Recently in Student Recruitment Category

Student Recruitment: how green is the grass in your yard?

Sometimes you can't escape reading higher education RFPs for marketing services. And those RFPs provide interesting insight into the marketing challenges faced in both the public and private sectors and what people would like to do to meet them.

In the last 30 days I've read RFPs from a selective (but not Ivy League) private university and a large public university that were both planning to hire a marketing firm for assistance in meeting enrollment goals for traditional, residential students. Their problem: historically strong market areas were not producing as many students now as in the past. Their quest: where is the grass greener?

The goal: new students with more money

These schools did not want just any academically qualified students. The private university emphasized students who could afford to pay all or most of the sticker price costs. The public university wanted out-of-state students who would pay higher tuition levels.

And so with their traditional cultivation areas no longer producing the required crop, each place was about to embark on a search for greener pastures. Expand brand recognition and strength. Generate new inquiries. Enroll students from far away. Make more money.

5 Serious "Greener Grass" Problems

How many problems can we list with this "greener grass" strategy? Here are five that immediately come to mind:

• Many schools have the same idea. Will California export enough students to meet enrollment goals everywhere else, and especially in the Northeast?
• Is the budget large enough to support the imaginations at work here? More than one masterfully crafted brand campaign has floundered because the budget would not sustain the long-term effort needed to successfully cultivate brand strength in new markets.
• Is a focus on "full pay" students realistic? Whatever the proverbial "ability to pay," fewer families are willing to spend on high tuition for anything less than schools with top-tier reputations.
• Most students go less than 100 miles from home for higher education.
• Searching for greener grass might mean neglecting the home territory and leaving that open to traditional, near-by competitors.

5 steps for a "greener grass" student recruitment strategy

What elments of a "new" student recruitment enrollment strategy might work? Consider these:

• First, make sure that the yield from your primary enrollment territory is as high as possible. Strengthen what you can to increase yield without additional tuition discounting.
• Do a "pull power" analysis for your current academic majors. Calculate the percent of inquiries that apply and enroll for each major. With some exceptions (some majors are less likely to draw students from far away), programs with the highest "pull power" percents are the best bets for enrollment from new market areas.
• Make sure the high "pull power" programs have really strong website information easily available for students who visit to learn more about them.
• Starting in the high school sophomore year, conduct very focused searches for "greener grass" students around these strong majors, assuming that these are indeed the ones with open space for new students. The purpose of the search? Get students to visit the website pages for these programs. Make it easy to inquire from the academic pages. You're more likely to get students to visit your website than to become an inquiry directly from your search contact. (Keep the inquiry form simple like this one at Creighton.)
• Forget "full pay" and go for "lower than our usual tuition discount" scholarship students. Aim to improve the bottom line without creating an unrealistic financial barrier.

One absolutely essential point

Get those academic website pages in top-order for future students before you do anything else. That's likely to help right in your own backyard before you even start on your Lewis and Clark expedition for new territories.

That's all for now 

·  Join me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HighEdMarketing

· Subscribe to "Your Higher Education Marketing Newsletter" at http://www.bobjohnsonconsulting.com/newsletter-subscribe.html 

Mobile Mrketing: Invest in Mobile Apps or a Mobile Website?

At both the ACT and eduWeb mobile marketing workshop sessions in July, a popular question was this: Should we first invest in mobile apps or should we be creating a "mobile-friendly" website?

Wise people differ on the answer. 

The Urge for an App

Apps are best done for special events that can range from virtual tours to campus transit instructions and time tables to specific marketing campaigns. An individual app done for mobile is easier to do than reconstructing an entire website. And after all, there's an app for just about everything anyone wants to do online, isn't there?

Advertising can make it seem as if apps are the "must have" element in mobile marketing. Yes and no. Research says that few people regularly use more than a few apps, no matter how many they download.

The Need for a Mobile-Friendly Site by 2011

If limited resources force you to make a choice, I'm in the camp that says work on creating a mobile-friendly version of your regular website and have that ready by mid-point 2011.

Don't do apps if doing them means postponing work on a website that will please people who access it from a mobile phone. We are not talking about iPads here. The mobile device that people are most likely to use to get to your site are iPhones and Androids. Maybe Blackberry. Check your analytics report to see what people are using now and track that growth every month from now until December.

Consider this from the Pew Internet and American Life Project reported in July:

• 65 percent of people 18 to 29 years old use their smartphone to access the Internet. Just under 50 percent of people 30 to 39 do the same. Expect those numbers to grow.

