Student recruitment is a significant strategic goal for all kinds of institutions in the higher education sector, be it for-profit, not-for-profit, or community colleges. It’s a fact that on the one hand, worldwide demand for higher education has gone up in the information millennium and the years preceding it, while on the other the institutions vying for these students have also increased in numbers.
Digital mediums to attract students have emerged and become prominent, thus prompting universities and colleges to deploy digital media-based recruitment strategies to maintain and grow their student bodies. This obviously means a noticeable shift towards increased reliance on software and IT for their recruitment and admissions needs. There is no debate about the success of their efforts.
Students in the digital world are hyper-connected and many aspects of their lives are inevitably linked to technology, and the most effective way to engage and nurture relationships with them is through online digital platforms. Students become aware of their higher education options on their own in today’s digital world. Digital marketing strategies are vital for colleges to get students’ attention and then devise innovative ways to stay in touch with them.
Student inquiries emanate from multiple sources including email campaigns, user-friendly websites with easy ‘call for action’ including chat-enabled websites, social media campaigns, online and physical events etc. Online recruitment strategies produce the best results for schools hoping to reach the widest student audience, and thus identify the most qualified students. It’s critical that your student recruitment software should not become a preoccupation that takes time and money away from more personal recruitment efforts but should be complementary to cater to all needs.
When it comes to campaigns to connect to your prospective student population, ‘one size doesn’t fit all’. You must identify, engage and serve each student demographic in a customized manner, and be ready to meticulously handhold your prospects to successful enrolment. Therefore you have to plan campaigns and touchpoints for each student persona’s background, needs, and aspirations, and be able to view real-time analytics for continuous improvement.
Your digital campaigns should more often be automated so that the response to a prospect becomes incredibly responsive. Responsiveness is key to winning the student over, and your software should create this environment for you. It is also critical that the software allows you to set up marketing automation for different prospect demographics with underlying drip campaigns that’s triggered by date, time or events. And these campaigns are enabled through a variety of channels including email, text messages, mobile app push messages, phones etc.
Mobile apps have become an important part of our lives today and especially the younger generation of prospects like to communicate through their smart phones with the institutions that they are seriously considering as the final shortlist of options. You would greatly empower them if you provided them a college-branded mobile app to track their application status, with a service desk to raise questions, read FAQ’s, get campus news, be part of communities etc.
You also need a recruitment software that’s easy to integrate with other college systems to manage the application through enrolment workflows, swiftly configurable for your college’s needs, and quick to go live. We live in a world of cloud-based applications with reduced dependency on internal IT teams to setup and go-live.
Contact us to find out how modern systems such as e2s Recruit can significantly improve your inquiries base, connect with inquirers through multiple channels in a personalized manner, and convert them into applications and enrolments. Our only goal is to make your student recruitment challenges disappear, leaving you free to focus on the prospect’s individual needs.
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