The buzz around artificial intelligence (AI) is loud and growing—and for good reason. Maybe you’ve already used an AI tool to transcribe a video call or pore through reams of research to find just the right citation in seconds. If so, you already know how these new AI capabilities can easily accomplish tasks that were just too labor intensive or not technically feasible until now.

One of the most promising opportunities of AI—and a big one that colleges and universities should be laser-focused on—is the ability to create new streams of data and intelligence.

One of the most promising opportunities of AI—and a big one that colleges and universities should be laser-focused on—is the ability to create new streams of data and intelligence. AI has the potential to fast-forward your institution’s transition to data-driven decision-making, so you can move confidently from thought to action with insights that just weren’t possible before.

The Value of Tech That Learns

In the past, we’ve used very basic techniques to catalog and categorize data. As just one example, think about how you measure the strength of your brand. Today marketers can categorize social media posts and tweets in a rudimentary way using keywords to get a feel for how a brand is being received.

This is known as sentiment analysis, and for humans, it is both time-consuming and limiting.

For instance, let’s say you search for sentiment cues using pre-selected keywords (examples: like, love, best, worst, hate). You may be missing other keywords that could have something valuable to tell you. Was the tweet about a competitor? Was that post a feature request? Are you missing a support issue? A compliment? A comparison?

What makes AI so well-suited for tasks like this is machine learning and its flexibility to understand context. Because AI can recognize context, we can now analyze beyond keywords in way we couldn’t before. We can use AI to answer questions like:

• “What is the key concern?”
• “What is the primary topic?”
• “What is the recommended action?”

Collect, Connect and Activate Data in the Age of AI

One of the most exciting opportunities with artificial intelligence in higher education is the ability to create new streams of data that weren’t quantifiable before, giving schools more ways to collect, connect and activate data as intelligence. Here are some examples where AI can make data more impactful across campus:

• Enrollment data: Collect and analyze data from multiple channels—website analytics, social media metrics and email engagement rates— to understand user intent and reveal patterns in prospect behavior throughout the funnel.
• Marketing personalization data: Instantly scan and sort incoming emails or chats based on interest in specific schools or majors to deliver targeted and relevant outreach based on individual preferences.
• Social listening data: Identify and extract sentiment data to measure response to an alumni event or a new program offering.
• Student performance data: Use data from automated grading to learn how long students spend on certain tasks or what types of questions they struggle with to identify the need for curriculum updates or remedial instruction.
• Help desk call data: Analyze recorded calls and chats to monitor performance issues and accurately target staff resources and future investment.

Our recommended approach? Start thinking about how AI can expand on the data you already have. 

These new streams of intelligence can drive new types of insight that simply weren’t functionally (or financially) possible before.

Many higher education institutions are now embracing digital transformation to maintain a competitive edge. Why? Because today’s students have an immense amount of learning options to choose from and institutions need to become more flexible, affordable and accessible to meet increasing consumer and environmental pressures.

Digital transformation offers institutions exciting possibilities and opportunities to enhance their teaching and learning and the ability to effectively manage their operations – all of which are key to better serving students. Despite this, many colleges and universities still aren’t digitizing, or are falling short in their attempts, which is causing their technology spending to rise, with little return on their investments.

This is partly because there are misconceptions about what digital transformation is and how to do it. In this article, we’ll help you better understand what digital transformation in higher education is and examples of how your institution can successfully embrace it.

To invest in digital transformation initiatives that produce tangible benefits on strategic, operational and financial goals, it’s helpful to first establish a working definition. Digital transformation in higher education refers to an organizational change realized by means of digital technologies and business models with the aim to improve an institution’s operational performance. In other words, it’s the transformation of entire business model through digital technologies to better serve customers and streamline business operations.

Examples of digital transformations in higher education include:

• Using more digital channels and tools like websites, social media, chatbots and email marketing to recruit and retain students
• Collecting, connecting and activating data from across campus to inform decisions
• Enabling students to complete tasks such as class registration, transcript requests and financial aid requests on their own through self-service capabilities
• Automating cross-departmental workflows to complete tasks faster and more accurately

The examples listed above are just a small sample of opportunities a digital-first approach to campus operations and student experience offers higher education. See tips below for how your school can successfully plan for and realize the benefits of digital transformation to meet mounting revenue, pedagogical and operational challenges.