Top Tasks for Mobile: Student Recruitment

For the best marketing impact, you won't be able to get away with "mangling down" (thanks to Drew Stevenson, University of Minnesota for that great phrase) your regular website. Instead, you'll have to make difficult choices about the content that's most needed by people visiting your site and make that the main focus of your mobile efforts. That will force more attention in navigation to the top tasks people want to complete on your site. Consider these for student recruitment:

• Read a list of academic programs available
• Calculate the net cost to attend your school
• Register for a campus visit
• Make an inquiry
• Check application status
• Pay an enrollment deposit

Example of a Mobile-Ready Site: College of Charleston

The task is daunting but far from impossible. College of Charleston says it has adapted 95 percent of its regular website for mobile access. Frankly, that almost seems more than necessary. Adaptation to mobile just might be a great time to identify those seldom-visited pages on your regular website that people can't bear to remove. Mark them as "not needed for mobile" and focus instead on your most used pages.

Visit the College of Charleston mobile site. Start by reading the description of the change and then use your smartphone to see just how well it works. One of the first things you'll note: you don't have to "finger flick" to make the type large enough to read when you arrive at a page.

The Charleston site makes a strong first impression. That first "curb appeal" of your site, mobile or not, will help or hinder the success of your marketing efforts.

Expect more "notes on mobile" soon.

Mobile Marketing Presentation on SlideShare

The eduWeb version of my mobile marketing workshop, "Mobile in the Marketing Mix: Crafting a New Communications Strategy," is online now at SlideShare.

Mobile Marketing with the American Marketing Association

Register for "Getting to the Core of of Social Media and Mobile Marketing for Higher Ed Institutions" webinar after you check the September 22 topic list. I'll be speaking on strategy for an effective mobile marketing effort.

That's all for now 

My mobile marketing workshops at the ACT Enrollment Planners Conference last week and eduWeb2010 on Monday attracted some great people, ready to share questions and experiences with everyone attending. Before leaving for Carol Aslanian's graduate marketing seminar in NYC tomorrow, time for some quick notes on mobile marketing and higher education.

First, a special thinks to Suzanne Petrusch and her team at St. Mary's University and Dave Marshall at Mongoose Research for assembling recruitment cycle conversion data that was of special interest to people at the workshops. Here's my summary of the St. Mary's experience using text messaging as part of the communications mix with potential new students since last November:

• Relatively few inquiries (about 4 percent) opted in for text messaging at or near the start of the recruitment cycle. That confirms findings in the 2010 E-Expectations research that college-bound high school students are wary of receiving text messages for student recruitment.
• But, and this is a very major "but": almost everyone (about 80 percent) who did opt-in early for text contacts continued along and applied for admission.
• Almost 50 percent of the people sending enrollment deposits by the end of June were people who had signed to receive text contacts.

Texting Offer Identifies Best Prospects Early

The learning here: offering the texting option was a great way to identify early in the recruitment cycle the people who were already very interested in St. Mary's and were willing to commit to a "text relationship" from the start. While this was destined to be a higher-than-normal yield group, identifying the most likely future students as easly as possible so they are not lost among (in this case) 35,000 total inquiries is an important role for mobile marketing to play.

Experience Your Site from a Smartphone

One item from the E-Expectations survey seemed a major surprise to many people: more than 20 percent of college-bound high school seniors have used a smartphone to access a higher education website. Why such a surprise? After all, somebody has been buying all those iPhones and Androids over the last 12 months.

• The real question should be this: how many people will not return after the experience they had on that first visit? Be sure to check your web analytics to see (1) how many new visitors are arriving at your site from a mobile device and (2) how the bounce rate for those people compares to the bounce rate for people arriving from a regular computer.

More next week on mobile apps vs. mobile websites, but there is a bottom line here: you will need a mobile-friendly website in the not distant future.

Mobile Marketing Presentation on SlideShare

The eduWeb version of the workshop, "Mobile in the Marketing Mix: Crafting a New Communications Strategy," is online now at SlideShare.

Look for more "notes on mobile" next week. More then about the frequency of the texting and other items that people brought up at the workshops.

That's all for now 

The impact of effective online marketing on higher education websites varies quite a bit from school to school. That's not exactly a surprising revelation.

Consider these random notes after preparing a new presentation (Adult-friendly Websites: A 'Best of the Best Review') for Carol Aslanian's next Education Dynamics conference that took me through many different websites in search of the 19 examples I'll be using in Chicago next week.

