Boosting Student Enrolment with Personalization: Identifying And Targeting Prospective Students

Fontbonne University, Missouri is closing in Summer 2025.

Pittsburgh Technical College, Pennsylvania closed in 2024.

Over 61 public and nonprofit colleges in the United States have closed down or announced mergers since March 2020. One of the principal reasons for this is the significant drop in enrollment rates.

With admissions cycles becoming longer, universities are struggling to attract desired talent. Traditional student recruitment methods driven by broad messaging no longer resonate with the diverse interests and aspirations of students today. 

To boost student enrolment, universities can:

• Leverage data to identify and target prospective students
• Nurture prospective students with personalized communication
• Enhance onboarding experiences with data-driven inputs

In this three-part blog series, find out how to boost student enrolment.

Keep reading to learn more about identifying and targeting prospective students.

Importance Of Personalizing Experiences To Boost Student Enrolment

Today's students are digital natives, accustomed to personalized experiences in nearly every aspect of their lives—from social media to online shopping. This expectation extends to their educational journey as well. They seek personalized engagement from universities, wanting to feel understood and valued as individuals.

Data-driven personalization allows universities to move beyond generic messaging to tailor communication and interactions to individual student needs and preferences. By leveraging data, universities can create a more engaging and relevant experience for prospective students, increasing the likelihood of conversion from interest to enrollment.

A Short Tale: How Monash University Boosted Qualified Student Leads By 19%.

Monash University harnessed the power of a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to achieve a comprehensive 360-degree view of their students. By integrating historical and real-time data from various touchpoints, they personalized student experiences and saw impressive results:

• 19% increase in qualified leads
• 4.2 out of 5 student satisfaction rating

This successful implementation showcases the transformative impact of data-driven personalization in higher education.

How Universities Can Implement Data-Driven Personalization Across The Student Journey

Universities can significantly enhance their student recruitment efforts and improve enrollment rates by following the strategies given below.

• Early Targeting And Diversification:  Strategies for engaging students early and across multiple platforms.
• Building Student Personas: Gather and utilize initial data to create comprehensive student profiles.
• Segmenting Prospective Students: Techniques for segmenting students to tailor communications more effectively.
• Personalizing Outreach And Communication: Leverage AI and machine learning for personalized messaging.
• Using Predictive Analytics To Retarget Students: Utilize predictive analytics to enhance marketing efforts and retarget high-interest students.
• Optimizing Student Recruitment Campaigns: Use real-time data to continuously improve marketing strategies.

Early Targeting And Diversification

Nearly 40% of students begin their search for a university as early as the eighth grade. This suggests a need for institutes to start their targeting efforts much earlier than usual.

Even at such an early stage, 56% students expect personalized communication. Personalized multichannel communication is key to understanding student needs and adequately catering to them.

Students also conduct their research using various channels, making it vital for universities to be present and relevant across these channels. According to a recent study,  students prefer personalized emails, text messages, phone calls, and social media channels for interactions with universities.

How To Target Potential Students Early

To effectively target students early, universities should:

• Create Engaging Content: Develop informative and engaging content that speaks directly to younger students’ interests and aspirations. This can include interactive webinars, virtual tours, and informative blog posts.
• Use Data Analytics: Leverage data analytics to track and understand the interests and behaviors of younger students. This data can inform more personalized and relevant communications.
• Implement Early Outreach Programs: Establish outreach programs that connect with students in middle and high schools, offering guidance and resources that can help them in their early decision-making process.

To diversify effectively, universities should:

• Email Campaigns: Develop personalized email campaigns that provide valuable information and resources, tailored to the student’s stage in the decision-making process.
• Text Messaging: Utilize text messaging to send timely updates and reminders, ensuring the content is relevant and engaging.
• Phone Outreach: Conduct personalized phone calls to build a more personal connection, addressing specific questions and concerns of prospective students.
• Social Media Engagement: Maintain an active presence on social media platforms, sharing content that resonates with students and encouraging interaction and engagement.

By starting early and diversifying communication channels, universities can build meaningful relationships with prospective students and guide them through their educational journey.

