A student’s decision to apply and eventually enroll at a college or university rarely comes down to a single interaction or promotional touchpoint. Instead, their relationship with their institution of choice builds over time. It’s fueled by personalized admissions follow-ups. It also requires timely messages that tip the scale over other colleges they might have considered.
Put differently, personalized follow-ups are more than just a courtesy. They’re an important recruitment strategy, designed to help your college or university stand out in a crowded environment. In fact, they might just be one of the most important Gen Z admissions strategies you have at your disposal.
Unfortunately, personalized admissions follow-ups can seem anything but easy to implement. What might seem straightforward for a handful of prospects becomes daunting when looking at an entire database of prospects, inquiries, applicants, and admits. Being intentional and leveraging technology while remaining mindful of the human touch is vital. This blog will explore how to build communications tailored to each of your students. The right efforts will build trust, strengthen relationships, and drive enrollment.
Why Personalized Admissions Follow-Ups Matter More Than Ever
Gen Z has changed the game in college admissions. Rising expectations and an increasing willingness to ‘shop around’ during the college search have made it vital to show your prospects personalized attention at every funnel stage. They don’t want to be treated like another inquiry. Instead, they expect to feel seen. They want to be treated like they matter, and have information uniquely relevant to them at their fingertips.
This is why, as magazines like Vogue put it, Gen Z “broke the marketing funnel.” For them, engaging with brands and organizations means building a community of shared interests. They have to feel like the organization is willing to invest in them as much as they do in return.
Personalized admissions follow-ups are the only way to make that happen. They show that your institution understands and values them as people, rather than treating them as one of thousands of prospects. Through personalized follow-ups, you can build engagement and a feeling of community. You can also drive decisions as a result of building trust with your core audience.
As a recent Stanford University article puts it, “Gen Z looks for trust and authenticity” above all and more than any generation before them. Any Gen Z admissions strategy has to value honesty and openness. Create mutual respect by communicating with prospective students on their level and in one-to-one environments.
What Makes a Follow-Up Truly Personal?
The traditional recruitment outreach, especially in early funnel stages, tends to follow a template. Colleges and universities send viewbooks and introductory emails. These simple options share central brand messaging about the number of majors available, engaging campus life, and excellent academics.
Personalized admissions follow-ups take a different approach. Unlike templated responses, they reference specific information an individual student might be looking for, like information about a specific major or extracurricular activity. They might also reference past interactions to show care for the student’s admissions journey, like a recent campus visit.
In that process, timing your personalized follow-ups based on recent behavior becomes vital. Attending an open house, for example, might be cause for a note from the tour guide or an answer to a question they had at the event. An application milestone, like submitting the supplemental essay, might warrant a follow-up note of appreciation.
Finally, personalization means taking your admissions messaging beyond the institutional voice. Using real voices, like individual admissions counselors, faculty, and even current students, makes the message more authentic and builds greater trust. It also begins to build relationships that can carry on throughout each student’s college journey.
Channel and Tactical Examples for Personalized Admissions Follow-Ups
Email has long been a favorite channel of colleges looking to add some mass-customized content to the admissions funnel. But while it remains relevant, truly relevant Gen Z admissions strategies should go beyond this baseline. A few examples of channels and tactics that can help to power your personalized admissions follow-ups include:
- Handwritten notes after campus visits that express appreciation and offer the opportunity for further conversation
- Short videos, filmed by student tour guides or admissions counselors, that follow up on visits or provide information relevant to each student’s profile
- Text messages or direct messages on social media to check in with students on their application submission, needed materials, and open questions
- Personalized online hubs or microsites with content that reflects the individual interests of each student
You can even think more broadly. Any channel and tactic that allows you to add a real human voice to the conversation and/or directly reflect different interests by different prospective students may be relevant for personalized admissions follow-ups. Even the old-fashioned phone call has an important place in the communications funnel.
How to Scale Your Personalization Efforts Without Losing Authenticity
Each of the above tactics, of course, can be difficult to implement. Truly custom and authentic personalized admissions follow-ups are difficult to execute when you have a lean recruitment team and thousands of prospects in the database. Fortunately, technology can help to scale these efforts without losing your authenticity.
It starts with an effective CRM strategy and implementation. Your prospective student database should systematically gather behavioral and interest-based information about your students, such as which web pages they visit, which messages they’re most likely to engage with, and more. This data can then trigger automated messages based on specific information.
For example, a student frequently browsing the financial aid pages is probably interested in scholarship information. Someone who visits the housing pages might be looking for more information about their residence hall options. The more you can segment your automated messaging by interest, geography, and other custom differentiators for your students, the more relevant you can make it.
External tools can also help. FlippedApp, for example, can help teams scale their personalization efforts by providing institutions with right-fit student profiles and key data points. That information, in turn, can make your personalized follow-ups more targeted and efficient, adding to your CRM data as you build your outreach efforts.
Building Trust Through Consistency and Relevance
A single personalized message, of course, won’t be enough to help you truly stand out among the hundreds of college-related messages your students receive. Your personalization efforts must be reliable and helpful over time to truly make an impact.
Above all, that means consistently following up with students to provide information that they actually care about. Instead of generic reminders about deadlines, provide content about the topics that might make them hesitant to apply, deposit, or register. If you don’t know the information they’re looking for, ask what they need to make the decision.
Cadence also matters. You need to be consistent, but without overwhelming your audience. Build drip campaigns that follow up with your students every one to three weeks. Also, automatically subscribe them to newer, more relevant flows when they take action or enter a different funnel stage. Any more frequent, and you risk burning them out or annoying them.
Finally, use your follow-ups to reinforce your core institutional values and brand messaging. Emphasize your student outcomes and the experience students will have while studying at your school. And, in the name of personalization, connect them with the resources and support systems they’ll look for before and while enrolled.
Measuring the Impact of Personalized Outreach
Like any marketing and recruitment tactic, it pays to avoid operating on hunches. Rather than trusting that personalized admissions follow-ups will work because Gen Z prefers them, track the results of your efforts to know which components of your campaigns work well and which still need improvement.
For example, you can track the open and click-through rates, response rates, and yield from different follow-up types. Then you can better understand which of them resonate with your audience or different audience segments. Within and across your channels, you can also monitor which messages resonate most with different segments to better target your content.
Create a regular cadence for your reporting that includes a period of adjustments based on the data you’ve collected and analyzed. That’s how you can be sure that the follow-ups you’re building have a tangible impact on enrollment outcomes.
Again, tools like FlippedApp can help. In addition to generating high-quality leads, the platform can provide insights into your students’ preferences to optimize both the timing and tone of any follow-up communications you build.
Prioritize Personalized Follow-Ups to Impact Enrollment Outcomes
The age of mindless mass communications in admissions is over. Thoughtful, personalized follow-ups can go a long way to build trust, enhance the student experience, and directly impact enrollment outcomes. By making your messaging more relevant and authentic, these follow-ups meet Gen Z at their level, consistently driving action and results in the process.
To get to that point, it’s time to audit and improve your follow-up strategy. Prioritize personalization at every stage to create lasting success, using the data at your disposal to make objective decisions.
The right tools can also help. Through FlippedApp, you can support more meaningful student engagement by surfacing the right leads while making personalization easier and more impactful. Contact us to learn how FlippedApp can help you build more personalized and successful Gen Z admissions strategies today.