Securing student enrollment targets has become a daunting task for admissions teams, especially with the rise of modern study options that cater to the tech-savvy generation who are not easily accessible.
Alarming statistics from the Inside Higher Ed Survey of College and University Admissions Officials 2022 revealed that 69% of community college officials and 55% of private bachelor’s college officials expressed great concern about meeting their institutions’ goals for new students.
When it comes to increasing your student enrollment and retention, you need to think ahead. Identifying the best strategy is the first step in making sure that your students stay in school and graduate. Here are five strategies that can help you increase your student enrollment and retention:
- Mapping the Buyer’s Journey
In order to increase enrollment and retention, you need to know what your goals are. When it comes down to it, it’s best not to think too much about others’ goals or how you can help them achieve theirs–only focus on your own. If you don’t set concrete goals for yourself, then no one else will know where they stand in relation to yours and how far away from their end goal they are, and thus how much progress needs to be made.
To help a parent make an informed decision about enrolling their child in a private school, it’s important to guide them through the buyers’ journey – from a state of initial unfamiliarity with a specific school to a state of enthusiastic enrollment.
- Use Storytelling As A Tool
You can use storytelling as a tool to increase attendance and retention. Storytelling is a great way to capture the attention of your audience and build relationships with them, but it’s also an effective way to create a connection between you and your students.
When you tell stories, you’re helping students understand why they should attend your school–and what they get out of it! By sharing the quality of services and education your school provides, helps them to build trust in the community by showing that there are others who know what they are experiencing now. Finally, storytelling reinforces brand messages by reinforcing them through the medium of story-telling itself–this helps establish authenticity with potential customers so they know that everything being communicated is actually true!
- Creating Marketing Funnels
A marketing funnel is a series of steps that you can use to promote your school. It’s important to create this process because it will help you reach more students, increase enrollment and retention rates, and even increase revenue.
The five steps of marketing funnels are:
- Awareness – communicating the value of your institution through advertisements or other forms of communications with potential students (print ads, social media posts).
- Interest – showing how much they would benefit from attending the school by highlighting its advantages over other schools in similar fields or geographic locations . Additionally, consider creating videos that highlight specific aspects about your institution or program offerings; these videos should be short so as not to overwhelm viewers with information at once!
- Consideration – encouraging interested parties towards making an inquiry about applying/enrolling at whichever university each person has decided upon visiting first instead by sending them relevant information regarding admissions requirements (email campaigns).
- Decision Maker – once someone decides upon applying then follow up with them regularly until they accept our offer then guide them through everything else including payment options etcetera until finalize enrollment process successfully completed successfully completed successfully completed successfully completed.
- Identify pain points of your Prospects
This is a critical step in identifying the needs and wants of your prospective students, so it’s important to get this right. Think about what is most important to them, and then identify how you can help them achieve those goals through your services or products.
Knowing where someone is at in their decision-making process will help you understand how they perceive problems and possible solutions for each stage along that journey–and therefore how best to address those issues when communicating with them during onboarding processes or as part of ongoing marketing efforts.
For example: If a prospect has already decided on a college over another option but hasn’t applied yet due to lack of funds (a common problem), then understanding where they’re at in their thinking process might reveal an opportunity for additional support from schools like yours who offer scholarships specifically designed around financial need–or even just providing information about scholarships available locally!
- Have an Active Social Media Presence
Social media is a great way to communicate with your prospective students. Social media enables you to share your brand story, what makes your school unique, and how it has been achieving success in the classroom.
You can also use social media as an effective tool for student retention. For example:
- Post about upcoming events or programs that are relevant for prospective students or their parents; this will encourage them to follow along on Facebook so they don’t miss out!
- Share photos of students doing something cool at school, like playing sports or creating art projects! These images will inspire others who might not know much about your school yet but would love an inside look at what makes it great (and maybe even want some tips).
Conclusion:
By using these strategies, you will be able to increase your student enrollment and retention. Now that you have an idea of how to increase student enrollment and retention, it’s time to get started! Be creative and innovative. You can use social media as a tool for marketing your school or program, but be sure to also look at other ways of getting people interested in what you have to offer. Storytelling has been shown by research studies over the years not only works well with our brains but also helps us remember things better than just reading something word-for-word alone would do–and so does storytelling when applied properly!