How would prospective students describe the emails and letters that your school sends out? When we ask students for feedback in our ongoing focus group surveys, they consistently mention four things:
- First and foremost, they want more personalization in every communication (email, mail, phone calls, and text messages). Students appreciate when you make the process about them.
- They want emails and letters to be shorter, more direct, and less formal.
- They want colleges to explain the “why” and the “how” better, including why they should visit or apply, and how your school is truly different than others they’re hearing from.
- They want consistent communication that predominantly comes from the same person, not multiple people or a general Office of Admissions account.
Tudor Collegiate Strategies heeds that advice, along with additional feedback straight from your target audience about how they wanted colleges to communicate with them during their search. The end result is a comprehensive student recruitment communication strategy that we call “The Total Recruiting Solution.” It’s giving colleges and universities an extra edge when it comes to getting the attention of prospective students and their parents, increasing their interest level in your school, and getting better recruiting results.
Our unique, research-based email and letter campaigns will save you time, eliminate the guesswork, personalize the process, and significantly increase engagement between students and families and your admissions counselors. We will help you consistently deliver impactful messages that explain and reiterate the different parts of your school’s unique story, along with your value proposition.
Our team understands that every school is different, and we pride ourselves on meeting your individual needs.
Here’s how it works. We partner with your admissions and marketing/communications staffs to create a year-long master recruiting plan. We conduct survey research with your current students about their experiences at your school, and we combine that with your feedback and our database of national research on communication preferences and decision-making factors.
Other key details:
- Our personalized email and letter campaigns cover the entire year with no gaps.
- The focus of your messaging will be a series of topics that students tell us are important to them as they’re trying to find that “right fit” school.
- Our campaigns can be sent to both high school seniors and juniors.
- We also create parent and high school guidance counselor communications each month to engage those influencers.
- We craft unique ad hoc messages at various points throughout the year to target specific groups of students, and to push specific actions.
- We consult with you on how to have more productive phone calls. Part of that includes providing monthly talking points for your school’s admissions counselors that tie in with that month’s messaging topic.
- We provide you with a social media focus each month that includes content recommendations to help you effectively deliver the all-important student lens on different topics.
- Once students start to choose to your school, we provide a separate set of messages for committed students to help prevent “melt.”
- We give you ongoing staff training on how to sell your school more effectively. We will teach you how to communicate with today’s prospective student in a very different way.
THE RESULTS?
Our clients consistently tell us that besides high levels of engagement from students and parents like they’ve never seen before, our messaging helps admissions counselors better understand the mindset of students in their territories. They have a much better feel for how and when many of their students will make their decisions.
We’ve also helped schools increase their application numbers, FAFSA completion rates, as well as the number of campus visits in a cycle. And, multiple colleges we’ve worked with have achieved record freshmen enrollment thanks in part to their partnership with Tudor Collegiate Strategies.
But don’t just take our word for it, check out our client stories here.
The next step is to contact Jeremy Tiers (Director of Admissions Services) directly at jeremy@dantudor.com and start a conversation about your specific needs. We’re also happy to send you an example of what a typical monthly campaign looks like.