How to Increase Enrollment by Nudging Students Through the Funnel

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OK, so it looks like we have a good group of people coming in to the session right now, so will go ahead and get started right now. Good afternoon or morning depending where you are beaming in from. I'm Aaron Goar from technicians and I'd like to welcome you to our dive deeper with slate preferred partners webinar series which highlights them anyways. Atom preferred partners provide value for the slight community. This late preferred partner program recognize this organizations that.

Integrate with slate and offer implementation support while providing meaningful contributions to higher education overall.

Today's webinars titled How to increase enrollment by nudging students through the funnel, is led by niche, which is the leader in college and K through 12. Search with over 1000 partner schools, niche has a record of delivering more visits, applications and best fit enrollments with their turnkey enrollment marketing solutions. Before we hand it over to our presenters, I'm going to go through some housekeeping items for you all to be aware of during this presentation. Note that this webinar is being recorded an will be made.

Available for viewing later. So if you need to leave early or you want to share this information with staff later, it will be recorded and will post it online for viewing. Closed captioning can be enabled as well by clicking on the CC button in the upper right hand corner of your share window. You can also enable full screen viewing by clicking on the expand button, which is also at the top right corner of the share window should you need to rethink your audio or video at any time.

And just go ahead and refresh. The window and that should take care of it for you. I'm assuming you'll have questions and hopefully you do some of you submit questions as a part of your registration process. And if you did a problem. We will go ahead and get those questions at the end of the session and you can also post questions in the chat, which we will also collect and throw them out during Q&A at the very end.

So without further ado, I'd like to hand things over to our two presenters today. Danielle Laguerre, Assistant Director of enrollment communications the University at Buffalo Graduate School of Education an will Patch enrollment marketing leader for niche. So go ahead and hand that over to you guys.

Alright, thank you Aaron. I just wanted to say thanks technicians for the opportunity. I really appreciate Danielle jumping into to lend her expertise in this. We're going to share a lot of great tips today. So as Aaron said, add your comments and questions will get those cover to the end. I can also live. Tweet this you'll see at the bottom every slide. The hashtag slate presents and they'll be able to see all these two.

So the goals today make this real quick. Will make sure you walk away knowing more about the types of students they're coming to you, how to talk to them and help nudge them through to enrollment. And then make sure that information is going to be timely.

We also have a discussion then about how to rethink the student journey and why the funnel is really a bad analogy, and then we need to think about the con flow is a blind date.

So.

I.

Before we dive into specifics here, I think we should go over just a brief overview of the types of students and Daniel starts off.

That sounds great, and thank you so much to the teams at slate and at niche for inviting me to join you guys today. I am so excited to share some tips throughout the presentation. Yeah, so before diving into specifics I thought it might be beneficial to go over some brief definitions of these student types. It just to make sure we're on the same page. So first let's dive in with prospects.

A perspective student is someone who has been identified as potentially a good fit, but hasn't explicitly requested information about your program or your school just yet.

So prospects simply might not know about your institutions. Are your programs, so it's really your job to get the word out about what makes your colleges and universities great. In my experience, because I work at a Graduate School, are spread, our prospects come to us through Jerry or to full name buys or other lists that we've gained through various marketing initiatives. I also look at our undergraduate.

Population at you be as prospects because a lot of our undergrads have historically decided to continue their education at you be.

Yeah, so the look alikes are gonna be your prospects there really tailored to fit the persona of your students or of your graduates. So you're going to build these using prior years of data and then purchasing based on those.

Uh, this can be a good way that you can buy fewer names. Who are going to be more likely to enroll, hopefully out in your traditional prospects and the thing you need to watch for here though, is that it doesn't become a self fulfilling prophecy if you only reach out to a narrow segment of students. Of course, they're going to be more likely to yield, so you know the competitor prospects are a way to get around that. Their unique to an edge, but there are way to reach students who are considering institutions like yours but having considered yours yet. So there's still prospects, but they tend to enroll at a much higher rate.

Yeah, so stealth applicants, inquiries, visitors. Your stealth apps. Either kids were coming to you, they're gonna be your best for you. I'll stealth apps are really just students whose first point of contact with you is that application.

They already know about. You usually have friends and family connections. This aren't on your radar yet, but that does not mean that that you're not on their radar. You know they might already consider themselves experts about you, but they just haven't requested information or haven't shown up in other sources.

Yeah, so one way to improve on the traditional prospecting is to find the students who look and act like those who are already engaging with you and rolling, graduating. How you set those personas up is going to be based on what your ultimate goals are.