Building Student Personas

Initial student interactions in the form of website visits or social media ad clicks are important sources for gathering valuable student data.

Attributes such as academic and financial backgrounds, geographical locations, course preferences, extracurricular interests, and more can be unveiled during this stage. Collating this data in one place can then inform future marketing campaigns to specifically address the varied nature of queries rather than being generic.

How To Build Student Personas By Using A Customer Data Platform (CDP)

Lytics, a data warehouse integrated CDP, can not only collate this data from multiple sources but also create comprehensive student profiles in real-time based on their online behavior.

These profiles, constantly being updated, bring university officials closer to their prospective students and let them think strategically about the best ways to take communication forward.

Segmenting Prospective Students Based On Data

As students move further into their research journey, their scope widens. Consequently, the data collected from their online interactions becomes a lot more diverse.

Segmentation, at this stage, can help analyze this vast incoming data to generate a more refined understanding.

How To Segment Student Profiles By Utilizing A CDP

Segmenting students can be done based on data points like:

• Extracurricular interests
• Visiting frequency on certain course pages
• Gated content downloads
• Interest showcased in virtual tours
• In-person events attended
• Newsletters sign ups

The Lytics CDP can help achieve this quite seamlessly. It segments student profiles based on a number of demographic and psychographic attributes in real-time.

Segmenting simplifies the complex student outreach that needs to be unique at different stages of the admissions journey.

Personalizing Student Outreach And Communication

Post segmentation and personalized messaging must take center stage. This includes:

• Targeted social media campaigns
• Customized website experiences
• Automated email campaigns

All of these are informed by the insights derived from segmentation.

How To Personalize Student Outreach And Communication

To ensure personalization of content and outgoing communication, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and predictive analytics can be quite useful.

For instance, if a group of students shows interest in an engineering program, universities can leverage AI and machine learning capabilities to customize the content of automated emails and targeted ads and even personalize website content when these students visit.

Using Predictive Analytics To Focus And Retarget Students

The Lytics CDP, with its inbuilt AI-driven predictive scoring, enables universities to score students based on their likelihood to apply. This is particularly useful when:

• Deciding where to focus marketing efforts
• Strategizing communication to target segments based on their likelihood of applying

Retargeting is an important element in any comprehensive marketing plan.

Prospective students who repeatedly visit a university’s website but don’t end up completing an application can be retargeted with personalized ads.

How To Use Predictive Analytics To Retarget Students

The Lytics CDP AI will help identify these students as highly engaged and suggest retargeting action with customized messaging to nudge them to complete their applications.

Optimizing Student Recruitment Campaigns 

Continually improving the state of marketing campaigns based on new data is key to remaining relevant to students.

By analyzing how prospective students have engaged with existing content and outreach campaigns, colleges can begin refining their strategies.

How To Optimize Student Recruitment Campaigns

With real-time insights into the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, universities can swiftly work on optimizing their recruitment campaigns. This directs institutions to:

• Focus on relevant channels
• Renew messaging
• Tailor communication that speaks to students in an authentic manner

This iterative approach ensures that student recruitment efforts don’t remain unidimensional and are continuously improving while being aligned with the evolving preferences of prospective students.

Here’s What You Should Do Next

It is quite clear that institutions need to take control of their data and leverage it effectively to craft relevant digital experiences for students.

Still, thinking if the Lytics CDP is appropriate for your institution? Ask yourself the following:

• Is your data consistently inaccurate?
• Does your tech stack fail to uncover the uniqueness of each visitor’s preferences?
• Is your tech stack unable to aggregate data across different channels?
• Do you have trouble identifying your most valuable students?
• Do you lack the data to improve or personalize your digital experiences?

If the answer to any one of these is a ‘yes,’ then integrating a Customer Data Platform like Lytics might just be the perfect addition to your martech stack.

At Axelerant, we’ve worked with some of the biggest names in the higher education space including MIT, Stanford, and the University of East London, in enabling them to boost their enrollment rates via personalization.

Speak with our experts to learn how you can boost your student enrolment rates through personalization.