How to Unburden Your Admissions Team During the April Madness Season
The month between April and May is the busiest time of the year for admissions teams. Offers have gone out, but the job is far from done. Staff are hard at work doing all they can to maximize yield and turn acceptances into enrollments. This can be a huge job. For one thing, students are used to personalized messaging, so receiving a generic email blast from a college isn’t going to necessarily induce them to enroll. For another, your team has made offers to hundreds or thousands of students and must conduct personalized outreach in a very short amount of time. Given the importance of communication during the month of April, how can admissions teams make sure the outreach they’re conducting is personalized enough to convince an accepted student to enroll?
Below, we explore how a modern communications solution can unburden admissions teams while empowering staff to send personalized communications, enabling more effective outreach during April madness.
Automatically Personalize Communications
Communications solutions give admissions teams access to student data and enable them to use that information to personalize outreach. Any and all information the institution has on its prospective students—interests, majors, sports, demographics, etc.—can be used to tailor communications.
Let’s say you want to target prospective engineering majors. You could encourage a current engineering student to make a welcome video—or have the department hold an event for accepted engineering students. When you discover which students are interested in engineering, you can use a communications solution to auto-populate emails with student names and email addresses, ensuring the right students receive relevant messages.
Automatically Send Email Communications
The most time-consuming tasks during April are making sure the right emails go to the right students at the right times. Communications solutions can do all of this. These solutions allow staff to set up communications that send automatically on preset schedules. Staff can design, schedule, and send single or sequenced communications. And since these can be deeply personalized, students receive a timely sequence of relevant, appealing messages.
Additionally, solutions like Jenzabar Communications contain templates that ensure your team isn’t crafting all communications from scratch. Staff can amend information into templates to ensure every outreach remains personalized. These automations work together to free up admissions staff to spend more time on engagements like last-minute campus tours and phone calls.
Automatically Nurture Accepted Students
When it comes to the month of April, a highly sought-after feature is the ability to send rules-based emails. This means that staff can set up communication sequences based on reader actions. For instance, you can create a workflow so that if a student responds to an email, it triggers an additional email send. This way your institution remains top of mind for interested students. If you’ve conducted outreach and a student hasn’t responded within a certain timeframe, you can set up communications sequences with “nudges” or reminder emails.
If a student ultimately decides that your institution isn’t right for them, you can automatically exclude them from further emails and texts.
Creating Your Email Communications Strategy for April
With personalization capabilities, automations, and workflows in place, all that’s left for admissions teams to do is to figure out what they want to say. For information to help you craft your communications strategy, read up on the latest yield season trends, discover the reasons students choose not to enroll, or see how one institution went about marketing to its Gen Z audience.
