Sarah Privette, coordinator of student recruitment at Durham Tech, shares the impact of Element451's chat feature and event templates in enhancing communication and tracking data for recruitment efforts at Durham Tech. Read on to learn more about the importance of modern digital marketing and how Element451 helps Durham Tech reach a wider audience to move prospective students along the recruitment journey and beyond.

Durham Tech's Most Loved Features

• Insights + Analytics
• Event hosting + management
• Packs pre-built campaign library
• Marketing automation

What challenges were you trying to solve prior to using the Element451 platform?

So many moons ago, I had actually thought about going back to school to earn my degree. During that time, I had actually looked into a community college, attended the college information session, and met with an admissions counselor who walked me through how to fill out the application. When I went home, I realized I had to go to work, and I never actually submitted the application.

And I think with a CRM like Element 451, it's a really great tool where you can use automation and send reminder emails and have that personal touch and have that high touch that maybe those students who are busy and have different priorities and are juggling different tasks. It reminds them and gives them that helpful touch to allow them to go back to school and just remind them that they're able to do it.

So we, as a community college, serve a ton of different populations. And each different population has their own set of specific and unique needs. Through automated reminders, event hosting and also just keeping track of different metrics and seeing how far students either go through the application from a prospective student to admitted student to enrolled student to a matriculated student to a graduated student.

And from there we can really use what we see through gathering data to really drive our decisions moving forward, to boost our full time enrollment and really help the students while at the same time meeting them where they're at.

How are you using Element451 to engage with students better?

I would say right now, our most used feature is the chat feature. We absolutely love it. We're able to interact with prospective students in real-time, create profiles that we'll be able to track that data and be able to help them throughout their journey.

We are also starting to implement Events and using certain templates within Element451 to create information sessions and hopefully our open houses soon so that we'll be able to see who comes to our events and how we're able to then convert those prospective students into fully enrolled students.

We're working with building the email communications and templates right now for all of our different departments, working with financial aid, working with student recruitment, working with our advisors, working with some of our other specialized programs too, within the college. And we're hoping to use the templates to not only create email communications, but also event communications, as well.

We're going to be able to not only gather and collect the data, but analyze it in a sense that shows us "what are the most popular programs? Where are students graduating from the most where are students entering in? Do we have any attrition? Do we have any melt? And where is that happening?" And then that data will really help drive our decisions and really help potentially allocate costs so that we can boost all of our programs to really meet their full potential in that sense.

What would you say to a colleague interested in Element451?

If you're looking for a new CRM, I would highly recommend Element451 so that you'll be able to provide that high-touch experience to prospective students and really help them along the pipeline from prospective to enrolled.

To see how Element451 can streamline every aspect of your enrollment management and marketing communication, book a demo today.