Well, another fall is in the books, and hopefully for you and your institution it was a good one.
Each year, we see a subset of colleges and universities touting record enrollment despite continued declines in the market, and for the folks that faltered, the curious question that tends to come up is…
“What Did These Institutions Do To Drive That Kind of Growth?”
And while there are a few factors that can drive it, the truth is it’s rarely marketing alone.
There’s the growing trend to prioritize early action, a quiet reduction in historic selectivity (more on that in future newsletter), or – more likely – some good, hard work taking place to improve the enrollment experience.
Reducing Friction to Increase Enrollment
The secret behind many institutions’ year-over-year growth – including many of our own partners here at Kanahoma – has been working to reduce friction in the admission experience, from initial inquiry through to first day in class.
Because the truth is the admission experience is a place where it’s easy to add things in – a new field in a form, new requirements for admission, etc. – but it's quite hard to take things out.
This is a key insight that informs one of Kanahoma’s best offerings (imho): Enrollment Marketing Optimization, a 100-day customer journey audit exercise designed to improve the student experience by reducing unnecessary friction in the admission process.
The Result?
Increased conversion and velocity, meaning more prospective students move through the process and they move through it faster.
So What Is a Marketer To Do?
Friction is any part of a process that slows a prospect’s progress and causes resistance to their efforts to navigate through a desired set of actions.
Sometimes, in the case of higher ed, these are necessary encounters – such as the process of providing transcripts – but often these are unnecessary components of an experience that were implemented by well-intentioned professionals unaware of the negative impact their actions could have on a prospect’s journey.
But How Do We Solve It?
As marketers, it’s our job to first find the friction and then fight to remove it.
This can come in many forms, such as:
Decreasing the click path from your homepage to program pages
Eliminating unnecessary fields in your Request For Information forms
Removing application requirements that aren’t actually being used to inform admission (e.g., letters of recommendation, resume, etc.)
Ensuring all nurture communication includes a single, obvious call to action
Increasing speed to lead and overall response time
Improving email deliverability
And much, much more…
But the process to get there can take many steps.
In the case of Kanahoma, here’s an overly-simplified view of our process for our Enrollment Marketing Optimization partners:
Current State: Through stakeholder interviews, material reviews, audits, and secret shopping, align everyone internally on the current state of your enrollment experience. We do this via a deliverable called a Situational Analysis Report.
Future State: We then gather all parties involved and brainstorm any/all ways we can simplify and improve the current state process. The result of this is the development of a Comprehensive Opportunities Document.
Gap Analysis: We then use a t-shirt-sizing process to understand the necessary inputs (what it would take to implement) and projected outputs (what kind of impact we’d expect on conversion) and rank the opportunities needed to close the gap based.
Go Forward Plan: Finally, we develop a plan to implement the highest value projects first, prioritizing those with both ease of implementation and a solid ROI, ensuring we can quickly build momentum while we compound improvements in conversion.
Bringing It All Together
For one of Kanahoma’s partners, Fall ’23 was a banner year. After several previous cycles of declining enrollment, this year saw the organization return to new student enrollment levels that they hadn’t experienced in nearly 10 years.
And while I’d like to think it was all the great marketing we had done, the reality is they spent less in marketing and as a result had fewer leads to work with.
The difference?
We collectively took the time to review the admission experience and find the friction and then fight to remove it.
And the results speak for themselves. Despite less marketing spend and fewer inquiries, the organization experienced the following, year-over-year:
Inquiry to App Start Rate went from 10% to 12%
App Start to App Submit Rate jumped from 55% to 63%
App Submit to App Complete Rate went from 62% to 66%
It may not be as exciting to leadership as a new billboard by campus, but these results speak for themselves.
So the next time you’re asked to grow enrollment without an increase in marketing spend, remember that friction is the enemy and the key may just be to…
Find the Friction and Then Fight to Remove It.
About the Author
Seth is the founder and CEO of Kanahoma, a San Diego-based performance marketing agency on a mission to build a better agency for organizations building a better world.
You can learn more about who we are and what we do at www.Kanahoma.com.