(webinar slides and video👇)

Nearly 1.3 million students have disappeared from American colleges during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. That’s a stark figure we’re all too aware of.

We also know that adult learners are a vast potential pool of students — some 39 million Americans alone have attended college but left without a degree.

When it comes to engaging with potential students, it’s a leaky bucket.

Many schools have decentralized software and organizational structures. Admissions does its thing. Student affairs its own. Continuing ed or graduate program recruiting, yet another. And none of it connects with advancement overseeing alumni relations and fundraising. That's where recruitment, retainment, and remarketing comes in.

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Engagement Matters For Both Recruiting and Retention

For Gen Z especially - there is no line between what is real vs. digital. One study tells us that 4 out of 5 Gen Zers check their phone notifications one to three times per hour. Almost two out of three baby boomers do the same. 

97% of first-year students who felt valued by their colleges in 2020 said they intended to return. 

The Education Data Initiative reports that 42 percent of college dropouts leave not because they are failing but because they face financial stress.

And according to CASE less than 25% of institutions are confident in their ability to capture alumni communication engagement outside of philanthropy. 

Why is all of this important? 

There’s enormous potential to build retention efforts on top of recruiting efforts. And re-enrollment on top of retention and recruiting.

You don’t need to start from scratch at each stage. If anything, your student engagement should be better as your relationship grows over time. Better student engagement means better retention, more students, and opportunities to build affinity with alumni, another untapped pool of prospective students.

Creating Seamless Student Engagement Throughout the Entire Lifecycle

With the right technology, you can create a seamless student engagement experience where you effortlessly connect with learners and meet them where they are throughout the journey of recruiting, retention, and remarketing. 

Instead of just talking through these three stages, let’s take a look at a student, Chase, and follow his entire engagement journey—starting from his college search through graduation and beyond.

The Engagement Journey Begins with Recruitment

Chase is a first-generation student from Northern Virginia. He does well in school but plans to stay close to home, so he has a short list of schools he is considering. He and his family aren’t very familiar with the college search process, but Chase wants to feel seen and cared for as he makes his decision. Chase’s family couldn’t support a big road trip or college tour, so when his high school offered to take the junior class on a field trip to three local colleges, Chase was thrilled. On that trip, he visited a community college, a regional public institution, and one 4-year private institution. 

After that trip, there was one school that Chase preferred above the rest, and ironically enough, this school is the only one with a student-centered engagement CRM.

As you can expect, they know a bit more about him and his interests now that Chase has visited these three institutions. 

Chase and his classmates filled out a short form from their mobile devices at all three school visits when they arrived on campus. He shared:

• full name
• date of birth
• email
• phone number

Demographic Data and Behavioral Activity

The first step in personalized student engagement is getting the right demographic data and having a way to track behavioral activity. This allows you to create a sound knowledge base of where students are in their search and what they need and want to know from your college or university. This requires a well-thought-out strategy of determining and gathering communication points based on things students need to know, do, or actions they take or don’t take.  

Now Chase is early in his college search, and right after this school-sponsored trip, life got busy fast! Baseball season just started, and studying for the SAT ramped up. 

Personalized and Relevant Communication

A few days after the trip, Chase got a great email from Element University that addressed him personally and connected him to his admissions counselor. Chase fired off a quick email to her before heading to baseball practice. 

Blasts of cookie-cutter information getting mass-emailed to an entire database of prospective students no longer cut it in today’s competitive admissions environment. Other students like Chase are looking for more. We must be intentional about the student information we collect - and make sure we progressively learn a little bit more each time. 

Even with just the basic identifying information that Element University collected about Chase and his classmates, the enrollment marketing team was able to personalize and automate an email communication at scale – making sure the right admissions counselor was featured based on the demographic information on each prospect. 

A Unique Journey for Each Student’s Wants and Needs

Here’s where personalization gets fun! Now Element U can start to layer in this behavioral activity with the demographic info that they already have about Chase. They sent him a special invite to their fall open house, highlighting the criminal justice and biology faculty who would be available to chat and the special panel for student-athletes. 