Uh, so there's going to be two different ways to get to that. The first is going to be a look alike. You know if you are doing look alikes, you're going to use as much data as you have and build these personas and purchase student names based on students who look like those students. Another option is to build those personas and then use look like audiences for digital marketing. So there it's still sort of a hybrid between a prospecting inquiry because they're using these look like audiences, anri marketing ads, and digital outreach.

Your hope then, is that they get enough information to either acquire or apply or visit and then essentially become that inquiry student.

I competitor prospect allows you to reach out. Students were considering your competitors but not you yet.

And by purchasing those rather than just cold prospect leads, you can really find success in modifying your conflict to reflect that.

So you can try testing this out using a traditional prospect com flow and doing a B test with that and then one that really speaks to why they should consider not just your type of institution, but what makes your institution different from your competitors. You know that they are already considering your type of institution, so just focus on the other pieces that you know about them.

These students, in my experience, have tended to yield significantly better than prospects. However, they just don't yield as well as inquiries because let's face it, it's hard to beat someone who comes to you and says, I wanna know more and that's just that's just challenging to get ahead of.

Yeah, so like with what will just hint it out and queries are the best uhm if a student has explicitly asked For more information about your school that is great and I think that's probably what we're all hoping for depending on what's on your inquiry forms you will probably already know what programs they are interested in how soon they'd like to start and you might even know where they live what their mailing address is.

Their email address, their phone number, and maybe even whether or not they would be interested in receiving text messages from you.

This is all information that you should be using wherever you can. Uhm, there is not a one size fits all approach to inquiry communications and I'm going to show you exactly what I mean by that a little bit later in this presentation.

Yeah, and then the 4th entry point is going to be the application, but as you and I know there is no such thing as a true stealth applicant. They aren't just sneaking in applying without knowing anything about you. You know you have to give students some credit here, stealth applicants. If you've sat down done the analysis your typical find they have connections already, either their legacy students they have friends who have attended, they've been on campus, maybe you know they've been following your social media there's.

There's already that sense of connection. They don't feel the need to raise their hand and say Yes, please start sending me Mail.

A stealth applicant really poses another issue though.

So there's a lot of time, a lot of effort going in your sharing stories. You're curing messages for inquiries in your prospects, but these stealth apps have missed all of that.

So if you don't have an applicant com flow, they might be missing information.

So you know if you're sharing timelines, tips, exciting news with your inquiries in prospects, you really need to think about doing the same with their stealth apps, their first sources application.

They don't assume that they know what the timeline is. They know the deadline they've been pushing to your inquiries in your prospect, so plan an applicant applicant. Com flow to really introduce that information to application source students and make sure that they know that what they need to.

OK, this is one I I hope you hope you bear with me through all this. Uh, the student journey to enrollment and then ultimately get graduation I don't think is truly a funnel like we always talk about it. So you have to think about how a funnel works. You poor things at the top and then inevitably it's going to move through the funnel. Because gravity.

I'll so let's talk about the student journey is more of a dance, and specifically I like think of it as a Congo line because the Congo line starts with a few people opting to get going and then others are being convinced to get going and start moving. And as it's moving along, other people can enjoy. There's not a single start point, they're not single entry.

Oh, you know, people also can drop out at anytime. They're not forced to dance all the way to conclusion, whereas in a funnel you can't start at the top of the funnel and then disappear or hang in midair.

Uh, in a Congo Line, though most people, though, will inevitably just watch and smile. Avoid eye contact because they're not forced to do the dance.

So let's look at that in terms here student journey here.

You know we have these inputs. I have the green errors there. The Outputs, the Red Arrows and that awareness phase at the top of what we traditionally think of as a funnel.

You have your prospects. You have your inquiries. They're coming in. Some may have heard of you already and you know, but others have never heard of your school. Even you need to build that interest. Not only institution buying your type of institution.

For inquiries you know you need to speak to what they've already told you, that they're interested in. I've done a lot of secret shopping and a lot of schools don't do that. If I tell you, hey, I'm coming to you asking for information, and here's my major and here's my extracurricular interests and you never speak to any of those. What was the point of having those fields on your inquiry form?

Oh, you know these students are taking the initiative and you should be treating them differently. Some of those who come in at the awareness page. These prospects inquiries will never move down. You know they're watching the dance.

That engagement stage then, once they were taking the action.

That's also an entry point. These are people who walk into the dance immediately jump right in and get going.

