Learning Center

Since COVID-19 wreaked havoc on every facet of life, colleges and universities have experienced an enrollment decline of about 1 million students, which is more than 5 percent in a little more than two years.¹ 

Strategic Enrollment Management (or SEM) has never been more critical for institutions that are working to attract the right students, balance academics with the needs of the market, and focus on long-term student success—especially in today’s environment where increasing numbers of students are ditching college altogether. 

Your higher ed admissions team has an appointment scheduled with an interested prospective student … now what? 

Will the prospective student answer the call when the appointment time rolls around? Does the prospective student understand the importance of the call? Does the prospective student recognize that this call will help them determine if the institution is a right fit? 

Many teams simply wait for the scheduled appointment time, perhaps automating a few reminder emails, while hoping for the best. 

Why do only 8% of our leads convert into students?

We spent an enormous amount of energy and resources on generating new leads for my admissions team. So what happened to the other 92% of prospective students we generated? Why didn’t they enroll and what can my admissions team do to increase these conversion rates?

It may not seem obvious, but the request for information (RFI) forms on your college or university’s website can make or break your new student enrollment goals.

Each of your RFI forms is one of the first interactions a prospective student has with your institution. They should: 

• Be easy to locate and clearly marked
• Be quick and easy to navigate and submit
• Collect only pertinent information 
• Have correct information and be functional

The information gathered from RFIs on your site is crucial to converting website visitors into active inquiries. If the RFI isn’t functioning properly, your outreach is affected, and new students are lost. 

Institutions have thousands of leads and wonder why they don’t turn into students. The answer is that the institution doesn’t build a relationship with each lead. Colleges and universities flood prospects with email, one-off calls, and print pieces designed to inform the prospect about the institution. When there’s no consistent, systematic approach to building a relationship with those prospects, then the “relationship” that’s built is simply transactional (e.g., Apply Now! Complete your FAFSA!). Think about it. In your regular life, that me-centered approach is not how you get a date. It’s not how you make a friend. How does it make sense, then, for one-way, transactional communication to create enrollments? EB knows that this just isn’t the most effective way to create long-lasting relationships.   

Here at Enrollment Builders, we’ve worked with many traditional and non-traditional institutions, and we know what it takes to engage your prospective students. In the end, you need to provide each prospective student with an engaging, consistent experience. To stabilize the admissions funnel and ensure that no interested prospective student is missed, Enrollment Builders has created cadences.

You work hard to generate leads so your institution can grow.

Despite the increases in marketing budget and lead volume (not to mention the long hours you’ve poured into the project), you’re still struggling with your enrollment goals.

The truth is, we didn’t realize at first how working “aged” leads would make such a huge impact for our clients who are trying to grow academic programs. We had a thought that if we combined two established practices, aged lead follow-up and outbound contact strategies, it would redefine the way our higher education Contact Center operates. It wasn't until we saw it in practice that we noticed how significant of a game-changer it was for our partners. By placing the prospective student's experience at the forefront of our strategic proven process, we uncovered a whole new way to drive growth.

Jennifer Goode / CEO of Enrollment Builders

In a consumer-oriented society, each of us are bombarded daily with not-so-subtle requests being made of us. Commercials shout at us to contact companies for their services, billboards implore us to rent them with clever ways of articulating their visibility, and online embedded pixels provide ads that remind us of items we explored days and weeks before in hopes that we will reconsider purchasing them.

You and your staff have been working tirelessly to create great content that is relevant, fun, and shows how well your institution matches the needs of the prospective students you are trying to reach.