The Grow Enrollments Podcast

This week, I spoke to Llibert Argerich, who is the VP of marketing at Udemy. As the world’s largest E-Learning platform, business is booming at Udemy for the time being. Thus, Llibert and his team have shifted their focus from introducing a brand new product to explaining why online learning holds the key to adapting to modern society. And with great attention comes a great deal of customer data. Platforms like Udemy must learn all they can about their new students to plot their next moves for the coming months.

This week, I spoke to Sasha Peterson, who is the CEO of TargetX. Known primarily for their CRM designed exclusively for higher education, TargetX specializes in improving what Sasha calls the “student delight” cycle. They help education organizations recruit students, run their admissions process, and engage students on campus. This multi-layered approach reflects TargetX’s bold mission to turn traditionally separate departments into a single, unified force. In his six years at TargetX, Sasha has often found that integrating a CRM is nowhere near as challenging as creating a new operational culture that allows the CRM to fulfill its intended purpose.

This week, I spoke to Akeel Haider, who is the Director of Performance Marketing at the Flatiron School. This coding bootcamp has ten campuses around the US, along with one London campus. Students can also complete their degrees entirely online. With nearly fifteen years of experience in performance marketing for higher education, Akeel has helped many traditional and non-traditional schools better understand their marketing funnel. This became increasingly difficult as schools began using more channels to connect with prospective students. Eventually, Akeel concluded that the key to scaling efficiently was creating a system that uses a variety of KPIs to accurately track the progression of the prospects’ journey from the first marketing touch point down to enrollment and matriculation stages in the admissions funnel and beyond.

This week, I spoke to Roger Welch, who is the VP of Marketing for EdTech company Springboard. This San Francisco-based startup offers career track courses on data, software engineering, coding, and UX. Unlike most other boot camps, Springboard actually guarantees job placement for their students, or they get their money back. Springboard also works closely with recent graduates for several months to help them find jobs in their desired industry. Having such a career-oriented business model allows Roger and his team to anticipate the primary concerns of prospective students and ultimately understand why someone would be curious about a school like Springboard in the first place.  

This week, I spoke to Lauren Landry, the Associate Director of Marketing and Communications at Harvard Business School Online (HSBO). Lauren specializes in content strategy, which is no surprise considering her background in journalism. As an education reporter for a Boston-based media company, Lauren frequently interviewed college students about their post-graduation plans. She learned why many students were focused on honing specific skills, and why some chose to pursue post-graduate degrees. Today, Lauren applies this firsthand knowledge to develop and distribute content related to both topics, which are still paramount concerns of incoming students. 

Many education organizations are finding themselves completely unprepared for the challenge of enrollment growth. Their previous marketing strategies appear to have lost all relevance, thanks in no small part to the myriad of differences between millennials and their new audience; Generation Z. It seems that the only option is to start from scratch. But is this even possible? And how do you know which changes to make first? Maybe the key is accepting that a full-scale “reboot” isn’t exactly what your marketing department needs at this time.

Of all the changes taking place in the education industry, few are more significant than the change in target audience. Education organizations currently face the challenge of engaging with the highly mysterious and highly misunderstood Generation Z. Not only do today’s prospective students require different methods of communication, but each engagement strategy must also be as personalized as possible. If you know how to talk to your school’s ideal student and where to talk to them, you’ve got a major competitive advantage.

In today’s episode, we’ll cover: 

- What are the building blocks of a successful enrollment strategy?

- How should enrollment officers engage with Generation Z?

- What role will automation play in the future of education marketing?

This week, I spoke to Ken Boutelle and Michael Tolmie, who are the Senior Vice President of Enrollment Services and Managing Director of Marketing at National Education Partners in Scottsdale, Arizona. National Education Partners offers a multitude of services to education organizations looking to improve their enrollment efforts as well as their general operations. They help organizations with everything from retention to student services to internal communication. It’s safe to say that Ken, Michael and their colleagues have encountered every possible obstacle to enrollment growth. 

What are the building blocks of a successful enrollment strategy?