As we move through to the applicant stage, I'll, you know, we've had people who have been engaged. Many of those who have been dancing or gain tire. They're dropping out, but those who are engaged in is the right fit are going to be taking that step and apply.

You know this is really our last entry point to someone can't step in at the accepted stage.

How you know this is? At this point, it's getting later in the evening. Some people have been often the edges finally took the leap and jumped into the dance, but a lot of people never make it that far, either they're tired. They're enjoying watching whatever. So we keep moving along, and the dancing goes on. But by the time we moved from the applicant to the accepted, even more people opt out even more. People get pulled from the line if they're not accepted or they just opt out. And then by the end of the night, most of those.

Who even were dancing have stopped, but the majority of those at the event never danced at all, instead opted to other activities. So maybe a party planner could step back, or in this case, enrollment manager could step back, and after taking careful notes, of course, find ways with as all party planners do. I'm sure I'll find ways to better appeal to those who never did decide to dance. What could we try next time to get them to join in with a stronger awareness? An outreach of the event, in this case of this application, processes student journey.

You can get more people to opt in. This is what your outreach your com flows, your remarketing is all going to do for you. The outreach you're con flows can help put you in front of people who were unaware of Yuan. Explain why they want to join.

Uh, in re marketing is great because remark knees like that persistent friend who saw you make a little eye contact and you know they keep encouraging a jump in K. Come on, let's keep in front of him and keep trying to get you to dance.

I love that.

Sure.

Um and I have a slightly different take that I'd like to share with everybody today, um.

So when I'm developing enrollment communications, I like to think about it the same way that I think about dating. And here's what I mean. So whether you're on a blind date, a quarantine style zoom date, a tenth date, or you've been seeing someone for six months, yes, you would need to talk about yourself. But you cannot talk about yourself too much. We have probably all been on those dates where the other person.

Went on about themselves forever and did not ask you any questions and you're not having a good time, right? So you have to be engaging and available.

You also have to consider that timing is everything. No one wants to receive 25 text messages or emails within just a couple days of first meeting you when they're not even sure that they're interested in you yet. You have to be thoughtful and visually attractive, and you have to have a good personality, an show what makes you different, and all of those qualities that make you special. You have to prove that that is worth someone's time and money.

This is a very tall order, right? Like I'm getting overwhelmed even as I'm just like going through all of these bullet points, but it is possible you just have to consistently show perspective and inquiring students that you're excited about them without proposing on the first date. So for our purposes today, you don't want to encourage them to hit that apply now button right from the get go as soon as you meet them. You also have to be willing to provide meaningful information.

That is relevant to where they are in the application process.

Moreover, you have to be willing to engage in a two way conversation when they are.

So if you do all of these things and you keep all of this in mind, you're going to move a little bit away from maybe dancing in circles. Kind of like how well mentioned and maybe a little bit closer towards a finishing line. Or in our analogy today, your students are going to want to make it Facebook official with your colleges and universities.

So to dive a little bit deeper here, I wanted to quickly show just a few examples of emails that we've done for perspective students where I work at the University of Buffalo's Graduate School of Education. All of these examples that I'm sharing today have resulted in quite a few inquiries.

So this slide shows a message that I created as part of a jirari name by.

Um, here I tried not to be super dry and boring, and that's OK, right?

Right now I think it's especially good to be a bit less transactional and to take a moment that the world is kind of a crazy place and to offer an apathetic tone wherever you can.

This message I created before the pandemic, so you're not seeing that here, but I did still try to be a bit more personal and less formal. You can see that I mentioned that I am in ulom actually of the Graduate School of Education where I work, and I weave in that personal experience as a way of being a bit more relateable and with the hope of encouraging some authentic relationship building.

I also follow that introduction with a brief top. Five reasons to consider GC list along with an embedded introductory video an I would suggest, in your perspective, communications. If you have high quality videos, definitely use them wherever you can, because not everyone is going to want to read through a list or several paragraphs, and instead they're just going to go straight for for that video. So if you have am USM.

In this slide we are seeing another email that I created as part of a GR rename by, but in this one we were specifically trying to target high achieving students for our doctoral programs. In this campaign we decided to be a bit more formal than in the previous message and that was intentional because these are potential doctoral students who are probably going to be a little bit more.

Interested in our community of scholars and our research.

I also tried to keep it fairly brief here because as a Graduate School, many of our perspective students are career changers or are juggling lots of competing personal and professional priorities. So they again might not have time to dig through a really lengthy email with tons of information. But even in this brief message you can see that I still featured program information. The fact that you be is a member of the Association of American universities.

