From Awareness to Enrollment: The Best Way to Improve Your Lead-to-Start Rates
Why You Should Prioritize Building and Optimizing an Admissions Funnel and How to Get Started
It’s one thing to get yourself and your school in front of potential students; it’s another to actually get them to apply, schedule a start date, and show up for class. That journey can be pretty rough if you’re coming at it in a patchwork fashion, which is why — more than anything — we believe in the importance of building admissions funnels.
What Is an Admissions Funnel?
Last year, we had a blog discussing B2B sales funnels, what they are, and how they’re different than ones for B2C. Similarly, an admissions funnel is a subset type of marketing funnel that adjusts the basic shape and concepts to specifically suit educational institutions.
Like most marketing funnels, you can break down the admissions journey into six steps that go from the top of the funnel (TOFU) to the middle (MOFU) to the bottom (BOFU):
- Prospects (TOFU) — These are students at the very beginning of their educational journey. They aren’t engaged with any particular school or college yet, but they’re brought into your funnel via college fairs, outreach programs, referrals, or personal research.
- Inquiries (TOFU) — Prospective students drop into Inquiries when they start actively engaging with your school. They haven’t applied or enrolled yet, but they’ve visited the campus or called one of your representatives or signed up for newsletters or mailings.
- Applicants (MOFU) — The middle of the funnel brings us to Applicants, i.e., those who have filled out an application for your institution. Comparing this number to the Prospects in step one can be a great barometer for how your TOFU elements are performing.
- Admits (MOFU) — Not everyone who hits the Applicants stage will qualify for admittance based on your school’s requirements. Those that do will move on to the last two stages at the BOFU.
- Deposits (BOFU) — Just because a student applied and was admitted, it doesn’t mean that they will keep going on their admissions journey. The next step is Deposits, admitted students who submit a payment to your school to keep a spot in your program.
- Enrolls (BOFU) — This is our primary goal, to get as many prospective students as possible all the way through to becoming Enrolls, who have completed orientation and are attending classes.
Why You Should Create an Admissions Funnel
Let’s be honest: creating an admissions marketing funnel takes a bit more time and energy than dropping a quick Facebook ad or making a pamphlet. But it’s also going to pay off a lot more in the long run. It’s a clear, focused way of visualizing the admissions journey, delivering relevant information and content at the right time, and determining how your strategies are performing and where you can improve.
Moving prospective students through a structured, thought-out admissions journey helps you not only hone your brand, image, and messaging; it also gives you insight into what students are looking for, where their priorities lay, and how you can better communicate with them. It can reduce the percentage of prospects who drop off along the way and result in better lead-to-start rates.
How to Get Started Building an Admissions Funnel
At each stage of a marketing funnel, you will seem some amount of drop-off — that’s extremely normal. But how big that drop-off is will be your primary metric as you create and optimize your admissions journey. So let’s take this step by step:
Stage Zero: Before You Begin
Before you start trying to reach and engage prospective students, you need to do some foundational work. Primarily: do you know who you are as an institution? Do you have a strong grasp on your school’s brand and image? Can you clearly articulate what your unique selling propositions (USPs) are compared to any competitors? Do you have demographic profiles of the types of students you’d like to reach? Knowing all of this before you begin will help you to craft more effective marketing down the line.
Stage One: Prospects
You’re casting the widest net possible here, so you’ll want to mix a wide variety of tactics to get your name out there. Some of this will fall under digital marketing in the form of improving your search engine optimization, investing in social media and search engine advertising, and producing original content for your site or social platforms. In other cases, you might find traditional outlets like high school outreach or college and education fairs useful. At every point, though, you need to have clear, consistent branding.
Stage Two: Inquiries
Converting prospects into actively engaged inquirers is your first big jump, and it’s also a great opportunity to start integrating personalization. We have an in-depth blog that goes into the importance of personalization and personalized customer journeys. The long and short of it is: people today expect an individualized experience. And this is the perfect stage to gather data on these students that can help you speak more specifically to their lives and concerns. If you have a young man in his 20s interested in one program and a middle-aged single mom interested in another, you’re going to want to engage them with different content down the funnel.
Stage Three: Applicants
One of the best things you can do to help convert prospective students into applicants is take a look at your application process and optimize it and streamline it. You want an application that’s online, easy to access, and as frictionless as possible. Pair this with lead nurturing activities like email outreach and alerts, Q&A sessions, webinars, blogs, and so on.
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Stage Four: Admits
While admittance itself is a pretty straightforward question — does the student meet the requirements, do they have the right documents, etc. — this is also a stage where continued nurturing and communication is important. Emails promoting success stories, campus visit days, school events, online connection opportunities, and so on can continue to build your brand and image in the minds of the applicants and create a stronger connection.
Stages Five and Six: Deposits and Enrolls
The continued conversation you nurture and engage in during the last step leads directly into the stage where you want students to schedule a start date, send in a payment, and show up for classes. Prioritize clear information on how they can work with your team on financial aid, program selection, choosing classes, career planning, and what to expect on their first day. Demonstrating that you value them, that you want to make their onboarding simple and easy, and that you’re there for their support can make all the difference.
Let the Admissions Journey Begin
Creating an admissions funnel isn’t just about the tools, like email marketing campaigns, data analytics, and chatbots. Those are the how, but a good admissions funnel focuses on the who, the what, and the why. Without taking a step back and understanding the needs and motives of your potential students, you won’t be able to build the kind of relevant content and information that takes someone from mildly curious to brand-new enrollee.