Thanks to this personalized invite, Chase and his family decided to visit Element’s campus one more time. 

On that visit, Chase made the decision to apply to Element U. Waiting for him in his inbox was a personalized follow-up message that was automated from the admissions advisor he saw on the campus visit, checking in with him and giving him a link directly to the application portal. 

This completely removes the friction of needing to create a login and lets Chase get straight to work on his application. A few weeks later, he submitted his application.

Chase’s visit launched a nurture stream. You can trigger additional communications based on his interactions with any following emails, texts, and even web pages, like encouraging the application at the right time in the process all to maintain the level student engagement that converts.

This is what we mean when we say right student, right message, right time.

Fast forward a few months – Chase has been accepted to Element University! 

He gets access to his very own personalized microsite that only shows him information that is relevant to his journey at Element U and keeps him engaged and on track every step of the way until the first day of class!

Having tools like:

• forms with conditional fields
• landing pages that require no coding to build
• segments to facilitate personalization
• workflows to automate all your communications and internal management
• and microsites that maintain that personalized student engagement for a one-stop-shop type of experience 

…are what make the difference. 

Besides being his initial school of choice, this was the school that just simply made it easy to go to college and completely removed the friction points for Chase. 

A Frictionless Experience to Increase Retention

Fast forward to Chase’s Freshman year at Element U. He lives off-campus, commutes to class, and works part-time at a grocery store. Combine all these new changes with a challenging statistics class, and Chase gets a D. As a result, his GPA slips to 2.8. 

Because Element U uses Element451, which can integrate with the SIS during the entire student journey, the university automatically triggers a workflow that creates a communication plan. It sends two emails and a text message to Chase, both checking in on him and specifically sending a call to action to schedule an appointment with his academic advisor through the Events module. 

Having a centralized engagement CRM for every step in the student journey gives you the power and freedom to customize what defines an “at-risk” student and set up data points and automation to engage with those students when they need it most. You can also notify the folks on your teams when they need to be made aware. 

Because of this automated intervention, Chase is now on the path to success. He went from a major in Criminal Justice into a Business Administration degree, scheduled more frequent check-ins with his academic advisor, and made a game plan for ways to strategically raise his GPA from this point forward.

All this information is stored on Chase’s student profile and can remain there for future reference throughout his journey at Element University.

As a result of these intentional systems and automated communications within the platform, Chase brought up his GPA. As he enters his senior year, he receives an invite to a career fair which leads to a fantastic internship opportunity at a new tech start-up.

Nurturing Retainment and Remarketing Beyond Graduation

We have finally arrived at Chase’s senior year. But senior year and graduation aren’t the ends of the road.

Due to the intentionality of the advising team and the centralized engagement CRM that Element University is using, Chase has a much stronger GPA of 3.5 and has finally gotten the hang of juggling everyday responsibilities and college. 

Since we have been gathering data, activity, and knowledge about Chase along his entire student journey, we can use the system to segment students who qualify for specific programs based on the course data we bring from the SIS or LMS. 

As we do this, we can inform Chase that he now qualifies for the 4+1 track with the MBA Graduate program. 

Because Chase now meets these criteria, the platform will enroll him into a nurture campaign for remarketing that offers him a waived GRE and application fee to start the graduate program immediately. This communication is then followed up by inviting him to register for recent alumni events upon graduation to maintain student engagement.

The Streamlined Experience Today’s Learners Expect

At this point in the educational journey, this is the type of communication and interaction that Chase just simply expects. It’s hard, if not impossible, to create a seamless action-based journey experience for students with a completely fragmented technological footprint. 

You can’t create that journey if you need to use 15 different solutions to nurture students. Naturally, seams and friction points are bound to arise within any single interaction on the journey.

As we are used to it, the funnel process is linear and smooth. But the digital student journey is messy and circuitous. What they have in common is the overlap between the website and your CRM platform.

To see how a streamlined tech approach can help you build a better student-centered experience, book a personalized demo of Element451 today.