Mickey asked, "Can I ask you how effective your communications have been in converting inquiries into applicants?"
The director replied, "Oh, they're fine. We have a CRM in place, messages go out to inquiries AND applicants. I love this technology."
Do you see a problem with this conversation? One of my 2015 goals for this blog is to better distinguish between the technology that disseminates your communications, and the content you place into those messages.
Those are two very different, yet both important components of automated communication work flows.
If you have a CRM, great. If you don't, you NEED to move it to the top of your priorities. Many (and I can't stress enough how many, 'many' is. Potentially as many as 'most') of your competitors are now using this technology to help them stay in touch with prospects. CRM's can expedite your response time, help you track your prospects and applicants, and convert many of the mundane, individual messages your staff send to prospects.
But what it won't do, is make the content in those emails worthy of your prospects' time. In the past day, I've shared with three people the top two trends I see in grad and adult higher ed recruitment: the adoption of CRM's in higher education, and the outsourcing of recruitment to third-party, for-profit companies.
My point? Even with an awesome higher ed CRM, you most likely don't stand a chance against competitors with third-party, for-profit recruitment strategies if the content in your emails doesn't engage your prospects.
This type of technology isn't a cheap investment. If you want to make it work for you, then you need more than the logic, lists and other cool features it offers you. You need to make the messages interesting for the prospects that receive the content delivered by the tool itself.
As we launch our secret shopper study for 2015, we glanced back to our 2014 results. We found that almost 85% of the emails we received were so close in content, you could have interchanged the school name within any of them and not found a substantial difference. Many of these schools sent the messages through an automated communications tool.
Would you emails fall into this category? Do you know if you were in the study last year? Ask us to find out...