Student recruitment and retention strategy
Connect. Communicate. Cultivate.
Students are inundated with higher ed options, and schools need communication plans that reduce friction between prospects and their next right action.
We look at recruitment and retention together. Outreach campaigns that deliver relevant, timely content to new and current students at critical points in their journey have a measurable impact on engagement, conversion, and persistence.
Recruitment and admissions outreach
From inquiry to application to start, students must be met with well-timed messages that strengthen their commitment to your institution.
Our engagement team serves as an extension of your enrollment management operations to reduce friction and create targeted solutions that enhance every stage of the enrollment process. Specialized and highly trained representatives immerse themselves in your brand to fully engage prospective students, crafting meaningful conversations, and representing your brand with integrity.
This student recruitment strategy prioritizes efficient delivery and engagement through automated email, SMS messages, and voicemails for admissions growth.
Enrollment process mapping
We can create a detailed view of the enrollment journey for your prospective students, and then adapt marketing and admissions activities to:
Bring together all enrollment stakeholders from inquiry through enrollment
Document the current state of business processes through the eyes of the prospective student
Create a shared vision for the ideal future state of business processes
Review and optimize your current CRM usage to support this vision
Admissions training and development
Give your admissions team the tools to deepen conversations with prospective students by preparing them to deliver brand and program differentiators tailored to the individual.
Together, we’ll identify opportunities to target specific elements of student engagement with your admissions staff, including:
Building relationships
Differentiating programs
Matching services to the student
Gaining meaningful student commitment
Using AI tools
Collegis can train enrollment coaches in the emerging use of AI in the admissions process:
- Collecting and analyzing data from multiple channels — website analytics, social media metrics and email engagement rates — to understand student intent and reveal behavior patterns.
- Transcribing IT help desk calls to monitor and analyze performance.
- Building a large language model (LLM) from a school’s website to quickly find and summarize information, providing students with the answers they need immediately.
Virtual training and development
Prepare your team to take on new challenges. Courses we offer include, but are not limited to:
Handling admissions conversations
Conducting effective, compassionate, conversations that encourage students to look forward to their educational goals.
Delivering your value proposition
Crafting voicemails, emails and text messages that resonate with students and increase engagement.
Utilizing technologies to increase engagement
Exploring outreach protocols, methods, and no-cost solutions (such as Calendly) to help staff connect with more students.
Admissions virtual effectiveness
Being comfortable and confident when presenting yourself and your school to students and parents via video.
Retention services
Research into student retention has identified four factors that influence whether a student makes it to graduation or not: academic, social, circumstantial, and personal. That means student retention reflects an institution’s ability to meet the student’s needs throughout their time at the school.
Student data can provide useful insights to fuel impactful retention strategies. For example, data can be used to build proactive alerts to identify students who are at risk of not continuing their studies and push notifications directly to decision makers who can intervene with relevant support before it’s too late.
We can help implement a student retention strategy, including:
Inclusive courses and program development accessible to a variety of life situations and learning styles
Faculty and course development services
Support for learning technology consulting and content licensing