• Easy to find academic programs: For most potential future students, "adult" or not, learning what programs are offered is the first thing they want to do when starting to pick a college. Few schools make this easy to do right from the home page. One of the best "can't miss" examples is at the DeVry University home page.
• Easy to find online programs: Online education is booming today so why not give people an quick list of everything you offer online? Too many schools require visitors to scroll through the complete list of programs to find the ones marked for online availability. Ball State University does it better on this special page for online programs.
• Transfer credit evaluation: Most undergraduate adult students have taken courses elsewhere. One of their goals in selecting a college is to learn which of those earlier courses will transfer toward the new degree. Most schools don't seem to offer informal online evaluation of previous courses. Instead, potential students are usually told that they'll find out after they've applied and been accepted. Indiana University of Pennsylvania departs from the norm with their online evaluation page.
• Payment options: It isn't easy to find out how people can pay for their courses. Northern Arizona University presents 4 options that easily pass the "scan and find in 5 seconds or less" test at their special "Payment Options" page.
• Social media connections: Many but not all schools today are including icons for social media sites somewhere on their websites, although from the placement it sometimes seems that they don't want people to find them. University of Phoenix increases social media visibility by including new updates for Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube on an "Online Communities" page.
• Quick start to Chat: I found several examples of a real-time chat opportunity. That's a good thing for people who have an immediate question about something on the website. But don't ask people to complete a detailed survey so "we can serve you better" as a requirement to send a chat question. Keep your chat form as simple as the example from Phoenix.

Those are a few examples of website features to create and/or avoid on a website with high student recruitment impact.

Best Adult Student Recruitment Website

People often ask me to recommend a single "best" website.

I'm always reluctant to do that since few sites combine the best features found by searching through many. That said, the search for examples for this presentation eliminated that reluctance. Nothing's perfect, but the best overall website I've found for adult student recruitment is at Walden University.

Graduate Student Recruitment Conference in NYC in July

If you have a special interest in recruiting graduate students, join Carol Aslanian and friends for "Graduate Student Marketing" at the Harvard Club on July 29.

Check the presenters and be a participant after you read the programs details.

That's all for now 

iPhone Dominates Mobile Access: for a small group of website visitors

Two mobile marketing workshops are set for this summer, both in July in Chicago. I'm busy with that research now, including new online inquiries at schools venturing into mobile marketing.

The first workshop, at the ACT Enrollment Planners Conference, is especially for people who need to weave mobile marketing into their mix of student recruitment marketing activities. The second, at eduWeb 2010, is for anyone interested in higher education online communications.

A key question, of course, is whether or not people are using mobile devices in sufficient quantity to make the expenditure of scarce time, energy, and dollars in this area at all.

Mobile Access on Google Analytics

If you have Google Analytics on your website, that's easy to find out. When you get to your dashboard, open "Visitors" in the left hand column, scroll down to "Mobile" and open that to "Mobile Devices." You'll immediately see how many visitors you are getting at all from mobile devices, as well as which ones people are using. Here's a screen shot from my website today. Mobile devices on GA.ppt

The first thing to note (I'll bet real money this is true at your site as well) is that most of your web visitors do not yet arrive from a mobile device. The second thing is that for those who do, the iPhone has a huge lead over anything else.

iPad: Track the Growth

Will the iPad be important? Easy enough to track that week by week if you want, or at least month by month. Today, for instance, I noted the first 3 people using iPads to visit my website.

Mobile Apps or Mobile Websites?

What's going to be most important to your marketing success, mobile apps or mobile websites?

Count on both, of course. Who said life would be so simple that you'd only have to work on one or the other? But don't get carried away with app development without also preparing your site for direct access from mobile devices. Check this article at ReadWriteWeb for a presentation of the need to ensure that your official website works well for visitors using a variety of mobile devices. 

While the iPhone dominates now, expect to see Android-based smartphones increase their market share between now and the end of the year. If that happens, you'll see it in your analytics tracking. At some point, you may need to move past iPhone/iPad apps.

Check iPhone Apps on the iPad 

Don't assume that all iPhone apps will work well on an iPad. Early reports note that some do not play well on the larger iPad screen. If you already have iPhone apps, check them now on the iPad. Some are being described as "ugly" and even Steve Jobs banned some popular Apple apps from the iPad.

The good news is that web analytics can help you make informed decisions about all of this based on the trends you see emerging for new and returning visitors as you track this in the months ahead.

Web Analytics for Recruitment: Conference Presentation in June 

I'll be covering more about web analytics tracking in my session at Carol Aslanian's conference on recruiting adult students in June in Chicago

Online Inquiry Forms... Long Forms = Fewer Completions

Visiting several higher education websites the last few days inspired this mini-rant.

