Personalizing the Enrollment Funnel to Maximize Student Recruitment and Success
In a perfect world, the enrollment funnel for higher education would look like this: a student decides to look for a degree program, goes directly to your campus’s website, submits their contact information, talks to a recruiter or advisor, and enrolls. Easy, right?
Except, that’s often not the case. Prospective students have plenty of options when it comes to advancing their education. And with more and more campuses adding degree and certificate programs, competing with other universities to hit your enrollment numbers can be challenging.
As a recruiter or campus leader, there are ways to increase prospective students’ chances to follow the enrollment pipeline from start to finish. If you’re not sure how to do that, no worries. In this post, we’ll cover five ways to add a personal touch to the admissions funnel to keep prospective students interested in attending your campus.
Three Ways to Personalize Your Enrollment Funnel
The fall semester is typically the busiest enrollment period for college campuses. So, the time between the end of the spring semester and the beginning of the fall semester is a great time to slow down, review your admissions funnel, and identify ways to personalize it for better student engagement.
However, before you make changes to your funnel, it’s helpful to know which stage of the enrollment funnel students lose interest and ultimately decide to apply for enrollment somewhere else. Do you lose out on potential students because of untimely responses to their queries? Or is it something else, such as simply not offering students’ desired degree tracks?
While you can’t necessarily add in a new degree program before the start of the fall semester, you can do other things to ensure prospective students choose your campus. Here are three ways to personalize your enrollment funnel.
1 . Personalized Outreach with SMS Marketing
Once you’ve collected prospective students’ contact info, it’s time to ramp up your marketing efforts to ensure they make it through your application process. Texting is the quickest and most efficient way to reach your students exactly where they spend most of their time—on their phones.
Considering most people check their smartphones around 144 times a day, it makes sense to use SMS to ensure your prospective students continue to move through the admissions process. Personalized texting strategies can lead to higher student retention.
A large randomized field experiment at a public university found that implementing a mix of automated and personalized text messages—which allowed two‑way communication between students and academic advisors—increased college‐level persistence from 93 % up to 95 % overall, and among underclass students from 87 % to 93 % by the end of the semester.
You can use text messages as a nudge to remind prospective students to complete their applications, follow-up on missing documents, or personally invite them to webinars, campus tours, or virtual tours. With Mongoose’s AI Assistant feature, you can generate real-time, personalized responses, offer multilingual support, set up automation for enrollment queries, and more.
Mongoose was developed to help higher education institutions create personalized SMS campaigns. You can filter or segment your prospective students by interests or demographics to ensure they only receive the messages most relevant to them.
2. Update Your Program Pages (and Include a Chatbot!)
Your campus website is one of the most critical touchpoints in your digital marketing and enrollment strategy. Most prospective students will likely access your website to browse programs, learn about campus life, and evaluate support services before making a decision.
Prospective students have questions—and they expect quick answers. Don’t risk losing a student at a key point in the funnel. Instead, use Mongoose to incorporate an AI chatbot into your website to streamline inquiries and optimize availability.
Mongoose can collect student information such as eligibility or financial aid needs, and can answer questions as they arise. AI Assistants are intuitive and ensure students receive up-to-date and accurate information. If a student has a complex question, an admissions counselor or staff member can easily step in.
3. Segmented Email Campaigns
Emails are a foundational element of enrollment marketing. But if your emails aren’t personalized, you’re likely missing opportunities to connect with students.
Your email campaigns are part of your overall marketing strategies and should be tailored accordingly. A HubSpot survey indicated that segmented emails receive 30% more opens and 50% more click-throughs than unsegmented ones.
So what does this mean for your admissions funnel? Understanding where your potential students’ interests lie helps you create better email segments that align with where they are in the student journey—whether that’s application, follow-up, or onboarding.
Plus, combining email with text, chat, WhatsApp, and social media outreach ensures comprehensive coverage of every stage of the funnel. Mongoose supports multichannel outreach, so your admissions counselors can build trust and support students consistently.
Personalize Your Enrollment Funnel with Mongoose
As your campus gears up for the fall semester, personalizing your admissions funnel is essential to meet enrollment goals and improve conversion rates. Taking a more individualized approach allows you to optimize the student experience and boost enrollment rates.
Mongoose empowers institutions with tools that enable personalized communication, streamline decision-making, and support success stories throughout the student lifecycle. From AI-powered chat to data-driven SMS and email automation, Mongoose enhances every stage of your enrollment funnel.
Ready to bring Mongoose to your campus and strengthen your admissions process? Book a demo with us today and learn how our platform can help optimize your funnel and support student enrollment from inquiry to enrollment.
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