Some of the benefits of living in Buffalo are affordable tuition, an funding opportunities.

And more than anything else would I tried to do here is keep it. You focused rather than we focused. And what I mean by that is our jobs as higher education in a. Professionals and communicators are jobs are to help someone envision themselves at our colleges and universities rather than just shouting at them about how great we are.

So you guys are the experts about what makes your schools and universities great and different. You know what your differentiators are, an what you're selling points are. So in all of your perspective communications, you really just have to make those selling points stand out as you get to know those perspective students.

Alright, so to dive a little bit deeper on this slide, you are seeing the inquiry phase of our communications plan. This is the flow chart. It's kind of the skeleton and what guides our work. So we created this plan with the hope of engaging inquiring students through email, phone calls, texting an print pieces. In particular, slate has been such a tremendous help because.

We were able to create a drip email campaign with a series of different messages that touch upon topics that we know are going to be probably pretty important to our inquiring students, and as you can see here, these topics include information about their programs of interest, financial aid, student success stories, application tips, another ad hoc messages like deadline, reminders or event invitations.

We purposely space these emails out over 90 days because again we don't want to be bombarding someone with 25 emails within one week.

Also, since everyone communicates differently, we complement our emails with phone calls, text messages. As long as someone's opted in an physical mailings, especially as a Graduate School, our students range in age from 20 to 80, so we want to be really mindful of contacting people in the way that they prefer.

OK.

In this slide, I was hoping to provide a bit of a behind the scenes look at one of our introductory inquiry messages, and again, this is to show that there should not be A1 size fits all approach to your inquiry communications.

So here you're going to see that we used conditional logic in slate to show information pertaining to online tuition rates. But we're only showing that information to students who have actually requested information about our online programs an what's great is you can do this with any data point.

So for instance, if a student indicates that they live in another country, you can utilize that information to send communications that were developed specifically with an international student in mind. Slate is also amazing because you can personalize all of your messages and do specific outreach based on where someone lives, what they're interested in, where they are in the application process, and what faculty they'll work with and their program.

But what's really fantastic is that you can target students even more based on whether or not they've attended one of your events. If they've clicked or opened a previous email, or again any data point that you are interested in filtering by in order to create customized content.

So one other thing that is great to share about slate is that you have the ability to pre populate your forms. So if you're inviting a student to attend your event rather than having them fill out a really long event registration form.

You can copy and paste and just one little tiny snippet of code into your event. You are all and you will have the form already filled out for them when they go to register, so that's a great way to improve their experience and to remove any barriers that they may be facing when trying to request more information.

OK, I have one more email example for you guys. Um, we sent this message out back in May 2 students who had started an application, but they hadn't yet submitted it during that time. Like many of you, I'll be honest, I was freaking out.

And I was concerned that students who wants thought Graduate School or college was a sure thing might not be feeling the same way anymore. So I wanted to send a message to remind these students that it's still a great time to pursue a graduate education and that we are here to help however we can.

You know, as you can see, offering application waivers always is helpful.

But sending these kinds of ad hoc nudges can really make a huge difference, especially in times like these, because you're helping to remind students why they were excited to apply in the 1st place. So in our case, at GC this felt like a great time to remind students that are programs can help them become more marketable. An may help increase their salary potential.

So we sent this message to around 350 people.

And we had over 40 clicks to finish the application. 811 financial aid session scheduled and a handful of visits to our website. And that's all just from one quick email. So these types of messages are really, really powerful.

And I think at this point we wanted to pull the audience, right? Well?

OK, so um, we were curious to ask before diving into the texting portion of the talk today who here has already experimented with texting? Will is going to pull the group you should see I think the ability to share your answers.

And as we're working on that, I can share a little bit more about my own experience with texting.

So from my experience, one of the most effective ways to reengage and continue the conversation with students is through texting, and that is something that we've done a lot of in the past few months, especially just to provide personalized attention and outreach to students. Slate makes it really, really easy to personalize texts in the same way that you would.

Emails so you can include someones name, program and other relevant information. But the goal of texting is a little bit different from emails right here you want to generate a helpful conversation by providing information or asking questions specific to where someone is in the application process. So again, this slide shows a couple different messages that I've sent recently. The first one.

Is for students who have inquired but have not yet submitted their application, and you can see this is not like groundbreaking creative writing here. This is straight and to the point. In easy. We're just checking in. We're communicating the deadline and we're seeing if anyone has any questions.

