WORKING WITH A PARTNER TO ACHIEVE YOUR GOAL: HOW TO DOUBLE YOUR ENROLLMENT FUNNEL WITH A $0 AD BUDGET By Dallin Palmer, Halda; Kathleen Costello, The Graduate School of Clemson University For those of you who need the quick version of the story, here are the ingredients you need to accomplish a feat like this:
They are not alone in the GEM professional community with over 50% reporting inquiry generation as a high priority.
1. Visitors to your grad pages 2. An offer of value that helps your visitor immediately (not “Learn More,” “Request Information,” or “Apply Now”) 3. A well-designed form For those of you who have five minutes, keep reading for some of the juicy details of how they pulled it off. It was August 2020, and HALDA had recently finished their first digital marketing benchmark study (performed in conjunction with NAGAP). They were on the hunt for a partner that also believed in one of their key insights. The study had revealed that 98% of institutions all have the exact same uninspiring calls to action on their admissions pages: 1. Apply Now 2. Learn More 3. Contact Us HALDA’s executive team believed that by offering something of more immediate value to a prospective student on an institution’s website, they could help graduate programs unlock huge untapped potential. Kathleen Costello, director of graduate admissions and recruitment at Clemson University, had attended a webinar where HALDA shared their learnings, and it struck a chord with her. The Graduate School at Clemson is well respected and robust with over 140 graduate degree and certificate programs. As a supporting arm to all the different graduate programs Clemson offers, Kathleen and her team were keen to identify effective ways to generate more inquiries for all programs in a scalable, effective, and low-maintenance effort.
Implementing this value offer helped The Graduate School of Clemson convert an additional 327 unique inquiries, almost doubling their typical inquiry volume from the exact same number of visitors.
In their first meeting, Kathleen shared that her team was interested in generating more high-quality leads for their programs, but that they did not have a budget for a large media campaign. Typically this is an impossible marketing challenge. However, for this collaboration it was instead the perfect opportunity to help Clemson hit their goals and for HALDA to test their assumption. • G OAL: Significantly increase inquiry submissions • ASSETS: Creativity, Clemson’s existing brand and organic traffic, Halda’s mad coding skills • TIMELINE: 1 month They collaborated to design a proactive and personalized value offer that gave students a compelling reason to submit their information right away, earlier in their search, rather than waiting until it was time to apply. They knew that if they could just get the student’s information, that Clemson's recruiters would be successful in bringing in applications.
continued on page 6
N
A
G
A
P
P E R S P E C T I V E S
•
S U M M E R
2 0 2 1
5
