Best Practices in Grad & Adult Admissions & Marketing

This is the third post of our "Road Map" series. This series will help layout a model for adult student recruitment.

In our first post, we looked at the first question we needed to answer - what is the prospective student's motivation for enrolling? What is the ultimate goal that your institution's educational program will help her solve?

In the second post, we looked at the basic framework for the duration of the conversation you needed to have with your prospective student.

Now we can take that motivation and begin providing her with the information she needs to understand how well (or not) your institution fits her goals and needs.

The more I work to expand the footprint of this higher education blog and the consulting business, the more I am involved in testing various ways to keep a growing number of higher education admissions, marketing and student service professionals engaged in valuable content. 

In my work, I've found 4 terms to avoid in email because they come across as "salesy," 

and using them reduces my response rates. In looking back, I've found they are used just as commonly in higher ed recruitment emails. 

I've now included these terms in my email training sessions with clients and will share them with you here. Admissions and recruitment professionals should eliminate these terms from individual, as well as mass and automated email messages.

Reaching out

We all know that when we (especially the admissions folks) are reaching out, it's because we want to know if a prospect is moving ahead in the enrollment process. But we "reach out" because we don't want to be so bold to directly ask the prospect - "what are your plans?"

I want to share with you an excerpt of an email conversation one of my trusted advisors, Rick Roberge, had with a prospective client. Beware, it will make you cringe...

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.