Does The Personalization In Your Communications Match A Student’s Campus Experience?
A Conversation with Vice President for Enrollment Management Kimberly Strano
You will hear many people in higher education today talk about the need to hyper-personalize in the college search process. Industry leaders, education technology companies, and marketers are promoting, encouraging, and even imploring enrollment leaders to create a hyper individualized experience for prospective students using data that is carefully curated and mined on each individual student. This personalization is needed in the world today to connect with prospective students in a more meaningful way. In this Blog, Ms. Strano will share some of her extensive knowledge and experiences in the area of communication in the admissions process.
Introduction: Kimberly Strano is the current Vice President for Enrollment Management at Mount Saint Mary College, NY. She is a seasoned enrollment professional with more than 25 years of strategic leadership experience in both public and private higher education. Throughout her career, Kimberly has successfully guided teams through periods of growth and change, fostering collaboration, innovation, and accountability. Ms. Strano is deeply committed to advancing institutional excellence by combining a humanistic approach with data-informed decision-making to help shape her strategic vision.
Students are used to having their experiences customized for them. From the drinks they order from their favorite barista to the algorithms on social media carefully serving them content designed to meet their desires, their expectations and experiences are designed to be personal. If a school does not match their expectations, then they will move on to the next school in the hope that they will find someone who understands who they are and what they are looking for out of the college experience.
As enrollment leaders, we have adopted this hyper-personalized approach during the college search process. Personalize, personalize, personalize. Train the chatbots to provide custom answers. Work with your admissions team, your marketing team, and outside firms and vendors to create emails with liquid mark-ups and conditional logic to pull in personal details on students. Load individual student interests and details into your CRMs for future customization. Refine the tracking pixels and customize the ping data making sure it is correctly attached to each student’s record. The addition of AI makes this a much less daunting process for enrollment teams in today’s world. So much of the enrollment budget is spent each year to build models and strategies surrounding hyper-personalization of the student’s experience.
This type of personalized approach to the college search process is great; you can even make the argument in today’s world that it is absolutely necessary to meet the needs and wants of students today, but if you don’t follow the same personalized approach when the student arrives on campus for their first visit, then all of the hard work and money you spent on convincing the student to visit campus will be lost. Worse yet, it may completely change the direction of how the student and their family actually experience your campus. If we set the expectations of a highly personalized and caring approach in our communications, then we must deliver the same type of experience when they are on campus. If not, then it makes our communications seem disingenuous.
Two of the most important data points in predicting a student’s enrollment are the student visit and if a student files a FAFSA. We can educate students and their families around why and how to fill out the FAFSA. We can offer workshops, put together carefully crafted FAQ’s and add short videos for our websites. But this only provides half of our important data benchmarks. The other half is getting students and their families to visit campus.
Imagine for a moment that a student registers for a campus visit. What happens next? Yes, I am sure we can all agree that next up are our communications plans for the visit. Each word carefully chosen to create maximum impact, designed to evoke emotion and excitement surrounding their visit to the campus. Confirmation emails and text messages designed to flow at just the right moment to build the anticipation of the campus visit for the family. Setting the stage for the student to arrive on campus is critical for success. If at any time during the campus visit the family encounters difficulties or uncertainties, the perception of the campus and its community changes significantly regardless of how strong and personalized the communication was ahead of time.
A mentor of mine always instilled in me the importance of the phrase, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” As enrollment leaders, it is our job to ensure our campus is always ready to welcome visitors. This is just as true if they have an appointment as it is if they do not have an appointment. It is our responsibility to teach the campus community how to create a welcoming environment, remembering to teach our colleagues that although it may be the hundredth person that they have met, it is the first time that family has interacted with them.
The moment a family pulls onto your campus, make sure everyone is ready. If you have a front gate with security, equip them with information to clearly direct the family to where they are going. If a student does not have an appointment, make sure the security team knows how to direct them. If you can, designate parking spaces for your visitors, making sure they are clearly marked to host your guest. Meet with your marketing and campus facilities teams to make sure the signage on campus is visible and accurate. If it is a long walk to the Admissions Office, then make sure there are signs along the route to help your visitors navigate the journey. When you think you have everything in place, then test it to ensure you are starting off the campus visit the right way. Remember, first impressions are the key to your success.
The goal is to have the first impression of your campus match the information you have been sending to your prospective students for the past few weeks, months, or even years. The hyper-personalized messaging will feel very disconnected if not paired with the same type of personalization when the student arrives on campus. This approach needs to continue once they arrive at the admissions building. Training the admissions team and student ambassadors to greet families continues the personalized approach. A smile, an acknowledgement of the journey to get to campus, whether long or short, directions to the restrooms, and an easy check-in process, are sure to start the family off on a positive note. Make sure the welcome desk team goes over the next steps of their visit. Set the expectations and then follow through on them. Build and cultivate a warm and welcoming atmosphere for visitors.
Train your admissions team to handle the hard topics as well as the easy ones. The “affordability” topic can be uncomfortable to discuss if you do not feel equipped to have that conversation. Teach the team, role-play with them, and give them the communication skills to engage in uncomfortable conversations. Provide your team with resources both human and written to help families find answers to more complex questions or situations. Enlist your next level resource individuals and help them to understand the importance of their role in creating a positive first impression. Work with your campus community so you all speak to families with the same kind and caring voice. This is just as much a part of hyper-personalization as any email or text message that you use to impact the student journey from awareness to enrolled student. And when the visit has concluded, write the student a quick note or email to thank them for taking the time to visit campus.
Whether the family is on campus for an event, a presentation, or an individual visit, it is essential to realize that people will rarely remember the statistics they are presented with during their visit to our campuses, but they will always remember how we made them feel. We get one shot at this with each family, so make sure it counts!
Best of Luck.