5 minute read
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: 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. They are not alone in the GEM professional community with over 50% reporting inquiry generation as a high priority.
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. • GOAL: 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.
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.
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After a number of iterations the team decided on an offer to create a personalized plan for each student considering graduate school at Clemson:
When a prospective student submitted the form they were instantly: 1. Provided with personalized information and resources that spoke directly to their motivations and concerns regarding graduate school. 2. Connected to the appropriate program coordinator for their program of interest via email. 3. Entered into a shared CSV that was uploaded regularly to Clemson’s CRM.
This offer was published on nine of Clemson's graduate admissions pages, and, as previously alluded to, generated 366 inquiries within 30 days without a single cent being spent on digital ads. Here are some of the most interesting findings:
Offering Immediate Value Works
The first question that they wanted an answer to was, “What is the relative impact that this offer will have?”. Clemson’s Graduate School consistently receives 350 to 380 inquiries each month with their standard “Learn More” calls to action. Implementing this value offer helped them convert an additional 327 unique inquiries, almost doubling their inquiry volume from the exact same number of visitors.
This showed that they had the capacity to double their recruitment funnel simply through better engagement with the traffic their pages already received.
Most Productive Pages
The most productive page for lead generation was a page that lists all of Clemson’s graduate programs. This was an unlikely candidate given the style of the content and the general design of the page:
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Broad Reach:
This offer was able to capture interest from students from all over the USA, from over 25 countries, and for 79 unique grad programs! Every college on campus received inquiries and applications from qualified candidates.
Helped Fill Each Stage Of The Funnel:
The call to action of “Apply Now” only helps an institution engage students at the very bottom of the funnel. Conversely, this engagement helped attract students from the very top all the way down to the very bottom of the funnel: Clemson has since received 50 applications, 35 admits, and 29 enrolled students from this cohort of inquiries. Extrapolated out over the course of one year, this approach could boost Clemson’s recruitment funnel by up to 4,392 inquiries, 600 applications, 420 additional admits, and 348 enrolled students on a shoestring budget.
Results after 1 month 1 Year Projections
Key Takeaway
Most enrollment strategies underemphasize the existing traffic on websites at best and completely ignore the value of these visitors at worst. This experiment showed that there is immense untapped potential sitting right under our noses, and all we have to do to access it is offer visitors something of immediate value. n