So I believe with this first text message we had a 35% response rate, which is significantly higher than what we would see with our email campaigns. So again, this is just a really great way to continue that conversation.

And during the inquiry phase you can also help nudge someone tord submitting an application just by inviting them to attend a webinar. Again, reminding of an upcoming application deadline, or checking in about an application that was started yet started but not yet completed.

So once someone has submitted an they've been accepted. You can also tell your messages to encourage them to confirm their enrollment, which I did in the third message here and actually with this message, several people reached out an responded just saying that, gosh, this was so much easier than digging through the emails that you sent me to find that link and to confirm enrollment.

Super easily.

So my best advice when it comes to texting is to just be mindful about what time you're sending your text. Are students at the University of Buffalo live all over the world so we don't want to text someone in the middle of the night?

Not only that, it's also very important to have staff available to respond to these messages after you send them. I recommend starting off with some smaller texting initiatives, maybe segmented by program or event registration, just to make sure that you're not overwhelmed with responses. Recently I sent a text even just like 60 people. I think that was program based and I made sure that another staff member was open and available to.

Respond to students for three hours with me. So definitely make sure you're fully staffed.

Well, you're gonna wanna turn your microphone back on.

That's what happens when you use the inline mute. So remarketing is in a really powerful tool. There are three ways that you can take advantage of it to stay in front of students, but I don't want to start assuming everyone knows what re marketing is an where it can be used. So First off, your re marketing, you sometimes can see this called retargeting. It's a process of serving adds to a list of known people, so most often that's done with a small piece of code on your.

Either a few pages on your site or site wide so that way when someone comes and visits your page then on different ad platforms will be served. Relevant ads reminding them about your institution.

You can see this in action if you're not clear on it. If you go, there's an example here. On the screen you go to almost any online shop and then you view a few items and you leave and very quickly you'll start seeing ads for those items on other sites or in apps. That's most often going to be run through Google, Microsoft in the Facebook ad networks.

You can do the same thing on your site though, so you can separate audiences by program or type of degree using different re marketing audiences, different pixels, and so you might have one segment for undergraduate students that's on undergraduate admissions pages or undergraduate program pages.

Uh, maybe a second for transfer students and 3rd for graduate students. So something for Danielle situation at Graduate School. You could build separate audiences even for every graduate program and the college, and make these ads super relevant so someone who is visiting pages for a higher Ed Administration program would see different ads than elementary education students.

Oh, you know that's the traditional way that we marketing is done. It can be very effective at keeping attention, bringing visitors back. So if you want to keep in front of potential students and parents, you know there's other ways though.

So this is something that's unique to niche, but it's worth mentioning intent based re marketing means that you're connecting the users coming to their niche profile. An competitor profiles doing relevant searches. So again, if you're if you have a higher administration program, when people are searching for that, you can serve ads to them to remind them of your institution.

Uh, and then those ads would not only be unnaturally beyond the Google Ad Network on the Facebook ad network, and would would be an apps then as well using those. I really expands who can reach at the point that you know that their researching. It's a great way to expand your reach to people who aren't just visiting your site. They're looking for schools like yours. It's a way to stay top of mind as they're preparing to enroll.

The third method we see our picture of the funnel again, or Congo Line. This third method is a great way to move students through and stay top of mind, even if they aren't visiting your site yet.

So this method you'll set up multiple short campaigns. I really recommend. I've had success doing just two weeks sprints, but you can do two to three weeks using lists of students that you upload to these ad networks.

Oh, so you want to do this so that students who convert Argyle be receiving messages, so that's why you don't want to do one month, two months, three months. Because if someone converts the first couple of weeks, they'll keep seeing ads encouraging them to apply or visit whatever that action is, so you won't make sure that stays relevant.

You gotta set up campaigns based on the action that you want each took take.

Also, for prospects and inquiries, you might upload those and they might be an impression based campaign, so you're trying to get a general branding awareness message out. You know you might combine that with campaigns for visiting for applying, and then once they've applied you can keep reminding them of the importance of filing the FAFSA, encouraging application completion if they haven't yet, then sharing student stories that are going to be relevant to them. So if you're I'm in Indiana, so if you're at an institution, Indiana.

And you are targeting students in Texas. You can share a students stories from Texas, so it will be more relevant to yeah, it was strange going out of state. You know, I'm 1000 miles away from my parents. Things like that.

