Are you looking for ways to improve your recruitment efforts? An easy way to do that is to customize some of the questions you ask in your inquiry forms. Not only do we too often ask too many questions, we also ask the same old boring questions.
We don't have to do that - well, maybe depending on how outdated your technology is, you may have to (and if that's the case, keep reading so you know what is possible and can begin thinking about more and better ways to engage prospects).
There are more, and better, questions we can ask prospects that help us know who they are and what they are looking for.
If you've read either the first or second post of my road map series, you'll know the first one we ask helps us determine motivation. In the most basic way, we can ask an open text field question to get motivation. Something such as, "why are you looking to enroll?" If you have any personas developed, you can ask a very similar question and offer a set of predetermined options.
If your form is intended for prospects for your traditional, graduate and adult students alike, you can ask a question a question to determine the population with which they identify.
One of the first things you will address in your recruitment is identifying and answering the questions each prospect identifies as her/his most important. To help get to the point, you can ask your prospects a question to determine what is most important to them. Something along the lines of, "which of the following is your top concern when selecting a school for you?"
If you offer your programs in multiple modalities, asking which a prospect is interested in will be important. Their questions/concerns, as well as your answers to them will vary based on whether or not a prospect is attending classes on a campus, remote location or online.
How would it work?
With one of our current clients, we updated the inquiry forms to include the basic information: first and last name, email address, phone number (optional), major of interest and purpose of the degree (motivation for enrolling). That's six fields.
Then we ask two more questions. We ask a question that helps categorize their status - high school student, college student currently enrolled elsewhere, veteran, adult student and another couple of options. Now obviously, a prospect may fall into more than one of those categories, but we ask them to select the one that best fits so we know about how they see themselves.
When they sign up for an event, such as an open house, we ask very similar questions on the RSVP form, but here's the cool part. With the technology we use, we can create a "smart" form that knows, based on the prospect's IP address, if she/he has completed a form before. If so, the tool will replace a couple of the basic questions with different questions that help us collect more information about the prospect without bombarding her/him with too many questions.
One of the primary reasons to ask those "non-traditional" questions is to help understand more than demographic information about our prospects. Once we have it, not only can we better identify what we ask prospects in a conversation, but we can also customize the information we send them in automated emails (again this may depend on the technology you have).
There you have it - four questions to help you and other higher ed professionals improve conversion from inquiry forms. Let us know if you have questions...