As enrollment marketers, our most important goal is to help find right-fit students for our institutions.

Our experience tells us that, outside of one-to-one personal interactions, the most effective approach to student recruitment lies at the intersection of data, content, and automation. And there's no data more valuable than the actions our prospective students take on our respective platforms.

Behavioral marketing empowers us to put data into action. Essentially, behavioral marketing means intelligently responding to student behaviors as they progress through their journey so that you can increase engagement and ultimately enrollment. But how do you do it and how do you do it at scale?

What Data Do We Need and How Do We Use It?

To properly engage and connect with students, we first need to know who they are and what their needs and goals are. It’s not enough to make sweeping generalizations and communicate only one broad message to all prospective students.

That’s where personas come into play. Persona modeling helps us figure out what data we need in order to understand our audience on a deeper level. This way, we can engage them in the ways that matter and make sense to them individually. 

To create personas, first we need:

• Demographic data: who are they?
• Psychographic data: what are they thinking?
• Behavioral data: what are they doing and when?

Once the appropriate data is collected and we begin to place students in unique persona buckets, we can use their behavioral data to create unique enrollment experiences that are personalized, meaningful, and stand out from other schools. 

How RIT Certified Uses Behavioral Data to Better Engage Students

If you’re on the internet you’ve experienced behavioral marketing. It’s what ensures you see multiple ads for a specific shoe website you briefly looked at. Behavioral marketing is all about reciprocating an action (you browse for shoes online) with a digital solution (an Instagram ad for the same shoes will remind you of how nice they’d look on you) to get you to perform another action (buy the shoes).

The key to behavioral marketing in higher ed is having a unique response for each individual student action in order to get students moving along the enrollment journey.

RIT Certified has been using Element451 to hone in on behavioral marketing and scale their responses with automated workflows and triggers tied to unique student actions such as:

Student registers for an event  → Trigger confirmation email

RIT Certified uses Element451 to create event pages that are set up to automatically trigger personalized confirmation emails that keep students engaged. Although this is an easy win, it can show students that their actions matter and that you care about their attendance. 

Student views a page → Trigger email with more information

By adding an Element Pixel to all of their web pages, RIT Certified is able to track students’ viewed pages or clicked links. With this behavioral data, they are able to trigger an email based on the student’s interest and actions on the website. Through this response, RIT Certified not only shows students that they see them as more than just a number, but they are able to help them move along the admission journey by clearly pointing out the next steps on their unique educational journey.

Student submits a landing page form  → Enroll the student in a nurture stream and create follow-up tasks

Similar to triggering emails based on the webpage viewed, Element451 helps RIT Certified nurture prospective students by enrolling them in emails and text messages that are relevant to their interests. By categorizing students into persona groups based on their intended area of study, RIT can create specific streams of content and create follow-up tasks that speak specifically to that group of students.

The best part is, none of this has to be done manually. With templates set up by persona groups, it’s easy to duplicate messaging and personalize it to fit each individual student’s needs and goals.

Personalize Your Enrollment Journey with Behavioral Marketing

Looking at the traditional enrollment funnel through a new lens can help us see the many opportunities we have to influence students along the way. 

By mapping out your institution’s enrollment journey, brainstorming touchpoints along the way, and implementing a modern enrollment-marketing CRM platform like Element451, you can start taking advantage of behavioral marketing to better connect and engage your prospective students.

To see more from Engage Summit 2022 visit our video library.