Oh, you know, once they once they see that you're going to be speaking to them in ways that matter.

Oh, then, that's where these small segmented lists are going to be really, really valuable once they've been accepted, then you can use remarketing to encourage deposits, share even more student stories about their specific experiences about their outcome. So if someone is accepted into your nursing program, share a lot of stories, an ads about other nursing students, what they were seeing, what they're experiencing.

Oh, you also have to make some of that end with a small amount of FOMO. The fear of missing out students are weighing a lot of options. They need to know what makes your institution different, what it's like, and why they would be missing out to go to your competitors.

Great so creating communications in slate if you're not already doing it. I just want to mention that it is wonderful because you are given so much data for every message that you send and what you're seeing in this slide is data for iMessage. That's part of our inquiry. Com flow and this one in particular is for individuals who are interested in our mental health counseling program. We can see.

Open rates click rates. The links that students are actually clicking on and all of this information helps guide our decision making process for future messages. So taking the time to regularly reevaluate, test, and examine where people are dropping off in your messages is really important. We can't be on top of our game and less we know what's working.

And what isn't, and where there's room for improvement. So part of that involves conducting AB testing lot or I'm sorry Abe testing for subject lines and email copy as well as examining what messages push someone along to the next phase. You might want to rethink the timing in order of your messages and also kind of continually reconsidering your layout and your aesthetics so.

For me, right now that involves, I'm going back through all of our inquiry communications and adding in better messages. Anne videos wherever I can.

Another thing that I want to message or mention here is that looking at data and results and being mindful of tone is again just so essential right now as higher education professionals we really cannot take the set it and forget it approach that. Maybe we once used to. We've all had to really pivot as a result of the pandemic and in my office.

An example of that is we used to have an automated email that encouraged all inquiring students to come visit our campus.

Obviously that had to be shut down and redone and launched again with a new call to action, because all of our staff are still working remotely. As you can see, I'm basically in my closet right now.

So we also had to take a break from doing our print mailings and figure out how to continue doing them via email instead. And of course it is disappointing knowing that are inquiring students aren't getting a nice physical glossy brochure that they can hold and look through. But there are pros and cons because we have seen actually a greater response rate from moving this to an email were receiving a lot of follow up just from doing it as an email instead.

And as I mentioned before, I am currently working to go through all of our inquiry emails at work, and one thing that I'm doing in slate is ensuring that all of our emails have the pre header text that you can include now, as well as ensuring that our images include all taxed and like will had mentioned. I'm really trying to weave in relevant stories about students, faculty and alumni so.

That content is always fresh.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that the work is really never done here because there are just always going to be things that we can tweak and improve to make our messaging even more impactful.

And now we can kind of get to the good stuff and really talk about uhm, why we do this work and why it's so important to be thoughtful about what you say, how you're saying it, and when you're saying it.

So here's some proof of that. I'm just going to walk us through some of the information here, so at this time of year in 2018, prior to implementing our communications plan in slate and really boosting our communications efforts, we had 874 applications completed, 518 offers made an 210 students registered for classes.

If you Fast forward to 2019 at this time we had just our inquiry. Com flows built, but we were still working on creating application nudges and content for accepted students. But even just having that inquiry. Com flow our applications completed and offers made had already increased this year. I'm really pumped for lack of better words because.

Ark with our communications fully being built in slate and an increase in some nudging and messages, we currently have 958 applications completed. 664 offers made and 300 three students registered for classes. So across the board are numbers are now better than they've been in the past five years and maybe even longer than that.

And what you don't see here is that we've also had 250 more applications started this year than we did last year.

We know that of all of the applications we've received, we can identify that between 65 to 70% of those applications were not stealth applicants. They had received communications from us that encourage them to take the next step.

Um and I do. Just want to mention that the success that we've seen at the Graduate School of Education where I work at UE, you know, is not only coming from the communications efforts. I am very privileged to work with a team of thoughtful and Smart and driven individuals, so it's a group effort, but hopefully what I've shared here demonstrates the positive impact that segmented personalized communications and nudges can really have on your involvement.

All right?

There's earn.

Alright, Hello, I've been back in will Danielle, thank you so much for these inside. Super cool to think of things like the the student journey or the funnel is a Congo line and thinking about communicating with students and most like blind dating.

No.

Absolutely.