In the "stealth age" when potential students of all ages explore college and university websites as the first step in picking a school, concern has grown about how to get people to reveal their identities as early as possible. After all, if we don't know who a potential student is how can we put our carefully crafted recruitment commuications plan into action?

Not enough time is spent on removing barriers to getting an online inquiry. That remedial works starts with using the shortest possible online inquiry form. The evidence is clear: few schools pay attention to that, especially in the not-for-profit sector.

Direct Marketing Maxim: Shorter Forms = More Completions

One marketing maxim known to direct marketers for decades is still true today: the longer you make the form you want people to complete, the fewer people will complete it. Period.

With that in mind, visit your online inquiry page for potential new students now. Look at all the information that is "nice" for the organization to have, but not needed to respond to a simple request for more information about your school. Remove it. 

Here are a few of my special favorites to consider eliminating:

• High school attended or attending
• High school code (maybe my all-time favorite)
• "Where did you hear about us" lists (another favorite)
• GPA
• SAT or ACT score
• Phone number unless it is an integral part of your follow-up plan
• Athletics interest
• Other student activity interest areas
• Year of graduation
• Ethnic identity, however optional 

All of this information might be nice or necessary for your data files between the time of inquiry and enrollment, but you have plenty of time to collect it later. Don't put anything on the inquiry form that isn't needed to respond to the inquiry. Usually, that's name, email and street address, and program area of interest (if you're going to address that in the first response.)

Make it Fit "Above the Fold"

This last note: design your form so that a visitor can see the entire form when they first arrive at your web page. That sends the important initial message: "This won't take long to complete."

Creighton University Gets It Right

Creighton University knows how to do this right. Visit the Creighton online inquiry form and see a form that would make direct marketers proud.

If you have an online inquiry form as good or better than Creighton's, let me know with an email to bob@bobjohnsonconsulting.com.

Web Analytics: Bounce Rate and Mobile Access

Yesterday and today I've been updating a fall 2008 presentation on web analytics for higher education for a new webinar with Magna Communications in April.

The presentation is based on Google Analytics and uses examples from that system. Much of what's available from GA is of course available from other analytics programs as well.

Two different elements that stand out from the updating process:

• The "bounce" rate. In checking to possible update the source for an analytics glossary recommendation, I noticed that some glossary pages don't even include a definition of the bounce rate. For the record, the bounce rate is the percent of visitors to a website page who leave that page without continuing on to another.
• It is especially important for higher education marketers to track the bounce rate for new visitors from whatever entry page they start at.
• The entry page will most often be the home page, but it might also be the admissions page or the page for a favorite academic program. If more than 35 percent of new visitors are leaving their first page without continuing, you likely have a problem.
• You can also use the bounce rate to compare what happens at the entry pages for various academic programs. Note the highest and lowest and compare the strong points of the best performing pages with those that don't do as well. (We are assuming, as you probably are, that potential students who start at the MBA or Nursing or Political Science entry page should continue to other pages in the same area rather than flee the site.)
• Mobile access. Pay attention to the percent of new visitors who access the website from a mobile device. If that figure gets near 10 percent, check and see how your website works for people who enter that way. Since 2008, Google has made that report stand out under on the dashboard with a new "mobile devices" heading under "Visitors."
• Expect access from mobile devices to increase. The real question is how quickly that will happen (some say rapidly, others say slowly) and how much time web developers on your campus should spend in creating a mobile-friendly version of your website.
• Use the "mobile" report in GA and you'll be able to see just how quickly a change is taking place and you'll know whether access is from an iPhone, an Android or a Blackberry.

Register for "Web Analytics for Recruitment Success"

Check the webinar outline and register at Magna Communications.

That's all for now 

• Join me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HighEdMarketing
• Subscribe to "Your Higher Education Marketing Newsletter" at http://www.bobjohnsonconsulting.com/ 

Recruiting Adults: Email is More Important than Social Media

Sitting at Carol Aslanian's conference on adult student recruitment listing to Jennifer Copeland at Demand Engine report on initial results of a survey of 50,000 adults (drawn from files of 10 universities that volunteered to participate with about 10% response so far) on their preferences for finding or receiving information at three points in the recruitment cycle:

• Researching schools before making an inquiry ("stealth" mode is increasing)
• After making an inquiry
• After sending an application

90% Start with Search, 90% Prefer Iniitial Email and Mail Follow-up

Key findings so far:

• Before making an inquiry, 90 percent report using a search engine (Google, for the most part) to start their search. At this stage, phone use ranks quite low.
• After making an inquiry, 90 percent prefer email and direct mail for ongoing contact. Social media (including FaceBook and Twitter) rank low. Phone is now acceptable is just under 50 percent.
• Preferences don't change much after a person sends an application:  Email and regular mail remain clear preferences, while phone rises to just over 50 percent and social media remain relatively low.

