Student enrollment requires a personal interaction with prospective students and their parents. At the same time, admissions departments are faced with many demands and limited budgets. Marketing technology is part of the solution to establish efficient processes in order to reach more students more efficiently but also since prospective students are researching their university choices via digital channels.
In this blog we want to cover the key terminologies: marketing automation and CRM systems that are critical for the college admissions department. As we have shown with our various mystery shopper experiments,lack of technology hurts many universities in their international student recruitment efforts.
Ultimately, every applicant needs to submit an application that provides you with the necessary information on the candidate as well as the financial situation to evaluate the financial picture. Despite the critical nature of the application and student information systems, they have to work as we all learned painfully when the Common Application system did not work last year. But application systems do not fulfill intelligent marketing support and that is where CRM and marketing automation come in.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation's goals: Marketing automation was developed to help marketers better target and execute one-to-one communication with key prospects, simultaneously managing and tracking marketing resources against this activity. Marketing automation includes multiple communication channels, such as email, social media, web landing pages,etc.
What is CRM (customer relationship management)?
CRM consolidates a great deal of information about prospects; however, it provides limited tools for true nurturing of earlier-stage prospects, and it definitely is not a communication platform. Marketing automation leverages CRM and addresses these gaps, but it then presents new capabilities for marketers that enable them to take their generation programs to the next level (1).
Higher education institutions rely on different institutional structures on how to manage the marketing and admissions process. I thought that this generic description from one of the automation vendors was useful.
- From an overall business perspective, CRM is more focused on aggregating knowledge about existing accounts and managing new-customer pipelines; whereas, marketing automation is more focused on orchestrating one-to-one communication with early-stage prospects and on scoring/routing new prospects to mange subsequent marketing and sales actions.
- From the perspective of sales/marketing roles, CRM is focused more on account management and service, and it is the system your sales team is most likely to spend their time in; meanwhile, marketing automation is focused almost exclusively on the marketing team and on the front end of demand generation.
- From a technical perspective, CRM is more of a database, but it does enable some minor execution of communication activities and certainly has basic rules processing to automate account management functions; meanwhile, marketing automation is much more of an execution platform -- with robust rules processing and enterprise-grade email/digital-communication sending capabilities -- yet it also does help store and track critical marketing data, particularly prospects' organic Web behaviors, as well as actions with content offers and downloads in response to nurturing emails.
Admissions departments are incredibly busy offices with many demands. Streamlining and automating as much of your work as possible is critical. Selecting the students that fit your school and who show the characteristics and signs of interest will help you to focus your attention more productively, ultimately leading to better enrollment yields and hopefully a saner life for you.
