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Recruiting, Retention

Remarketing

Seamless Experience Across the Student Lifecycle

Webinar | Nov 18, 2022

element451.com

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Your Moderator

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For Today

30 minute webinar with Q&A
Access the recording and slide deck Monday
Share your insights with #TakingEducationHigher
Fill out the post-webinar survey

Quick Housekeeping

#TakingEducationHigher

I have a couple housekeeping items to cover quickly before we dive in.

Today’s webinar will last about 30 minutes with time reserved for Q&A. We are recording this webinar and it’ll be available for download, along with today’s slide deck, in a couple days. We will give you early access to the recording, just watch your email and our team will send you a note when the content is available.
During the webinar you can ask questions in a few ways. The Zoom control panel has a Question feature if you’d like to send the question directly to me.
You can also tweet questions and takeaways to the hashtag #TakingEducationHigher. I hope you will join me on Twitter while you’re listening to Eric and Brendan present today.
We’ve also opened up the Zoom chatroom - just make sure you have your share settings marked to All attendees and presenters. Feel free to share ideas, ask questions, and interact with other attendees during the presentation.
And finally — Please help us help you by filling out a quick post-webinar survey. Your comments and ratings are greatly appreciated and influence topic selection for future webinars. I’ll chat a link to the survey at the end of the webinar & you’ll get a follow up email encouraging you to submit the survey shortly after we conclude today’s session.

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Your Presenters

Placeholder for presenter pics and names/job titles

Eric Range, VP of Product

Brendan Henkel, Pre-Sales Engineer

I’m thrilled to introduce our two presenters

Eric Range is VP of Product at Element451. He has nearly 20 years experience in the higher ed space, including serving as Asst. Vice President of Enrollment Management Marketing & Operations. Since leaving campus, Eric has held various partnership and product roles both in and out of EdTech, including a stint at a Fortune 500 company.

Brendan Henkel is Element451’s Sales Support Engineer. He has 10 years of experience in higher ed enrollment – Everything from the front lines up to executive leadership. Brendan started his EdTech career at Element on the Customer Success side of the house prior to moving into his current role.

Don’t forget to share your takeaways and use the hashtag #TakingEducationHigher.

Eric,, I’ll turn this session over to you.

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What We

Know

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1,300,000 students are missing from our campuses

39,000,00 Americans have attended college and left without a degree

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97% of first year students who felt valued by their colleges in 2020 intend to return

42% of college dropouts leave not because they are failing, but because they face financial stresses

Eric:

When it comes to engaging with students both the ones we want and the ones we have–, it’s a leaky bucket. Many schools have decentralized software and organizational structures. Admissions does its thing. Student affairs its own. Continuing or graduate program recruiting yet another. And none of it connects with Advancement overseeing alumni relations and fundraising.

With the cost of recruiting students having them walk out the door later is a huge burden on all of us and isn’t sustainable . That's why engaging and making connections with students is so critical.

In 2020 97% of FY students who felt valued, that is, they had a strong connection to their campus, intended to return. And that was in the midst of a pandemic.

42% of stopouts leave due to financial stresses. Those with stronger connections are more likely to ask for help and avail themselves of resources, not just silently disappear.

�

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Less than 25% of institutions are confident in their ability to capture alumni communication engagement outside of philanthropy

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For Gen Z the line between “digital life” and “real life” is far more ambiguous. In fact, they’d be more likely to say there isn’t a difference at all.

How Gen Z is Shaping the Future of Technology, Shockoe Digital Product Development

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Why is this

Important

Eric:

Why is all of this important?

As Brendan will show us there’s huge potential to build retention efforts on top of recruiting efforts. And re-enrollment on top of retention and recruiting.

You don’t need to, nor should you, start from scratch at each stage. If anything, your engagement should be better as your relationship grows over time. Let’s see what happens when you use some of the same strategies and systems we use to recruit students to continue to engage and connect with them when they arrive on campus, become members of our communities and beyond.

And Better engagement means better retention and opportunities to build affinity with alumni, yet another untapped pool of prospective students.

�Mallory, just checking in on our poll…

�

<RESULTS>>�MW: Now I’m going to throw if over to Brendan who is going to take us through a student journey that demonstrates what we’re talking about.

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Meet Chase

First generation student from Northern Virginia
Wants a personal connection to whatever institution he decides to attend
Started his search as a junior during a high school field trip to three local colleges

element451.com

#TakingEducationHigher

Brendan: Thanks so much Eric and thanks everyone for joining us today!

