Posts Tagged ‘college recruitment’

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Here’s One Way to Differentiate Your College

May 5th, 2015

A recent story by Beckie Supiano in The Chronicle for Higher Education, “Students’ College Choices Aren’t Totally Rational (and That’s OK),” included insights from our most recent nationally co-sponsored study, The Excitement Factor!.  Supiano writes, “For many students, choosing where to go to college is, at least in part, an emotional decision. That’s not one more higher-education problem to be solved. It might even be a good thing.” In interviews with industry professionals including college and high school counselors, Supiano reports on the influence of the emotional connection, often referred to as the “AHA!” moment, for a student making his or her college choice.

The most successful college enrollment teams recognize the value of creating an environment that will foster excitement about attending their college. Even so, it can be a challenge in today’s competitive higher-ed marketplace. One of the questions we get asked most often is this: “What is the one thing we can do to differentiate our college?”

Excitement_FactorThe answer is: Take a personal interest in the prospective student. 

If you are thinking that is too simple, or that most colleges do this already, two-thirds of prospective students will disagree with you. In truth, most college-bound students say that the colleges they most seriously considered never took a personal interest in them at any point in the recruiting process.

Student excitement about a college is enhanced when they perceive that the college has taken a sincere personal interest in them. And, as a practical matter, the more personal interest you take in a student the more you will find out about his or her unique combination of interests, preferences, desires, anxieties, and aspirations. With that greater understanding you will naturally communicate a unique value proposition. The student will perceive you as unique among their available choices. You will have reached the coveted state of differentiation.

For a significant percentage of students who reached the application or admit stages of the funnel, the college’s personal interest in them, or lack of it, was influential in their college selection decision.

With 36% to 42% of students in the public and private pools, respectively, saying that this was influential in their college selection, it underscores the opportunity for colleges to impact enrollment by demonstrating a personal interest in students across every brand touch point of the institution.

Best Practices: How personal interest is exhibited by the college.

Students respond very favorably to highly personalized, well-crafted emails that address their individual interests. Any type of communication that appears to be genuinely targeted to the individual student is likely to be well received, interpreted as personal and stands out from other colleges.

One student, referring to her multiple interactions with a large public university, said, “From the beginning, the communication felt very personal and made me feel wanted.”http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-photography-female-student-smiling-college-campus-portrait-beautiful-image35626197

Many students relayed stories of colleges building relationships with them in their sophomore and junior years of high school. They said that personalized individual attention exhibited by the college makes them feel more confident, more important, more wanted, more recognized, and more excited about attending.

There are communication techniques your staff can learn that will help them feel confident about reaching out to their prospective students to ask the right questions. This is one of the core techniques we teach in the Interactive Counselor Training Workshops we hold on college campuses throughout the country. It is also  a key component of YES, our Yield Enhancement Tool.

Relationship building isn’t the role of the admissions office alone. Students told us that they responded to personal attention exhibited across all brand touch points on campus; from admissions, to faculty, to financial aid, to anyone who comes into contact with a prospective student, even the landscaper who is helpful in providing directions to a student visiting campus for the first time.

The release of The Excitement Factor! is creating a great deal of thought-provoking discussion among enrollment managers and higher education marketing professionals. The project uncovered a wealth of highly valuable information on how your ability to create student excitement about your college can drive your enrollment. You can DOWNLOAD  the report now.

Continue the conversation on Twitter @LongmireCo. Be sure to Subscribe to Versions of Conversion today so you don’t miss any of this highly-valuable information.

RickMontgomery_100x100Rick Montgomery is as an Enrollment Strategist at Longmire and Company. With over 20 years in higher education marketing, he brings an innovative approach to helping colleges and universities meet their enrollment goals. Rick can be reached at 913/492.1265 x.708 or via email at rmontgomery@longmire-co.com.

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Posted in Closing the Sale, Conversion and Yield, Counselor Training, Customer service

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Celebrate Decision Day! Then, Use These Insights to Move Forward

April 28th, 2015

What are your plans for May 1, aka College Decision Day? Here is our suggestion: First, give yourself and your team kudos for the months of hard work and the outstanding efforts you put forth to serve the students you recruited while building the best possible incoming class. Next, celebrate those great new students that will be joining your campus family this fall. And then, if you are like the majority of college admissions teams across the country, you’ll go right back to work to secure more admitted students because there is still much work to do.

The truth is that most colleges don’t meet their enrollment goals by May 1. According to the “2014 Inside Higher Ed Survey of College and University Admissions Directors,” only 39% of colleges met their target enrollment by Decision Day in 2014 and industry insiders are projecting that even fewer will do so this year.

decision_dayFor college admissions counselors and enrollment managers facing this challenge, we have some good news and important insights gleaned from our latest co-sponsored study, The Excitement Factor! Of the 12,000 students participating in the study, 20% committed to the college of their choice after the first of May.