It's funny when we talk about things like drip marketing. I always like to joke to you don't want to. It's like irrigation. You don't want to over water, but you don't want underwater, right? So it's a delicate dance or a balance or a blind date. What have you? With that said, this is wonderful. There are definitely questions that have come in ahead of time. Like I said before in questions that came into the chat, so let's go ahead and start getting to some of those guys are ready for that. How about this one? What advice or insights can you share about nudging students?

And engaging them on throughout the funnel using social media.

Yeah, so I mean.

If you just do organic social, there's not gonna be any targeted nudges. I mean, you'll mostly be, hey, here's our deadlines. Engage with them. Tell the stories. I mean the I actually we have a student survey that will be coming out of the white paper next month. The two most used social media for Oregon apps for students are YouTube number one by a wide margin and Instagram, so if you're not sharing student centered information on YouTube and instead just putting up.

Generic videos for marketing. You know you're losing that, so share organically. Of course, why they should care. But think of that is more prospecting. I mean where you really get into using it as nudges is going to be in the re marketing campaigns using Facebook using Instagram primarily with Facebook you can steer clear of Facebook itself an Messenger, but focus on Instagram. the Facebook ad network, which will get you in some apps.

Oh, and that's going to be a way that you can do your targeted re marketing pushes.

Great.

Another one, how do you evaluate how hot a prospect is? How do you gauge where they are in the cycle and how do you know what content to deliver where an when?

Let you leave this one off, Daniel.

Sure, so I think it's difficult, especially right now to really know how hot someone is. Of course we all cross our fingers that individuals are really serious about our programs, but given everything that's going on and even prior to the pandemic, people have real life situations that sometimes you know we can't predict. So one good indicator, though. I think if someone is responding to your emails is interacting with your text messages.

If you're looking at their timeline in slate, and you see that their continually visiting your website, I think that's a good way to judge that they're pretty serious, right? And especially if they've taken the time to start an application. So I think you just have to get into the mindset of considering where someone is at in their journey, and what types of information are going to be the most helpful. So for us, if they're just starting to get to know us, they've just asked for some additional information.

Again, like I showed in that flow chart, we try to highlight financial aid programs of interest, application deadlines and things like that. Once they get deeper into the dance or the funnel or the date or however we want to describe it. I think then we can provide some additional reminders like I showed why it's a great time to continue your education and continuing to communicate application deadlines and things like that.

Yeah, I mean for it depends too. If their prospects are inquiries. If their inquiries, they're pretty hot. You know if they came in and raise their hand, you know that's a good sign that they are looking right now, especially if there a senior that's very high intent person. If it's self applicant, of course. Same story.

You know, that's where the inquiries should be. Just be jumping on those immediately with prospects you can. Again, like Daniel said, you look at what they've been doing. Look at their behaviors. Are they engaging with your emails? If they're not opening emails, I think you can probably gauge not that interested right now, or the messaging just hasn't hit something, but then you can also just flat out ask them if there are prospect you purchased it. Part of your conflict could even be, hey, you know are you, are you?

Have you already decided where you're going? Pretty dead set, you know are you. Are you just starting the search? What where you at right now? And that's going to be a very important thing. There's too many, too many times we try to get cute and dance around things just flat out ask him and they can give you an answer.

Hey.

In terms of the New World of measuring engagement, what are you actually measuring in your funnels? That is, predict if, how do you know that we're measuring in the moment is actually leading to outcomes?

Yeah, so that's a tough question, right? Uhm, were kind of in unchartered territory right now, so I agree that it's really hard to actually predict anything at this point in time.

However, now that I have been in my role for two years, uhm, I'm starting to really get a good sense of what's working and what's not.

And that's for every piece of our communications plan, so I'm working with our GC leadership in my office to kind of examine and analyze our recruitment and communications initiatives were doing that by looking again at click rates, open rates, event attendance, other things like that, as well as how marketing initiatives are performing.

And just looking at how all of these things are performing in terms of conversion and were still just kind of knee deep in it at this point.

Yeah, I mean, it's one of those tough things. There's lots of people saying that they have all the answers, but no ones been through this before. I mean, you could try to do some modeling looking at what happened in 2008, 2009, but two issues there. One, it's not the same scale and two that was 12 years ago. I mean, everything's changed your financial aid models have changed, I mean.

There's really not. There's not a good model, so do the best that you can anan. Try to model it based off of prior years, but assume you know maybe a 1020% whatever you're comfortable with reduction, but then you know if you can keep pace with where you were. That's a huge win.

Yeah.

What are some current best practices for moving students through the funnel in terms of a multi channel approach? 'cause there's been discussion of social media email campaigns print there's so many different ways to approach it, but what would you say is is the most effective approach?