The research is winding down soon. Detailed results will be available in one or two months.

The preliminary results are strong: email is alive and well as a tool for enrollment conversion, the telephone is important (as immediate follow-up for people after an inquiry and later throughout the cycle on a selective basis).

Social Media Impact Grows Near End of Recruitment Cycle

When does social media become important? Pretty deep into the recruitment cycle when people are close to a final decision and want to connect with other people who are also close to enrollment.

The clear lesson: if you don't have recruitment time for everything online, invest resources in your website (critical for first visits) and email follow-up. When you're sure that's well covered, branch out into what Jennifer is calling "bleeding edge" social media like FaceBook and Twitter.

That's all for now.

• Join me on Twitter here at http://twitter.com/HighEdMarketing
• Subscribe to "Your Higher Education Marketing Newsletter" at http://www.bobjohnsonconsulting.com/

E-readers and Student Recruitment: Rapid Viewbook Delivery Right from the Web

Soon I'll be updating a popular presentation for my Sunday afternoon tutorial at this year's AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education in November. 

The first version of "Student Recruitment in an Online World: Creating a Marketing Communications Plan in a World without Paper" seemed like a crazy idea when created for ACT's Enrollment Planners Conference in 2008. Until more than 40 people signed for the pre-conference session.

We updated and repeated it at the ACT meeting in 2009 and again at eduWeb2009 as pre-conference workshops this summer. The eduWeb session is online now at SlideShare and so far 1,396 people have viewed it and 13 have said it was a "favorite."

A key element right at the start is a review and discussion of e-readers. For most people, that means Amazon's Kindle or Sony's competitors.

Way back in 2008 we agreed on one thing: since e-readers were only available to read "black & white" text, they were not yet a viable alternative for things like viewbooks (or alumni magazines or annual reports). And in 2008, we could only speculate about when color e-readers would be available.

E-readers Soon in Color

Since then, the pace of change has been rapid. If you haven't yet started to think about how many people will want to download your viewbook from your website to an e-reader in the next 12 to 24 months, you'd best starting thinking now.

• In the 2009 summer events, we were able to talk about the first commercial e-reader in color from Fujitsu. It was (and is) available only in Japan and it cost about $1,000. Far from a mass-market device but remarkable progress in less than a year.
• Now Barnes & Noble has announced that in spring 2010 it will market a color e-reader. The potential manufacturer has denied this, but you can watch a Barnes & Noble rep announce it on YouTube.

No price was mentioned in the YouTube interview but I'd look for something substantially under $1,000. At first, it will be for early adopters rather than the general public. But you can sure feel which way the wind is blowing. And it is blowing much harder than it was in 2008.

Sony Invests Major $$$ in TV Ad Campaign

• Sony debuted a new TV ad campaign for an e-reader priced at $199 during this year's Emmy Awards TV show. People who missed that might have caught it last Sunday during an NFL game or perhaps on an episode of "Good Wife." Big $$$ behind this. 
• Amazon has cut the price of the least expensive Kindle to $259 (second time this year) and introduced a new "international version" at $279. Perfect for international student recruitment?
• Barnes & Noble has e-reader software you can download for your PC or Mac or smartphone. Ideal for the fast growing netbook sector. I'm reading my free copy of Dracula on my netbook right now each time my plane leaves the ground.

Viewbooks and Alumni Magazine for E-readers in 2011?

So what about your viewbook and your alumni magazine?

Isn't it time now to get ready for 2011, if not 2010? If you want people to know your college or university really is a tech-savvy place, will you have full-color publications ready for people to download to an e-reader direct from your website or Facebook page? 

Pressures will only grow to reduce print publication costs. Every download to an e-reader is one less copy you'll have to print and mail. Not to mention the rapid delivery advantage. Time to get started now. Out there in higher education land, somebody already has. Maybe your chief competitor.

Join me at the AMA marketing symposium for a new version of "Student Recruitment in an Online World: Creating a Marketing Communications Plan in a World without Paper." Register for Tutorial D after you review the session outline. 

That's all for now.

• Join me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HighEdMarketing
• Subscribe to "Your Higher Education Marketing Newsletter" at http://www.bobjohnsonconsulting.com/