The late enrollers shared many of the same attributes as their peers, of course. But there were some areas where we found distinct differences that may help you in your outreach efforts.

  • Excitement about Attending: Late enrollers don’t have as high of level of excitement about the college they select and are far less likely to experience a feeling of connection with the college than early enrollers.
  • College Visits and Applications: Students who enrolled later were far less likely to have visited or toured the college they selected than their peers. Actually, they generally applied to and toured far fewer campuses than the students who made their decision sooner.
  • Family Ties: Late enrolling students are more likely to choose a college that a family member has attended than other students.
  • The Cost Factor: The students who enrolled later indicated that cost was slightly more important to them than the students that made their decision earlier.

The late enrollers tended to have lower SAT scores than other students, but otherwise there were no large variances found in the demographics or psychographics of the two groups.

As you review the pool of students still available to you, keep these things in mind. We know that excitement that about attending is a more powerful driver of college selection than cost or perceived quality of the institution and that a tour of your campus can create excitement. Are there students in your pool who haven’t visited your campus yet?

Have you identified potential students with a family connection to your college? In The Excitement Factor!, four in ten students told us that their college choice was influenced by where a parent or sibling attended and late enrollers are even more likely to gravitate to the college that has a family tie for them.

And lastly, if you are looking for a way to really connect with these potential students, we suggest that you make them feel wanted. Two-thirds of college-bound students told us that the colleges they were considering had not taken a personal interest in them at any point in the Personal_Interest_460x287recruiting process. You may have heard the saying that “someone may forget what you said and forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” Showing a personal interest in a student makes them feel good about the college and it has a strong positive correlation to yield.

We help colleges and universities with their recruiting efforts every day, especially now during yield season. If we can help you, please let me know.

Continue the conversation on Twitter @LongmireCo. For more information about Longmire and Company’s Interactive Counselor Training Program, click here. Be sure to Subscribe to Versions of Conversion today so you don’t miss any of this highly-valuable information.

Karen Full picKaren Full is a highly-respected higher education professional who has held positions in admissions and enrollment management at several institutions in the Midwest and Florida. With her vast experience working with large and small, public and private colleges, Karen brings a valuable perspective to her role as an Enrollment Strategist at Longmire and Company. Call Karen at 913/492.1265 x.711 or email her at kfull@longmire-co.com. Follow Karen on Twitter @KarenAFull.

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Psychographic Segmentation: How Personality Traits Impact a Student’s College Selection (Part 2)

April 23rd, 2015

[This is the second in our two-part series on the use of psychographic segmentation to frame your communications with prospective students.]

Psychographic segmentation is an effective strategy that can be indispensable in higher education and can impact every stage of your funnel. Using this approach can be a very powerful tool in your mass marketing efforts and will make the conversations that your counselors have with students far more meaningful and persuasive.Eye_For_College

In Part 1, we focused on segmenting students by their fact-based or excitement-based decision making. Now, let’s delve into psychographic segments based on students’ personality traits; how the relationship between specific personality types are associated with what they desire in a college and what communications strategies are most successful in moving the needle of their excitement.

What can you learn from psychographic segmentation?

The 12,000 students who participated in our newly-released study, The Excitement Factor!, identified their personality traits for us. Then, we asked them to specify what they want in a college.

Through statistical analysis, we uncovered four distinct personality types. We labeled them as follows:

  • Warm and trusting (23%): Easygoing, warm, caring and trusting
  • Assertive extrovert (19%): Spontaneous, risk-taker, assertive, social and extroverted
  • Skeptical introvert (40%): Private, introverted and skeptical
  • Analytical perfectionist (18%): Analytical, ordered and a perfectionist

We also explored the associations of those segments with the type of college students say they most desire.

  • Warm and trusting: Career-oriented, friendly, values, safe, personal and affordable.
  • Assertive extrovert: Social, career-oriented, fun, exciting, friendly, values, safe, personal, affordable and sports.
  • Skeptical introvert: Diverse and liberal.
  • Analytical perfectionist: Prestigious, challenging and well-known.

In addition to analyzing the association between personality type and desired college environment, we examined associations with personality types and the most effective communications methods. For example, we found that “warm and trusting” types are more responsive to Facebook than any other personality group.  And, whereas both “warm and trusting” and “assertive extrovert” types will respond positively to text messages from a college, the “analytical perfectionist” will likely be turned off by that style of communication.

Imagine the power of knowing the personality traits of each student in your funnel.  Admissions counselors can have a fuller understanding of each student they talk to so they can serve them best. They can know what they want and why. They can know how an individual student makes decisions and how to frame a value proposition that will most resonate with that person.  A college that gathers this information early in the recruiting cycle (for instance, now for the Class of 2016) can tailor every communication with a prospective student in a highly-personalized way that will dramatically improve the quality and richness of your communication with them.