As colleges and universities invest in digital transformation, they must overcome four barriers and move through four key stages to succeed. Read More

Institutions that prioritize technology and elevate their IT department’s role as a strategic partner within the institutional ecosystem will be best positioned for long-term sustainability. See key considerations for the tech requirements and initiatives that drive effective digital transformation in higher education.

Much of the technology needed to support, run, manage and drive an institution is the same. Why does that matter? Because many colleges are needlessly spending money and resources to own and manage their core technologies and infrastructure. Consortial/shared services offer a cost-effective solution to quicker digital transformation. Read More

Now is the time to proactively embrace technology’s role in helping your institution refocus on its academic mission by alleviating administrative burdens and delivering a supported and robust technology experience to students, faculty and staff. See guidelines for implementing a proactive IT strategy that will help your institution achieve digital transformation.

By automating manual, repetitive tasks, colleges and universities can reallocate staff and faculty talent into more meaningful activities, deliver faster student experiences and even lower operating costs. Learn more about what process automation is and how to determine opportunities for reducing workflow inefficiencies.

Higher education is no longer immune from students’ high expectations and preferences for digital service. Most other industries interact with consumers digitally, and students now bring those expectations of simplicity, personalization, self-service, automation, and customer service with them to their educational experience. To thrive in the future, institutions must embrace and accelerate the process of digital transformation to optimize operations and lower operating costs, improve student experiences, and expand their reach.

If your college or university lacks the IT resources, governance or expertise necessary to support your digital transformation journey, Collegis Education can help. Talk to us about how our services can help you stabilize, standardize, optimize and transform your technology systems and operations to deliver near-term results and long-term growth.

Competition in higher ed is stronger than ever before. College enrollment has been on a downward trend for the past decade as students have many more options for accessing education, and many are questioning the value of higher ed in general.

With more schools vying for fewer students, it’s critical to have a strong higher education digital marketing strategy that is informed by analytical data in order to stand out in the eyes of your target audience. Read on to learn key considerations for successfully using data to inform your strategy.

What is a higher education digital marketing strategy?

Digital marketing is simply the general practice of leveraging technology channels to reach your prospective students in new ways. This includes the use of web-based channels such as social media, email, search engines, livestreaming, email, web content and more to connect with prospective students (as well as current students and alumni).

Different types of digital marketing activities include:

• Paid search (pay-per-click, email automation, etc.)
• Paid and organic social media
• Retargeting
• Website strategy (includes personalization, search engine optimization, or SEO, and conversion rate optimization, or CRO)
• Referral strategy
• Content marketing

Digital marketing allows you to mine valuable analytical data

In addition to the fact that today’s students overwhelmingly use the internet to research their higher ed options, digital marketing offers one huge benefit: The majority of activities involve online channels that provide analytics dashboards and reports. These dashboards can be reviewed in real time, allowing college marketers to see how well their campaigns are performing and make adjustments almost immediately.

For example, using data to be responsive to your prospects’ needs can mean checking your website’s analytics and optimizing its pages to give your audience what they are looking for – not just what you think they need. When trying to attract digital natives, the faster you can serve them the information they’re looking for, the more qualified they’re likely to be when they finally make contact.

Integrating your marketing data

The first step to using data analytics to improve your marketing efforts is integrating your different technology systems and tools.

Most often, data is spread across customer relationship management (CRM) systems, advertising platforms, web analytics and more. Separately, these reveal only a portion of a student’s journey toward enrollment. However, when these disparate systems are integrated and can communicate with each other, marketing teams can leverage their data to better understand their target audience – allowing them to not only reach those students more efficiently but also connect with more of them.

