CONNECTED 2 GROW

How to Increase Student Enrollment

for 2020-2021
For years higher education institutions have faced an ever-changing market landscape
fueled by technology, competition and changes in prospective students’ preferences. But
no force or trend has come close to matching the speed and dimension of what we are
facing right now with the COVID-19 crisis.

According to the American Council on Education, on-campus college enrollment will fall by
15% in the fall semester, costing institutions about $23 billion in foregone revenue. It is
improbable that online options will make up for this loss, and uncertain if things will ever go
back to “normal.”

On the other hand, the ongoing digitalization and automation of work will only accelerate
with the pandemic, increasing even faster the need for high-skill jobs. In that sense, Higher
Education will be even more important than before, even if the educational models need
to change. People will need more access to higher education and vocational training
programs, even if it is under a more online, socially-distant model.

Therefore, even though things will be harder in the next few months, we need to increase
our efforts to capture the attention of our prospective students and find innovative ways to
minimize the impact of the situation on our institutions’ enrollments.

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We need to keep in mind that right now
prospective students are confused, and as
a result are postponing decisions, and in
some cases changing their selection
criteria. Therefore, selling cycles are being
disrupted and institutions are being forced
to reframe their value propositions and
their sales and marketing techniques.
In this scenario, digital marketing and sales
strategies play a larger-than-ever role.
People are at home, spending more time
researching online. Campus tours, student
fairs, and other traditional selling tools are
not available right now, but there are still
many ways to connect with our target
students.
Large universities with high digital
marketing budgets might be well prepared
for this. Their websites and other digital
assets are (in most cases) fine-tuned, their
sales teams are well-staffed, trained, and
equipped, and they have the best and most
expensive technology in place.
But small and medium higher education
institutions, with more limited resources,
might have been caught off guard. Now,
more than ever, they need to double down
on their digital strategy, but with the same
(or fewer) resources than before.
In this e-book we will go over the most
important strategic and tactic issues that

In this e-book we will go over the most important strategic and tactic issues that need to be
covered to achieve high-performance in digital marketing enrollments initiatives at this
time. It is based on my (and my team’s) more than ten years of experience helping 30+
universities internationally achieve and exceed enrollment goals, as well as an exhaustive
investigation on what is happening right now, what is working, and what isn’t.

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Having enough prospective students is still a That's why we need to make sure we are
key factor in achieving successful enrollment getting the best out of the key digital lead
numbers for any higher education institution. sources, correctly managing each platform and
SEO, social, and other channels are important, campaign, and correctly allocating the budget.
but in most cases are not sufficient to fuel
funnels enough to achieve the desired results,
especially now that some channels are seeing
a decrease in lead volume.

That is why paid advertising is more critical

than ever, but during the coronavirus
pandemic it comes with new challenges. We
might need more prospective students, but in
many cases there are lower budgets than
before. So we need to achieve more from paid
media campaigns, but with more restricted
resources. 4
More granular budget optimizations

Digital advertising costs have experienced, in

general terms, a significant reduction during the last
weeks. This is by itself good news. But at the same
time
closing rates in some universities have suffered.

Correct digital advertising budget allocation and

optimization has always been critical, but now it is
particularly important due to all the changes we are
seeing in costs, closing rates, changes in behaviors
and in audiences.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine behaviors have shifted significantly.

Search Engine Campaigns need to be restructured
and reoptimized to be able to maintain the same (or
better) performance than before. Maybe before we
didn’t need to professionally fine-tune our
campaigns much, we could just let them run with low
maintenance, even automatically. But now, we need
professional help to evolve campaigns continuously
and get the best possible performance out of them.
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Facebook & Instagram

Prospective students are spending more time on

social media than before and many advertisers have
scaled down their advertising budgets. This has led
to reduced costs. But, once again, audiences have
also changed.

It is very important to measure the performance of

each individual to which we are advertising daily, to
rapidly detect changes in consumer behavior and to
make sure that we are allocating our budget in the
best possible way.

First-party data

Leveraging data to achieve great results has been a

well known go-to technique in digital advertising for
higher education institutions. We need to be careful
though. As consumer behaviors change and
audiences shift, we need to rapidly adapt our first
party data audiences and tactics.

Custom audiences and lookalike audiences are

critical, but are only the beginning.
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EFFECTIVE COPYWRITING:
ADAPTING TO OUR CUSTOMERS’ CURRENT MINDSET
Our copywriting needs to change. We can’t use the same messages that we were using before. Of
course our value proposition and products need to evolve also, but if we can’t connect with our
prospect students then it won’t matter.

Some questions we need to ask ourselves as we work on our new messages are the following:

• What are our target students worried about?

• What may stop them from choosing us or from choosing anyone altogether?
• How has their journey changed?
• Which are their priorities right now?

Throughout our marketing communications, including paid ads, landing pages, PDFs, e-mails, etc,
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we need to make sure our communication is updated regularly and is relevant in today's context.
FIRST CLASS SALES EXPERIENCE
What happens after a prospective student fills out a
form? How fast do they receive a phone call from a sales
representative? How well do we follow up throughout
the process?

All of these factors have always been very important, but

now have become critical. We can’t afford to have a bad
sales experience for our prospective students.