Yeah, I mean multi funnel multi channel is the way everything should be done. So you need to lay it all out and have a plan. Daniel had this great sketch of their con flow there lay it all out like that initially. So if someone's a prospect OK we buy them now and then when do they receive each piece? Do they receive an email 1st and then they might get a postcard if they're opening emails you know what are your triggers? When do they get it? When is the? When is the cut off date?

Oh for your inquiries, same thing. I mean have a good solid plan of what they're experiencing, then also layer in what's going to be your one offs.

So you know it will regardless of when someone comes in and inquiry, we know that in October we're going to be sending out reminders about the faster you know what? How is that going to change their experience? We know that in January we're going to do our push for our spring visit. They so really try and layout the student journeys. That's a good activity to do as a team because there may be things that you forget about, but the recruiter staff might remember or marketing might say. Well, we also do this from advancement that you might not be aware of.

Oh, so just lay it all out, but be sure you're thinking about what is our print. What is our email was our text was Ari. Marketing was our overall digital marketing. What is our organic social was? Are paid social you know there's a lot of things just need to lay it all out.

Yeah, and I would add to that just by saying like I had mentioned previously, you know we're not currently doing those print mailings, but that doesn't mean that we're going to figure out a way to do them again soon because having that multi channel approach really is so important. And I think I already said this, but everyone prefers to get information in different ways, so hitting all of those different touchpoints is really essential. And another thing, if you're not texting yet, I would highly suggest doing.

Because you are going to see a great return on those efforts.

Gas.

Yeah, we were texting. Just make sure that it's it's relevant and that they've opted in. You know. Don't just say hey, I'm just checking in they don't need that.

Yes.

Yes.

And opt in is so important to opting in to receive the text messages.

Yeah, that's a little more than important that is legally required.

What are some other great tools for virtual recruitment tools that you'd recommend, such as interactive view books that will help gain attention in the community as your recruiting new students?

Yeah, I one of the things that I think is really important is that you cannot just move what you've been doing online. If you try to say OK, our traditional visit we did, we had our opening, we had our we had our.

My program speak. We had admissions council. We had students and they went on tour.

That's that, start from scratch. Think about where it is and then have your events in multiple places too. I mean, a virtual tour is nice. You can give that sense of campus.

But then also make sure that you're just providing like student photography. Have students just go around and, uh, and share their experiences. You know one of the things that I wanted to try and wasted and have resources. A few years ago and right now would be crucial. Instead of thinking about, we're going to have a group visit on this day, we're going to try and convert it all to an online format instead. Just have a landing page or a micro site that is your asynchronous visited date.

I mean, people can come at anytime and view it. So maybe you have like a uh?

A widget on this page that is your virtual tour. You have a widget that is your student videos so that people can say, you know I want to see what a first year experience is like. You have your faculty speakers, you have interactive features within that page.

But it's not a you have to show up at this time and here's the sessions laid out in order because you don't know what? What everyone's Day is going to look like when you're at home. I think we've all learned I've been remote for awhile now. I think everyone has learned you cannot plan on having a set block of time, all the time.

You know you might get interrupted. You know you might everything's going great, and then the dog starts barking. Needs your attention.

You know you have to be able to adjust, and having an asynchronous event would be great. I've seen some schools doing some really cool things with visits an essentially like a maze from Reddit, but on Facebook live on Instagram live. Just having these stories. You know they're doing it in different ways where the students are in such students are already on YouTube. That's the number one choice. Spend your time using YouTube to stream as well. People can join you there. I mean, that's something that allows schools missed out on but.

It's something that always had more people attend events on YouTube and I did. We tried to do him on on Facebook or elsewhere.

Yep.

You took the words right out of my model because I was just about to mention we are actually hosting a Facebook live AMA event tonight. So after plug if you're interested, University of Buffalo Graduate School of Education. Follow us on Facebook.

Yeah, and I mean you're gonna reach different people in each network, so don't be afraid to have events two or three times just in different places.

Absolutely.

Perfect well looks like we just reached the end of our time. Thank you so much. Danielle Ann will virtual claps to two U boat but there was one question that did come in on a registration form that I want to leave for comedic value and everyone can just kind of sit on this question after we leave and someone asked why do you drive on a Parkway and park on a driveway. So just leave that right there for you to just.

Thanks once again and once again this this is being recorded so you can all come back view it later and share it. So thank you so much.

Thank you.

Alright, bye.

Thank you.