Key Strategies in Enrollment Management for Higher Education Success

Ensuring the enrollment period is smooth for your students might sound like a job for your admissions team. However, nearly every department on campus has a hand in enrollment management. From the marketing department to student services to admissions, it takes every department working together to ensure your enrollment numbers stay up.

To do this, your campus needs an effective enrollment management strategy. You’ll need more than a strategy, though. You also need an engagement platform to help your departments carry out their enrollment responsibilities.

In this post, we’ll go over the critical elements of an enrollment management strategy.

Five Key Elements of Enrollment Management 

When you hear “enrollment management,” you likely think of just enrollment and admissions. While it’s true that admissions plays a big part in it, that’s not all of it.

Think of enrollment management as a step in the larger student lifecycle. First, you need to market your campus and its degree programs. Then, students apply for admission and receive acceptance. Next, those students progress through their degree programs, graduate, and become supportive alumni. 

The enrollment cycle is constantly in motion, which means you need to ensure the effectiveness of each part of your enrollment strategy, including recruitment, enrollment, and engagement. Let’s examine the five elements of enrollment management and learn how to use an engagement platform to support your efforts.

Marketing

Your marketing department is an essential part of enrollment management. Marketing helps get the word out to prospective students about your institution’s robust degree programs. Plus, with the right marketing strategies, you can reach students outside of your region to promote diversity on campus and create a more inclusive learning environment. 

To nail down your marketing strategy in the digital age, think about where your prospective students hang out online. Are they on social media? If yes, consider creating paid ad campaigns that lead visitors to your website. Once there, a chatbot or an AI assistant can help collect contact information. You’ll want this to send targeted SMS messages to pre-segmented audiences based on their degree interests, demographic information, and more. 

Admissions 

The admissions department is arguably the most critical part of enrollment management. Admissions is where the magic happens. But, it takes a concentrated effort to ensure students enroll and, ultimately, arrive on campus.

You’ll need to create an admissions strategy to track students through enrollment. Your plan should include having a help desk during complicated touchpoints in the admission process. Your help desk might consist of an AI chatbot, assistant, or live chat to help answer students’ questions and guide them through the process. 

Offering help to students looking to enroll on campus can positively increase their perception of your institution. Plus, extra help during admissions ensures students who would otherwise give up have a chance to succeed and start their academic journey.

Retention

While you monitor enrollment, you should also examine retention. If students enroll on your campus but ultimately decide to discontinue their studies, you have a problem that needs to be addressed. Fortunately, there are several ways to increase and maintain student retention, starting with student engagement. 

Students who are active on campus are far more likely to stay engaged and complete their studies. This means you and your team should provide plenty of opportunities for students to become involved, whether launching student-led clubs, hosting on-campus events, or creating peer mentor programs.

The key to this, though, is reminding students of potential opportunities. You can use SMS or WhatsApp message campaigns to do this. You can also use these same channels to check in with students and ensure they’re on the right track. 

Alumni Engagement 

Your alumni are an essential component of crafting your enrollment management strategy. They can be the greatest testament to your campus. Their success directly reflects the quality of education they received while enrolled in your programs. 

And they’re great word-of-mouth advertisers, too. Because of this, you’ll want to ensure your alumni office is doing its part to keep alumni engaged and up to speed on the neat things happening on campus. 

You can use an engagement platform to:

• Remind alumni about Giving Day
• Inform alumni about upcoming networking events
• Advertise volunteering opportunities
• Encourage alumni to participate in mentorship programs

Research and Reporting

Research and reporting will significantly benefit each of your institution’s departments, especially enrollment management. Using an engagement platform that can provide insights is a great way to dig deeper into student sentiment and understand their behaviors and interactions with your campus. 

Understanding your students’ sentiments allows you to paint a more comprehensive picture of your overall enrollment management strategy. This can give you a better understanding of common enrollment challenges you might run into, like declining enrollment numbers, student financial constraints, or struggling to create a more diverse student population.

Conversation insights and reporting are helpful for each department, but especially for admissions and student support offices. For your admission team, you can understand where students get lost in the enrollment and application process. For student support offices, insights can uncover student sentiment and alert your team to potential issues— which means your team is one step ahead in mitigating problems before they arise.

Reinforce Your Enrollment Management Strategy with Mongoose

It pays to have an enrollment management strategy encompassing the entire student journey, from hopeful prospective students considering college enrollment to successful graduates and alumni leaving their mark in the professional world.  

An effective enrollment management strategy includes partnering with your marketing, admissions, alumni, and student services departments. Each department can significantly benefit from using an engagement platform to support its outreach efforts. If you’re ready to learn more about engagement platforms and how your campus can improve your engagement, recruitment, and retention strategies, contact us today to schedule a demo.

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