Learning Center

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

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. 

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.

In our expanding marketing work with institutions around the country, Enrollment Builders’ consultants have a unique opportunity to get an insider’s view of what many colleges and universities do right and — sometimes more importantly — the recurring tactical mistakes that can lead to chronically underperforming programs. As Search Engine Optimization (SEO) becomes an even more crucial part of every organization’s marketing plan, we’ve been able to see first-hand the challenges that many institutions face in building smarter search programs that yield significantly higher ROI. Here are four of the most common hurdles colleges and universities encounter as they focus on SEO:

In Enrollment Builders’ experience with organizations of all sizes, we often notice similar challenges each face as they plan for and implement online educational services for their students. Reframed, these obstacles form a set of must-haves for success in online program creation or strategic online growth. Though every institution is unique, here are the 7 essentials for online growth that our consultants have distilled from their work with a broad range of national and international clients:

We live a world that loves specialization. Henry Ford became a captain of industry by turning the craft of auto-making into an assembly line of distinct duties. And though specialization has its advantages in certain industries, in the field of online marketing and other digital services, a vertical structure may actually do more harm than good.