Using enrollment funnel data to optimize your marketing strategy

Once your systems and tools are integrated, you can begin optimizing your higher education digital marketing strategy for long-term enrollment goals. To do this, we suggest analyzing data in the following ways across three key stages of the enrollment funnel:

1. Inquiries

Initial marketing efforts often drive prospects to request more information through a form. Once completed, these prospective students enter the institution’s pipeline as inquiries.

When analyzing marketing performance at the inquiry level, the importance of technology integration begins to unfold. Think about your Google Analytics account – helpful for identifying successful marketing campaigns – and your CRM – helpful in storing student data. Each serves its unique purpose, but when integrated, they are able to provide valuable downstream marketing attribution.

Downstream marketing attribution allows for insights into overall marketing channel performance. From an inquiry perspective, you will be able to see which efforts best converted on your landing page or main .edu traffic, improving budget allocation and simplifying day-to-day optimizations.

2. Applications

After they become inquiries, the goal is to drive students who have inquired to complete an application.

With communication among your Google Analytics, CRM and advertising platforms at the application level, you will begin to identify large-scale patterns, allowing you to further analyze marketing portfolio performance. For example, you may notice that last month’s paid Facebook advertisements produced the highest inquiry volume, but the majority of the submitted applications came from a targeted email campaign. Here, you begin to uncover which strategies are most effective at driving results through each stage of the student journey.

3. Enrollments

The final stage of the funnel brings us to the most critical question for maximizing a marketing budget: What is driving enrollments?

Going back to our previous example, social advertisements drove the greatest inquiry volume, and email campaigns drove the greatest number of applications. But what if the highest number of enrollments came from organic search? If this is the case, then to truly optimize your marketing strategy (based off enrollments), your institution would benefit from investing in SEO efforts – a solution that requires the integration of technology.

Prioritizing data management at your institution

The key to optimizing your higher education digital marketing strategy is to make decisions based on enrollment data. To do this, your institution must first be able to effectively collect, store, protect and process its data.

If your institution is struggling to integrate and manage its marketing and enrollment data across various systems and tools, Collegis Education can help. We’ve worked for many years with a wide variety of institutions to help remove silos, establish best practices and inform data-driven strategies through analytics.

Like every other industry today, higher education is teeming with data. Colleges and universities collect an extensive amount of information about students before they ever step foot in a classroom. While all of this data can be incredibly valuable in higher education, you can only use it to inform decisions if you’re able to make sense of it.

Higher education metrics, when tracked over time, can provide meaningful insight into your marketing and admissions — and even your student support efforts. But because there are so many ways to measure performance, it can be easy to devote too much time to digging into numbers that aren’t particularly helpful.

Which metrics are most important? While there are numerous measures that are truly key performance indicators (KPIs) you can track to identify whether you’re achieving institutional objectives, make sure the following 14 metrics are helping to inform your strategies.

Awareness-based KPIs higher education institutions should track

1. Impressions

A very high-funnel metric, impressions represent the total number of times your content (typically an ad) has been displayed. This doesn’t mean that a user interacted with your content, but it does mean they were exposed to it. Stagnant or lagging impressions could indicate you need to establish a stronger brand or adjust your marketing tactics

Use this metric to: gain a sense of how many users know about your brand.

2. Website traffic

There are a number of website-related metrics you can dig into, but external website traffic is arguably one of the most important. It indicates how many people arrived at your institution’s domain, whether they came from a digital ad, an email, organic search or even by entering the URL directly into their browser. Internal traffic can also be informative, but that metric mostly conveys information relevant to retention and advocacy. While there are technically numerous metrics that convey how much traffic a website receives (pageviews, users, sessions, etc.), it’s important to track at least one of them consistently over time.

Use this metric to: identify trends and determine how marketing tactics are affecting performance.

3. Return on advertising spend

Return on advertising spend (ROAS), which can be evaluated at the campaign level as well as for total marketing spend, indicates how effective your marketing efforts are. Calculate ROAS by dividing advertising revenue by advertising cost — most digital platforms track this for you. The higher the number, the greater your return.

Use this metric to: decide whether marketing spend could be better utilized.

Consideration-related KPIs higher education institutions should track

4. Inquiry submissions

This number represents the total number of prospective students who’ve expressed interest in your institution in some way. In the digital world, this often occurs when a student visits a landing page, fills out a form or registers for a webinar.