To do this, many of of the colleges we work with use our Yield Enhancement System (YES) to uncover buying decision and personality-type segmentation. The intelligence uncovered is highly-valuable at every phase of the recruiting cycle, including the final weeks of the yield season.  Some admission offices successfully use this information for more effective one-on-one interactions.  Others fully-integrate the information into all communications by attaching a segment code to each record in a CRM system, thereby providing the trigger to drive specific types of appeals delivered through conversation, email, on-campus interactions, and so on.

The release of The Excitement Factor! is creating a great deal of thought-provoking discussion among enrollment managers and higher education marketing professionals. The project uncovered a wealth of highly valuable information on how your ability to create student excitement about your college can drive your enrollment. You can DOWNLOAD  the report now.

Continue the conversation on Twitter @LongmireCo. For more information about Longmire and Company’s Interactive Counselor Training Program, click here. Be sure to Subscribe to Versions of Conversion today so you don’t miss any of this highly-valuable information.

RHL_Photo_100x100Bob Longmire is President of Longmire and Company, Inc. He is a recognized expert on the topic of how prospective students and parents form their college selection decisions – and how colleges can use that knowledge to grow and control their enrollment. He can be reached at (913) 492-1265, ext 709 or at blongmire@longmire-co.com. Connect with Bob at Linkedin/in/boblongmire.

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Posted in Behavior, Closing the Sale, Conversion and Yield, Counselor Training, Research, Your Value Proposition

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New Study Underscores Volatility of First Choice College

April 8th, 2015

Many students enter the college selection process with, at a minimum, one or two colleges that are at the top of their list of preferred schools. It’s inevitable that some students will replace their initial first choice college with another institution they find more attractive during the course of their selection process. But how often does this happen?

More often than you think! Roughly 40% of students from the pools of public and private colleges swap out their former first choice school with another institution during their college selection process. This happens in about 25% of cases for prospective community college students.

Excitement_Factor

What motivates students to change their minds? And, more importantly, what can you do about it?

As you probably suspected, one factor is cost. Among those students bound for four-year institutions, approximately half replace their first choice college for one that costs less.

The issue of affordability is a tough one to tackle as an admissions counselor. (We have previously addressed proven strategies for presenting your institution’s unique value proposition in a manner that will take you from “too expensive” to “totally worth it.” See here.)

However, there are times when it is not going to be within your power to make the cost of your college feasible for a student you would like to enroll and they will find a better financial fit elsewhere.

Here is the good news: You do have control over the factors that are influencing the remaining pool of students who are likely to make a change. In the soon-to-be-released study, The Excitement Factor!, which explores how students arrive at that decision point, we uncovered that half of students that change their minds, do so for one of two reasons:

  • Perception of better quality at another college
  • Greater excitement about attending another college

college choice change graphicYou can protect your school from losing prospective students by presenting your college’s value proposition in a powerful, highly-personalized way. You and your team have been working for months to create student excitement about your institution. Every promotional brochure, email, campus tour, press release, personal conversation, every single effort you have put forth to make your class, has been designed to emphasize your college’s unique attributes in a way that will spark the enthusiasm of your prospective students.
But, it you aren’t asking direct questions about how a student feels, how excited (or not) they are about your college, how they feel about your college and the others they are considering, you will not learn what you need to do to change false perceptions and generate the kind of excitement that will lead to enrollment.

We encourage you to step out of your comfort zone and ask questions of students and parents that you have never asked before. Don’t worry that those questions will be too intrusive. We have done years of research on this topic, talking with hundreds of thousands of college-bound students and their parents, and have never found these questions to be considered invasive. We do, however, hear frequent complaints from students that the counselor did not attempt to get to know them better.

Best strategy: Listen to what they say. Listen for how you can help them. Ask penetrating questions and your prospective students will know that you truly want to get to know them more as a person.

We help colleges and universities with their recruiting efforts every day, especially now during yield season. If we can help you, please let me know.

If you would like a copy of The Excitement Factor! as soon as it is released, you can CLICK HERE to send us an e-mail to put you on the distribution list.

Continue the conversation on Twitter @LongmireCo. For more information about Longmire and Company’s Interactive Counselor Training Program, click here. Be sure to Subscribe to Versions of Conversion today so you don’t miss any of this highly-valuable information.

RickMontgomery_100x100Rick Montgomery is as an Enrollment Strategist at Longmire and Company. With over 20 years in higher education marketing, he brings an innovative approach to helping colleges and universities meet their enrollment goals. Rick can be reached at 913/492.1265 x.708 or via email at rmontgomery@longmire-co.com.

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Posted in Closing the Sale, Conversion and Yield, Counselor Training, Research, Your Value Proposition

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