Recruiting, retention and remarketing – like Eric said, you don't have to build from scratch at each stage. With the right technology in place, you can create a seamless engagement experience where you effortlessly connect with learners and meet them where they are.

Today, instead of just talking through these three stages, we are going to take a look at a our friend Chase and review his entire engagement journey - starting from his college search through graduation and beyond.

Chase is a first generation student from Northern Virginia. He does well in school, but plans to stay close to home so he has a pretty short list of schools he is considering. He and his family aren’t very familiar with the college search process, but Chase wants to feel seen and cared for as he makes his decision. Chase’s family wasn’t able to support a big road trip or college tour, so when his high school offered to take the junior class on a field trip to three local colleges – Chase was thrilled. On that trip, he got to visit a community college, a regional public institution, and one 4-year private institution.

After that trip, there was one school that Chase preferred above the rest and ironically enough this school is the only one with the best student engagement CRM on the market.

*Click for transition image*

Yes, you guessed it, he can’t wait to learn even more about Element University ;)

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Personalized Recruiting

Chase shared basic PII (personally identifiable information) during each campus visit through a mobile-friendly form

First step in personalized engagement is collecting demographic data and behavioral activity

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As you can expect, now that Chase has visited these three institutions, they know a bit more about him and his interests.

At all three school visits, when Chase and his classmates arrived on campus, they were asked to fill out a short form from their mobile devices.

He shared his Full name, date of birth, email, and phone number with each school.

The first step in personalized engagement is getting the right demographic data and having a way to track behavioral activity. This allows you to create a good knowledge base of where students are in their search and what they need and want to know from your college or university. This requires a well-thought out strategy of determining and gathering communication points based on things students need to know, do, or actions they take or don’t take.

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Personalized Recruiting

element451.com

#TakingEducationHigher

Now Chase is early in his college search and right after this school-sponsored trip, life got busy fast! Baseball season had just started and studying for the SAT ramped up.

A few days after the trip, Chase got a great email from Element University that addressed him personally and connected him to his admissions counselor. Chase fired off a quick email to her before heading to baseball practice.

Blasts of cookie cutter information getting mass emailed to an entire database of prospective students no longer cuts it in today’s competitive admissions environment. Students like Chase are looking for more. We must be intentional about the student information we collect - and make sure we progressively learn a little bit more each time.

Even with just the very basic PII that Element University had collected about Chase and his classmates during his first visit, you can see here how their enrollment marketing team was able to personalize and automate an email communication at scale – making sure the right admissions counselor was featured based off of the demographic information on each prospect.

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Personalized Recruiting

Chase visited ElementU.edu to learn about the Criminal Justice, Business, and Biology majors. He also looked at the Baseball team and what it would take to try out.�
Utilize behavioral activity to trigger communications and drive Chase to deeper engagement!

Personalized emails at scale
Special invites to campus
Details about academic programs and student outcomes
High-value print mailings and gifts

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#TakingEducationHigher

Chase wrapped up his junior year and spent the summer babysitting his younger siblings and working at a grocery store. He took the SAT in August and was pretty happy with his scores. Before his senior year kicked off, Chase went on Element U’s website to learn more about his academic programs of interest and to gauge whether or not he could play Baseball for the Division 3 team.

Here’s where personalization gets fun! Now Element U can start to layer in this behavioral activity with the demographic info that they already have about Chase. They sent him a special invite to their fall open house, highlighting the criminal justice and biology faculty who would be available to chat and the special panel for student-athletes.

Thanks to this personalized invite, Chase and his family decided to visit Element’s campus one more time.

*NEXT SLIDE*

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On that visit, Chase realized Element U was where he wanted to be! So it was no surprise that waiting for him in his inbox was a personalized follow up message, that was automated, from his admissions advisor they he saw on the Campus Visit, checking in with him and giving him a link to an easy way to go directly to an application portal for the Element University application. This completely removes the friction from the application process by circumventing creating a login and enabling the snapapp feature to only have Chase complete the required fields on the application. A few weeks later, Chase submitted his application!

Here you can see a great automation workflow example from our partner RIT Certified. With post-campus visit communications built out, it’s time to let automation do the rest. Chase’s visit can launch a nurture stream. Based on his interactions with those emails, texts, and even web pages, you can trigger additional communications – like encouraging the application at the right time in the process.

This is what we mean when we say right student, right message, right time.

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Viewed Page

Email Triggered

Another great example from RIT shows the journey for the student in visiting the landing pages and then receiving a relevant communication afterwards.

I think it goes without saying … but I’ll say it anyway!

