. How can you convert an interested prospective student before your competitor does?
Your website underpins your entire online presence - all roads must lead here. A website audit is a great place to start. Understanding your prospects’ behaviour whilst on your site is critical and can be done via Google Analytics. Here you can see your site’s wins and losses, and where you have opportunities to improve web performance. It’s all about stickability. Are you complementing your campaigns with dedicated landing pages? Can prospective students find the information they need, quickly and easily? Can visitors make an enquiry via web-form or chat?
Go it alone or BFFs?
If you want to go it alone, stop reading this now and get back to work – there’s too much to do. Otherwise, keep reading while we consider some partnerships you need to activate to help you achieve your goals.
International offices tend to focus on their Best Foreign Friends – recruitment agents, in-country representatives or partner institutions overseas. Of course they are important, and you need a strategy to manage those relationships and monitor performance. But there’s some important stakeholders closer to home you need to cosy up to.
Since you never have enough resources to do everything you’d like to, your Best Faculty Friends should be your first port of call. Ultimately that’s where the students end up anyway, so figure out a way to utlilise faculty resources to their benefit and yours. Devolved structures within universities often mean that international offices have not enough or little direct control over the marketing resources required to develop, implement and support specialised international marketing and recruitment strategies, so it’s not just faculty friends you need to cultivate. “Who manages our Instagram account, again?” Central marketing teams should be besties with their international office colleagues anyway – you’re all on the same side, aren’t you?
Program focus
One way to win over your BFF’s in the academy is to focus on program recruitment. There’s at least a couple of ways to go about it.
The first will require an understanding of demand at the program level, and some neat low-cost promotional strategies, but that’s where digital recruitment steps up to the plate. Virtual fairs, utilising your prospect pool, drawing information from your website, and driving interest through your key recruitment channels, facilitated by real time advising by faculty, can be done from your desktop, with not an airport lounge in sight. In-country events can also be organised - obviously more expensive – but however you go about it, targeted program level campaigns can be highly effective.
Another approach is cohort recruitment from overseas partner institutions into specified programs. This is a step beyond stock standard articulation arrangements, and requires a solid relationship and shared objectives with your partner, but can be highly effective not only in increasing numbers, but also balancing market shifts that impact retail (i.e. agent) recruitment activity. And the most successful program collaborations lead over time to spin off collaborations between partners including two-way student mobility, staff mobility and research collaborations. Where do I sign up?
Process improvements
We’ve hinted at this already – no point generating lots of interest if you can’t respond efficiently and effectively to convert prospects into students. This applies to managing enquiries and applications, getting offers back to applicants quickly, following up offers that haven’t been accepted, processing acceptances and starting the visa application process. When was the last time you conducted a process audit? And what about your BFF’s in the academy? Encouraged by your program level campaigns, are they working diligently to turn around the more difficult applications so you can get a timely response back to students and agents? Or are they buried under a pile of term papers? Can you help them and help yourself by strategically utilising automation technology to streamline your conversion and engagement with prospects?
So that’s a lot to think about if you want to improve student recruitment performance. Did we mention having a plan (which is where you need to start)? Hang on, I think there’s one in this drawer.
Stephen Connelly Stella Haros
GlobalEd Services Blue Rock Concepts
www.globaledservices.com www.bluerockconcepts.com.au
This article appeared in the July 2016 edition of the AIRC Insider
RSS Feed