Call back fast -- very fast

According to an article published in the Harvard
Business Review, when making a significant decision,
the majority of people still want to talk to a qualified
human. While humans speak 125-175 words per minute
and can listen at a rate of up to 450 words per minute,
the average types 38-40 words per minute, and that’s
on a full-fledged keyboard, not a phone.
Another HBR study also found that the life of online
sales leads is very short. A study conducted with 1.25
million leads found that leads that are not called back
within five minutes experience 90% lower contact rates,
and leads called within an hour are 7x more likely to be
qualified.
Even though this phenomenon is well known by many
sales leaders, only 4.7% of U.S.-based companies
achieve this performance. This is due to the fact that
the execution isn’t easy. To achieve a fast callback
operation, the correct technologies need to be in place,
systems need to be integrated through KPIs and
enough agents should be available to handle peak
times correctly.
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Sales reps profile and training
Sales reps need to be up to the task. Selling higher
education is not like selling mobile phones.
Prospective students (in some cases with the help of
their parents) are making one of the most important
decisions of their life. That's why who is selling is as
important as what they are selling.

Even when budgets are high, it is hard to have

enough sales people, with the correct incentives,
enough training, and with a high enough professional
profile.

The importance of contact

center persistence
The same HBR study reports that the chance of
making contact increases to 90% after 6 attempts.
Yet, many sales teams, on average, try two times only,
and 30% of leads are never contacted at all.

With the right amount of resources and processes, it

is possible to increase the account of effective
contacts by at least 70%.
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 A different approach to achieve this: the international contact center
To achieve a best-in-class contact center operation, we
need software (licenses, implementation, integration,
and support), sales agents -- many more than most
higher education sales teams have -- and these agents
need to be highly motivated and have a high enough
profile to sell what they are selling. If you want to sell a
college degree or a Master's degree, you need
someone with the academic and cultural background to
be up to the task.
All this is very expensive when paying US wages and IT
services.
An alternative is to implement a professional contact
center based in another country, for example in
Monterrey, Mexico. Monterrey is on CST time and has a
large number of English-speaking professionals thanks
to its high education levels and proximity to the U.S. It
also has a high-performance culture that makes it very
easy to work with U.S. counterparts.
That's why companies such as The Home Depot,
Grainger, Johnson Controls, Lowes and many others
have established their Latin American Headquarters in
Monterrey.
At JULIUS we have run higher education contact center
sales teams, selling to U.S.- based students (and
students from other parts of the world), with higher
closing ratios than many U.S.-based contact centers and
significantly lower costs.
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INBOUND MARKETING
When searching to have a world class marketing and
sales process, it is unthinkable to proceed without a
professional inbound marketing strategy and
execution.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound Marketing is the use of content marketing and
technology to give each prospective student
everything they need in each stage of the admissions
process. By providing personalized content &
touchpoints throughout the process, Inbound
Marketing may become a very cost-effective way to
increase the overall performance of our enrollment
operations.

Building trust and offering value
The approach of Inbound Marketing shouldn’t be too
sales-oriented or aggressive. In the end, it is the
sales-rep’s responsibility to close the leads. Inbound
Marketing should run on a parallel road,
complementing what sales reps are doing by providing
high quality content.
The content should achieveseveral objectives,
including:
• Differentiating our unique value proposition from that
of the competition
• Making sure our main attributes -- those that make our
higher education institution special -- are very clear to
the prospective student
• Creating trust and build credibility
• Giving the students tools to make their decision
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Before and after generating the lead
Inbound Marketing, and in particular its different components, are very helpful in generating leads and also closing
more leads.

Thanks to content generation, when done correctly, we can generate organic traffic to our websites and convert
leads from that traffic. Also, good content fuels high quality and effective social media posts, which can boost our
social channels’ lead generation efficiency. Finally, good content may increase the performance of paid media ads,
by giving paid traffic other ways of converting, or by using content to run paid media campaigns (in which
accessing content is the call to action, and the goal is to first generate contacts, and later on convert those contacts
to leads).
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 YOUR WEBSITE -
THEY MOST IMPORTANT DIGITAL ASSET
The rise of social media and the fragmentation of digital channels has taken a toll on websites. In many cases
websites have been left behind and require a much-needed upgrade or complete redesign. Some key factors to
take into consideration when working with your website are the following:

Design: UX & credibility Site architecture

Having a well-designed website is crucial to ensuring
that prospective students see your higher education
institution as a respectable organization in which they
should trust their professional future. At the same time,
people expect seamless experiences when navigating
sites, so taking care of things such as usability, mobile
responsiveness and time to load are musts.
Your website should have all the information a
prospective student may need throughout their
admission process organized in a clear manner. Even if
they may never read from beginning to end everything
in our website, we need to make sure that if they ever
have an urgent question and can’t (or don’t want to) go
through one of your sales reps, that they will be able to
find everything they need.
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CONCLUSIONS
These are indeed difficult times. But, with the help
of a robust digital strategy and execution, we have
more options than ever to get through it.

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Schedule a call now
Is time to take bold action and protect your recruitment
efforts through this current crisis.

To fast-track the implementation of these strategies for

your college or university, schedule a call with me so
we can talk about how we can help you apply this
tactics to deliver results.

The strategies and tactics in this e-book have helped

our clients: Click here
to book a meeting
Let’s Talk
https://meetings.hubspot.com/jorge-ayala
1. Reduce the cost of leads by 68%
2. Reduce the lead response time to under 5 minutes
3. Increase enrollments by 150% 15

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