*CLICK TO TRANSITION*

Since we can track Chase’s website activity, we can deliver personalized content that is relevant to him. And with the secured application, even more personalization can occur based on data points like budget needs, advising needs and when Chase is looking to enroll. Based on the delivery of this information about Chase we are pushing campaigns to him that matter, when they matter, and in mediums that matter. Things like event registrations for Campus Visits, personalized information on scholarships and financial aid messages from a financial aid advisor, and content specifically related to their activity on your institutions websites and landing pages.

For Chase, this results in the development of a personal connection with the school. He receives information about the programs and activities that he wants, in the way that he wants to see it, and when.

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Personalized Recruiting

element451.com

#TakingEducationHigher

Fast forward a few months – Chase has been accepted to Element University!

He gets access to his very own personalized microsite that only shows him information that is relevant to his journey at Element U and keeps him engaged and on track every step of the way until the first day of class!

Having tools like forms with conditional fields and filters, landing pages that require no coding to build, segments to facilitate personalization, workflows to automate all your communications and internal management, and microsites that maintain that personalized engagement for a one-stop-shop type of experience are what make the difference.

Besides being his initial school of choice what is that separated Element University from the other two local institutions for Chase? This was the school that just simply made it easy to go to college and completely removed the friction points.

*NEXT SLIDE*

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Effective Retention

element451.com

#TakingEducationHigher

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Effective Retention

Decide on 5-10 key data points to identify when a student is struggling and needs engagement.

Examples: registration status, GPA, SAP status, dropping/failing class, financial/registration holds, not opening emails, FAFSA renewal status.

element451.com

#TakingEducationHigher

So seriously, fast forward to Chase’s Freshman year at Element U. He lives off campus, commutes to class and is still working at the grocery store part time. Combine all these new changes with a tough class in statistics (I know we all LOVE statistics) and Chase ends up getting a D in class which results in his GPA slipping to a 2.8.

Because Element U is using a platform that can bring in those signals from the SIS during the full student journey, the university automatically triggers a workflow that creates a communication plan. It sends two emails and a text message to Chase that are both checking in on him and specifically sending a CTA to schedule an appointment with his academic advisor through the events module.

Having a centralized engagement CRM for every step in the student journey is going to give you the power and the freedom to customize what defines an “at risk” student and set up data points and automations to engage with those students when they need it most and notify the folks on your teams that need to know in the moments they need to know.

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Effective Retention

Building intentional check-ins and automations removes the chance that students will �fall through the cracks

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Automated Remarketing

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We have finally arrived at Chase’s senior year. This is it! Or is it?

Due to the intentionality of the advising team and the centralized engagement CRM that Element University is using, Chase has a much stronger GPA at 3.5 and has finally gotten the hang of juggling every day responsibilities and college. Since we have been gathering data, activity, and knowledge of Chase along his entire student journey we can utilize the system to surface the students that qualify for certain programs based on the course data we are bringing in from either the SIS or LMS. As we do this we can inform Chase that he now qualifies for the 4+1 track with the MBA Graduate program.

Because Chase meets this criteria now the platform will enroll him into a nurture campaign for remarketing that offers him a waived GRE and Application fee to start the Graduate program immediately which is also followed up by driving him to register for young alumni events upon graduation.

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email

social

.edu

sms

landing pages

search

print

traditional

visits

Automated Remarketing

element451.com

#TakingEducationHigher

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Top 6 Recruiting and Engagement Challenges

and How to Beat Them

*New* Resource

https://451.elmt.link/challenges

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State of Enrollment Marketing Technology

5-minute survey

Win a $500 Amazon Gift Card

https://www.enrollify.org/surveys/element451

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Recruiting, Retention

Remarketing

Seamless Experience Across the Student Lifecycle

Questions?

https://451.elmt.link/ThreeRs�connect@element451.com

Please don’t forget to fill out our quick webinar evaluation. Your feedback is valuable as it helps us determine future webinar topics and gives Eric and Brendan a sense of how they did and if the webinar met your expectations. I’m chatting a link to the survey now. https://451.elmt.link/ThreeRs

Let’s get right into Q&A.

QUESTION 1: How would you bring in all the signals you need to complete communications for the whole student journey. (Ber)

Answer Flat file, API integration, Zapier

QUESTION 2: How do you move beyond generalizations in your segmentation. Ie High school srs. So the student like Chase truly feels seen.

Answer: Layer in signals and factors in communication variables. Like the fact that Chase is a baseball player. You don't need 1000 segments to build 1000 cohorts -make communications personalized by using variables