At National Education Partners, one of their first steps towards enrollment growth is figuring out which metrics (starts, applications, etc.) are in need of the most improvement. Any goal becomes much easier to achieve when you can attach success to specific numbers. For many organizations, growing enrollments also means doing a better job emphasizing the programs with the most unique value propositions. It usually makes sense to optimize marketing spend in this direction. 

However, it’s very difficult to obtain sufficient data without regular communication between departments. Ken and Michael revealed that organizations with the most enrollment issues tend to do a lot of finger-pointing. The enrollment team says the leads are terrible, but the marketing team says the enrollment team just doesn’t know how to close them. Instead, these teams should be spending more time sharing data and creating strategies that make everyone’s lives easier. 

How should enrollment officers engage with Generation Z?

Like most organizations, National Education Partners has seen a massive decline in the efficacy of phone calls. Today’s students are much more receptive to text messages. But in Ken and Michael’s experience, it’s the content the student sees well before they talk to admissions officers that really seals the deal. In other words, a student should be able to decide if this organization is right for them solely by looking at their online content. 

The type of content that best suits the organization depends on their ideal student, or their most successful programs. Business students, for example, typically prefer to get their information from white papers. Education students, on the other hand, have shown a heightened interest in podcasts. Organizations should also consider popular topics of conversation for different industries. One that comes to mind for education students is school safety. 

What role will automation play in the future of education marketing?

A major contributor of enrollment issues in traditional education organizations is the high cost of attendance. Thankfully, one tool has the potential to decrease tuition costs while increasing enrollments simultaneously: automation. At the moment, students cannot gather all the information they need or get accepted into a school without the assistance of a human being. National Education Partners is exploring ways to change that by creating an automated, Amazon-like experience. 

This solution will likely involve chatbots that are so advanced that they can answer any question and guide prospective students through the entire enrollment process. No more emailing back and forth, no more waiting for acceptance letters. Ken and Michael believe that organizations will see dramatic decreases in their cost per acquisitions as the need for human assistance decreases over time. 

There’s no future without data

These predictions may seem rather drastic, but it’s important to remember that they come from hard data. Your organization may be in store for some drastic changes. But with the right data, you’ll know exactly what those changes are and which tools they require. Data is the cornerstone of any successful enrollment strategy. You simply can’t expect to improve enrollment efforts if you don’t know what’s hindering them. 

Today’s education marketers have wildly different responsibilities than generations past. Simply put, the job has become more important, and therefore requires the use of more advanced tools. One of the most sought- after tools in education marketing is CRM platforms. We know that CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management.” But what do these platforms actually do for education organizations? How can you choose the right option for your team? Before purchasing a subscription, you must first ascertain which additional resources you’ll need to reap the intended benefits of CRM platforms.

Education marketers often make the mistake of putting too much time and money into generating new leads. They fail to realize that all this work is essentially meaningless if their conversion rate doesn’t improve. It’s the leads who are already inside the sales funnel that deserve the most attention. Moving leads further and further into the funnel, however, is easier said than done. It takes a lot of creativity to convert a lead into a customer, or student. Education marketers must ultimately figure out what kind of information and outreach tactics prospective students need to seal the deal. 

The education industry is changing dramatically, but many traditional institutions are stuck in the past. Their marketing materials and enrollment processes have not been updated to accommodate Generation Z. Instead of relying on their reputations to drive enrollments, institutions must evolve to prove that they understand the needs of their students. After all, nothing turns off a prospective student more than a university that apparently believes it’s still catering to Generation X. 

In today’s episode, we’ll cover: 

- Why traditional institutions cannot afford to resist change

- The biggest problem with traditional lead forms and applications

- How marketers can prepare for the AI takeover

This week, I spoke to Jim Fong, who is the Chief Research Officer at the University of Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA). For most of his career, Jim was an analyst who studied data from the past. Over the past five years, however, his attention has shifted towards the future, and how higher education will be affected by the next economy. Today, much of Jim’s work involves sounding the alarm for traditional institutions who have yet to make the connection between user experience and enrollment growth.