Standing out among the noise is more difficult than ever in an environment where tens and sometimes hundreds of institutions vie for each potential college student’s attention. Simply doing what every other school does via generic student outreach emails and other messages is no longer enough.
Effective student outreach has to be a top priority, especially in the age of the demographic cliff of higher education. Through enhanced digital student marketing, your institution can get the attention of prospective students. You can then transform that attention into engagement, action, and enrollment.
Of course, making your student outreach effective throughout your digital channels is not automatic. This blog will outline the practical strategies you can leverage to enhance your digital admissions marketing through more personalized outreach that stretches across multiple channels.
Why Effective Multichannel Outreach Matters
Marketing best practices have long included a focus on multiple channels. A study by Salesforce, for example, found that 72% of consumers expect brands to engage them on more than one channel. Each channel an organization adds can boost the impact of promotional messages.
For today’s tech-savvy students, that focus on comprehensive outreach is more important than ever. Modern students use a wide range of platforms in their college search. According to RNL’s 2023 E-Expectations Report, email, social media, institutional websites, and external college search and planning websites all play a core role in the process. Any successful attempt at digital student outreach must also touch on these channels.
In addition, a multichannel approach to digital student marketing can increase the likelihood of timely student outreach. When you spread your unique message on multiple channels, the chances that you can reach the right students—at the right time and with the right message—increase. Even in cases where irrelevant messages may be posted, other messages on other channels may still reach their goal.
Finally, an approach to digital admissions marketing that not only leverages multiple channels but also personalizes student outreach across these channels has the potential to create a massive competitive advantage. Most institutions, after all, still rely on broad outreach on digital channels. Being able to segment and personalize your efforts makes your institution stand out at a time when differentiation has become more important than ever.
Understanding Your Audience for Better Personalization
Personalization is impossible without an in-depth understanding of your audience. That’s why the ability to launch effective multichannel student outreach depends on two core steps:
- Gathering data on student preferences, demographics, and engagement behaviors. This data will enable you to understand better why, where, and how students like to communicate with institutions. You can also see what types of messages may be most effective in reaching them.
- Segmenting students based on their interests, academic goals, and communication preferences. Through this segmentation, you can more effectively plan your outreach. You can also ensure that your messaging across digital channels is appropriately personalized for your audience.
Of course, achieving personalization means working with platforms that gather student information. FlippedApp, for example, can provide admissions teams with detailed profiles of students who match their criteria. This offers insights that can help users personalize their student outreach more effectively. That data, in turn, becomes the foundation on which any outreach can become more relevant to students on their college search journey.
Leveraging Multiple Channels for Student Outreach
Without knowing which channels are most effective for student outreach, you can’t have a complete discussion about digital admissions marketing across multiple channels. Admissions and recruitment teams should spend a significant amount of time determining which channels are most effective for them based on student behaviors and current capacity.
Some of the most common channels for personalized student outreach include:
- Email: A staple in digital student marketing, email has much more potential than mass messages to all prospects. Instead, you can create personalized email campaigns with content segmented to individual interest groups.
- Social Media: Focus on the channels your students are most likely to engage with. Popular options are Instagram and TikTok (as well as LinkedIn for graduate students). Then, engage your audience with authentic, interactive content from your institution.
- SMS: Text messaging is perfect for quick and timely messages related to information that benefits your students. Send personalized notes about application materials or financial aid deadlines, event reminders, and similar content.
- Website: Don’t underestimate the power of your website for digital student outreach. Your key landing pages should be both functional and engaging. Also, consider leveraging website personalization based on your prospect information.
- Events: Finally, and especially when you have a firm idea of segmented student interests and needs, host virtual or in-person events to help satisfy them. Offer information and the opportunity to interact with key subject matter experts across your school.
Of course, plenty of other channels may also be beneficial. Build your channel mix strategically to ensure that you reach your prospects where they are and at just the right time.
Using Technology to Scale Your Personalization Efforts
Modern digital personalization is impossible without the right use of technology. At their best, the systems you use can help your admissions teams manage and scale their personalized outreach across all the recruitment channels they leverage.
For example, CRM systems have become an indispensable part of the modern admissions tech stack. The right CRM can help you capture student contact information, their interactions across your digital ecosystems, and their preferences based on those interactions. Meanwhile, a wide range of message automation tools can help you use that information to send personalized messages at scale.
A tool like FlippedApp can also become invaluable. It supports personalized connections with your prospects through actionable insights, which can help admissions teams focus their time and resources on students who are most likely to ultimately enroll at your institution.
Creating Consistency Across Your Digital Channels
Consistency becomes a vital part of the equation, especially as your content becomes more customized. As your students engage with your institution across multiple channels, they always have to maintain a sense that they are talking to the same school, with the same brand and ‘personality’ across every channel.
Start by defining exactly what you want that brand and personality to be. If your institution doesn’t already have one, create a messaging framework that outlines your core brand promise, messaging pillars, and intended voice and tone. This foundation will help ensure that all touchpoints with prospective students will ultimately reinforce the institution’s core message and values.
Of course, that content cannot be static, either. You will still need to adapt your content to fit the tone and format of each platform. Social media, for example, tends to be more casual than email, except LinkedIn—which, of course, is even more formal. Define those tweaks as clearly as possible while ensuring that you maintain a cohesive narrative across channels.
As a bonus, coordinating your efforts across channels also helps to avoid overcommunication or conflicting messages. For each topic you want to highlight, from event promotions to highlighting student life, you can create a cohesive content calendar that ensures you get the message across on all of your channels in a cohesive, engaging way.
Measuring Success and Refining Your Approach
Finally, engaging with prospective students across multiple channels can only be successful if you closely track the performance of your student outreach campaigns across those channels. Gather the right data, and you can use it to improve your efforts or iterate on what has proven to work.
Start by setting KPIs for each channel depending on how students interact with it. For email, that might be email open and click rates. But for social media, engagement metrics matter more. The further down the funnel you can go, the better. Event attendance or applications generated are great KPIs, as long as you can track them back to individual channels.
You can also use feedback from prospective students to refine your outreach efforts. Surveys or even asking students (and their parents) directly at virtual and in-person events enable you to get more in-depth thoughts on what efforts and messaging work and where you need to improve.
The key is finding the data that allows you to fine-tune your multichannel student outreach efforts. FlippedApp, for instance, can enhance your tracking of prospective students and provide the data you need to fine-tune your personalization over time.
How to Take Your Multichannel Student Outreach Efforts to the Next Level
In modern digital student marketing, personalization across multiple channels has become vital. That means going beyond emails. Identify and leverage the channels and messages that resonate most with your audience. Get it right, and you can connect with your prospective students in more personalized, effective ways.
Take a close look at your current outreach strategy. Are you using the right channels, messaging, and data to engage all of your prospective students? Could you benefit from additional tools that help you succeed? Explore FlippedApp today to streamline and enhance your multichannel personalization efforts, and take your student outreach efforts to the next level.