By Jeremy Tiers, Vice President of Admissions Services
3 minute read
While most colleges and universities remain focused on converting admitted students and preventing melt, there’s another important group that also needs your attention this spring.
Personalized and relevant communication with high school junior inquiries is critical, especially if you want to increase your number of campus visits this spring and summer as well as the amount of early applications.
I encourage you to break this group down into two smaller groups – existing inquiries and new inquiries.
If the bulk of what you’ve been sending existing juniors has been emails, postcards, and brochures that are full of facts, figures, bullet points, links, and transactional pushes to visit campus, the likelihood you’re standing out is very low. In fact, I would also argue you’re making it harder to get the attention of most of those students when you send future messaging.
Less than 18% of students in our ongoing survey research say the communications they’re getting, or the communications they received during their search, felt very personal.
What’s the goal of your first few messages to a new inquiry?
If your answer is to share a ton of information/links and encourage them to schedule a campus visit (or start their application), I would tell you to come up with a new goal. Students say when you constantly push those items it’s annoying, feels ‘salesy,’ and it feels like you’re trying to rush their process.
My advice is to focus on being memorable by starting the process of learning something about the student (or taking a piece of information they shared with you) and building a recruiting relationship.
Let’s circle back to those two smaller groups I mentioned earlier, starting with existing junior inquiries.
Create a transition email that comes from the student’s admissions counselor. Recognize that their junior year is almost done, and the college search process is about to feel a little more ‘real.’ For students who have already visited your campus, consider asking if they’ve visited any other colleges, and if so, what’s something about your school that they feel makes it a good fit for them. Whatever question you ask, that’s your call to action. End by encouraging them to send you their thoughts on whatever you asked, and reiterate that as their counselor you’re there to offer support and tips, and your goal is to help them navigate what can be a confusing and overwhelming process.
For existing inquiries who haven’t visited campus, create a similar transition message, but consider sharing a few tips about (for example) how to narrow down your college list and figure out which colleges to apply to. You could tie one of the tips in with visiting campus and use a quote from a current freshmen who visited – have them briefly explain why the visit was so helpful during their search. Or, instead of offering tips you could ask a direct question like “<How are you feeling about your college search at this point?”
When it comes to new junior inquiries, one of the first emails I encourage you to send should again come from their admissions counselor, express excitement that they’re interested in learning more about your school, mention you understand that every student goes through their process a little differently, and your goal is to learn more about them and help them try to figure out if your school has some (or maybe a lot) of the things that are important to them. End the message with a direct question that tries to learn something about the student so you can keep the conversation going and learn more. An example would be, “What are you wondering about most when it comes to being a student here?”
On a related note, it’s important to have multiple versions of that message I just outlined with slight tweaks at the beginning based on how a student inquires and enters your CRM. You should also have a unique version for students who enter as a stealth applicant – meaning they first show interest by completing the application.
Here’s a final piece of advice to help make this strategy even more effective. Make sure your email subject line doesn’t sound like a marketing or mass message. Two that have worked well for our college partners are, “Figuring out college is hard, let’s talk” and “One question to ask you, that’s it”.
Again, the goal during the early stages of a student’s college search process should be to get their attention and start the process of building a relationship by asking/learning about their wants, needs, concerns, and fears. That means all subsequent messaging should follow a similar approach – have a trusted sender, make sure the language feels personal and conversational, is direct, and has one clear call to action.
After you’ve established some trust and had some dialogue, then bring up the idea of a campus visit or ask if they’ve thought starting their application.
If you found this article helpful, please forward it to someone else on your campus who could also benefit from reading it. You can also encourage them to subscribe to the weekly newsletter here.