Use this metric to: gauge how interest among prospects is trending.

5. Cost per inquiry

This higher education metric helps in understanding how effectively marketing budget is being spent toward generating interest among prospective students. You can calculate cost per inquiry (CPI) across all your marketing efforts as well as at the campaign level. To determine CPI, divide marketing spend by the total number of inquiries received.

Use this metric to: identify successful campaigns and areas for improvement.

Close-phase (or “conversion”) KPIs higher education institutions should track

6. Visit registration submissions

A visit registration submission is exactly what it sounds like: a prospective student who has registered to visit your institution. Campus visits (even virtual ones) can be incredibly powerful in helping institutions drive enrollments, because students typically only attend them at the last few schools they’re considering. You can think of visit registration submissions as a precursor to later enrollments.

Use this metric to: identify quality leads that need to be nurtured.

7. Application completions

This higher education metric indicates how many students have turned in a completed application — not just those who have created an account and started to fill out an application. This distinction is important given some students never follow through on finishing and submitting every application they start.

Use this metric to: determine how well you’re pacing toward enrollment goals.

8. Admissions (or “Admits”)

For most colleges and universities, not every student is eligible for acceptance. Your total number of admits tells you not just how many students completed the application process, but how many have been officially accepted for admission.

Use this metric to: gain insight into what enrollments may ultimately be and to determine the quality of leads coming in through marketing and enrollment efforts

9. Enrollments

The total number of enrolled students — enrollments or “enrolls” for short — is how many students have taken all the final steps to begin their studies at your institution, including submitting their deposit and registering for classes. For most institutions, growing enrollment is a consistent goal.

Use this metric to: determine whether your enrollment goals have been (or likely will be) achieved.

10. Cost per application

Cost per application (CPA) builds off CPI to encompass all the marketing spend it takes to get a student to submit an application. To calculate CPA, divide marketing spend by the total number of application submissions. It’s inevitable that more prospects will inquire than will apply, so expect this metric’s value to be higher than your CPI.

Use this metric to: determine the marketing and outreach spend it takes to compel students to apply.

11. Cost per enrollment

Cost per enrollment (CPE) is the total investment associated with securing a student’s seat at your institution. CPE is calculated quite simply by dividing total marketing spend by the total number of enrollments. Given the additional investment enrolling a student entails, CPE will be higher than both CPA and CPI.

Use this metric to: measure the effectiveness of your overall marketing and enrollment strategy.

Completion-related KPIs higher education institutions should track

12. Student lifetime value

Think of student lifetime value (SLV) as the education equivalent of customer lifetime value (CLV): it’s the total monetary worth the average student contributes toward your institution. This metric is a bit more complex to calculate than the others given there are so many qualitative factors involved, but some researchers suggest using the net present value method.

Use this metric to: understand the total value a student contributes to your institution, even after graduation.

13. Retention rate

Generally speaking, the retention rate refers to the share of students who continue on to the next milestone at your institution. This metric can be defined many different ways — from the first term to the second term, from one year to the next, etc. Individual schools should determine which milestones to focus on when measuring retention.

Use this metric to: understand whether there’s a need for interventions that help support students.

14. Conferrals

This metric represents the total number of degrees awarded to graduating students. Most institutions, as well as the annual Digest of Education Statistics from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), measure conferrals on an annual basis.

Use this metric to: identify trends within your institution and to see how you compare to other colleges and universities.

Ensure your higher education metrics signal success

Higher education metrics can help you gain insight into which campaigns resonate with students, how effectively you’re nurturing leads, whether you’re on track to meet enrollment targets and more. You’ll also likely recognize whether it’s time to adjust your overall marketing strategy.

Perhaps your institution, like many others, is starting to realize using the same approach to converting prospects into attending students is no longer as effective as it once was. To find out how you can restructure the enrollment funnel to better meet your goals, read “How Colleges Can Reinvent the Enrollment Funnel.” It may just help you determine how to stand out from the crowd in an increasingly digital landscape.