Adult learner marketing is in need for an overhaul. The typical tools of the undergraduate enrollment manager – purchasing test taker names and financial aid leveraging – don’t fit. While the usual approaches of professional, graduate, and continuing education – ‘build it and they will come’ and mass promotion of course registration and application dates – is not sustainable and increasingly ineffective.
Below are my some of thoughts from a recent UPCEA webinar entitled, The New Enrollment Marketing Plan: A Five-Step Process. The following transcript is from the webinar question-and-answer session. DemandEngine will release the full webinar at a later date.
Tim, you mentioned the two types of marketing (direct response). Can you talk more about ways of getting direct registrations as opposed to skimming?
Tim Copeland: Yes, for context, skimming is an acquisition strategy where you try to find prospective students who may not be interested in registering today, but may be good candidates for the future. Direct registrations are specific registration or application promotions often sent to existing inquiries or past student participants.
With a direct registration strategy, you want to avoid these mindless grabs of past participants that may have some sliver of interest in another course.
If you have certificate programs (or this even works with degrees), look at the number of students who have credits toward the credential over the past two years and then target them with specific offers to encourage completion. On one hand, this is a retention issue; alternatively, it is a reasonable and relevant method to identify current students who are more likely to continue, which is much easier than going out to find an unknown student.
Every professional, graduate, and continuing education unit should have a dual prospective student acquisition strategy that is made up of skimming and direct registration strategies. And as I said, more effort should move toward skimming to build the list of future prospective students.
What are some questions you would ask a client to get them thinking about what they need to do to develop a conversion strategy?
Tim Copeland: We start with a three-step messaging architecture to uncover what students actually believe about your institution or program, to determine what you want them to believe (your ideal branding messages}, and to discover what evidence can you provide. We also discuss important events and dates, or even important program deadlines, as well as other material you may have that could be used as a response offer. This information provides a basis to craft an ongoing conversation with your prospects using key messages and proof points, in combination with offers, events, and deadlines, to encourage students to take the next step.
What advice would you have for a university where enrollment functions are somewhat separated from marketing and advertising functions? (We are the administrative unit for the University's online programs and produce materials, but only provide the back-end for different units across campus. The programs themselves handle the student contact, and getting data about what worked and what doesn't is hard.)
Tim Copeland: First, I would say you are not a lone ranger in your current situation. Historically, the nature of extension, outreach, or continuing education units has been very decentralized and, some might say, entrepreneurial.
As competition has increased, though, there is a need for a more coordinated approach to enrollment marketing. It’s not necessarily an issue of ownership, although having direct-line reports for key enrollment functions—from recruitment, marketing, and operations—helps.
What’s needed is a more comprehensive planning effort that begins with enrollment leadership identifying clear and realistic goals. From there it’s a process of working with your internal constituents to develop a written plan that specifies both the strategies required to achieve your goals and where the accountability lies.
Too often, Deans or other leaders of our units delegate this or perhaps don’t put enough organizational emphasis on the importance of enrollment management. I believe this is a mistake.
You made some points about chasing tools. But ultimately, technology has to support what we do. How do you reconcile the two?
Tim Copeland: If we want to be strategic about technology, we would start with defining the business need, identifying the organizational value, understanding our processes, building a business case, and THEN selecting the appropriate tools. Instead, what we see is a warp-factor jump from functional need to technology solution; this is a case of the tail wagging the dog.
What is a general revenue growth goal for a CE unit that has only two professional staff and one office manager and is only three years old?
Tim Copeland: In your question, you’ve highlighted exactly why applying growth percentages to a budget is quite mindless. Is the best practice 2% or 20%?
The real question to ask is, “What is the potential opportunity?” Do you have programs with unsold capacity? Are the programs in demand? I like to start with unsold capacity: You may find that you have 100 student seats that are going unfilled, which represent $70,000 in revenue. If you executed specific strategies to capture that 100-seat capacity, could you achieve 50% of it?
These are more interesting planning questions than the rote application of a 5% target on the revenue budget.
A lot of the examples you provided today ring true for my outreach organization. Where should we start?
Tim Copeland: Assuming that everyone shares the same information, start with what you know:
· What are your enrollment trends?
· What does your enrollment funnel look like?
· Which programs are profitable?
· What does your organization feel like to students? Are you internally- or externally-focused?
Then you can start building your case for action with data. (For those of you who have your purse or wallet nearby, pull out a dollar bill. What does it say on the back? “In God we trust.” For the rest of us, we have to bring data.) These lead to opportunities to modify or strengthen current approaches and, ultimately, organization change through collaborative planning.
How can we get higher-ups to set or see the value of clear goals?
Tim Copeland: Unless there is an internal crisis—say, revenues dropping unexpectedly—it’s often difficult to get the organizational inertia to change. Here are two options:
First, refer back to one of my earlier points in the presentation: if you don’t have goals, what’s stopping you from developing them? Sometimes middle managers blame management for a lack of direction; we expect them to bring the tablets down from the mount.
Another way to look at this is that you have a responsibility to fill in the blanks. When I was in the corporate world, our CEO at a meeting of North American managers told us that things are never perfect, and as managers, you have been hired to fix problems.
We find that organizational performance audits and secret shopping research can expose weaknesses while providing valuable data that serve as a fixed point of reference. If you would like to further discuss how we do this work, contact me.
During the presentation, you mentioned some research. Is this information published?
Tim Copeland: The papers I mentioned are available on the DemandEngine website. Again, those titles are, “The Road Less Traveled: Enrollment Management Practices of Professional and Continuing Education,” “Introducing the Enrollment Funnel - A Valuable Tool for Professional and Continuing Education Outreach,” and “ACHE 2010 - Making Outreach Measurable.”
Interested in solving the stealth problem? Start with an enrollment marketing strategy based upon relevance, permission, and preferences as your foundations. Design multi-channel conversations using offers, information, and stories that communicate with students based on their needs, wants, and interests. An interactive approach to enrollment marketing is about addressing the student, remembering what she says, and then communicating again in a way that demonstrates you remember what they told you.
