We interact with students from over 150 schools. Now we’re turning our connections into research. Our in-house data insights are in bold (and sometimes blue within a graphic). If you like what you learn, go ahead and share it!

Gen X LOVES to communicate

Potential students born between the mid-1960s and the early-1980s might not always seem like a massive market for higher education, but as the percentage of students pursuing masters and PhDs skyrockets, older students are flowing back to the classroom. 

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And they wanna talk about it. 

Gen X, compared to their Gen Z and Millenial counterparts, are considerably more likely to be influenced by and engage with phone calls, chatbots, and especially text messages. In fact, Gen X is the only demographic for which text messages are more than slightly effective when it comes to influencing an enrollment decision.

Gen X are communicators and connectors. They appreciate lots of information delivered in many ways, and they base their enrollment decision on alumni stories and social proof more than any other demographic.  

Connect with them consistently through many channels, and an enrollment team’s human touch can have an outsize effect on Gen X as they explore options. 

Healthcare and Business: Admissions support just means more...

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Program quality and financial considerations generally sit at the top of the grad prospect priority list, but business and healthcare prospects place an especially high value on a somewhat unexpected category: Admissions support.

High quality outreach, conversations, and follow-up communication make a huge impression for these prospects. This could be because the programs they seek are somewhat generic and difficult to distinguish from what’s offered at other schools. Therefore, the quality of interaction with each school is a huge differentiator for prospects. 

The emphasis on customer service should empower admissions teams (and their arguments for more budget). Interestingly enough, however, not every tactic for supporting students pays off in goodwill and influence. For instance, while 56% of graduate students claim the presence of an application portal had a meaningful influence on their enrollment decision, only 33% of healthcare students claimed it had an impact. Business students reported an even lower impact, with only 26% claiming it influenced their enrollment decisions.

This suggests that conversations and personalized insights into their unique enrollment journey make the biggest difference on these crucial categories of prospects.

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Courtney Tomlinson: Full-stack Marketing and Enrollment Professional

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K12 enrollment professionals tend to have smaller teams and slimmer budgets, but they have just as many jobs to be done as almost any other enrollment marketer. 

As Assistant Head of School for The Gardner School of Arts & Sciences (Vancouver, WA), Courtney Tomlinson effectively handles these tasks through a focus on details, data, and a personal touch. How does she do it within the limits of her team and budget? Here are just a couple of her strategies:

Follow the uncaptured traffic: Where there is uncaptured traffic, there’s opportunity. Tomlinson noticed that nearly everyone was bouncing off of her school’s tuition page. Rather than look at that as a roadblock to admission, she deployed a DLP to interact with her visitors about their concerns. Immediately, she started turning bouncers into leads.

AI isn’t a solution, but it's a great starting point: Tomlinson is a gifted writer and communicator, but interacting takes time. She uses Halda’s generative AI as a starting point for copy, then she employs her nuanced skills and perspective to tweak it for her needs. It’s an efficient, safe way to save time and effort with this new technology

Embrace Collaboration: Tomlinson is quick to seek others’ perspectives to complement what she brings to the table. She’s one of our most collaborative partners when it comes to building inside the tool and deploying personalization on her website. And as she’s found success, we’ve learned just as much from her as she has from us.

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If you want to learn more about how Courtney does an incredible job, check out the full profile.

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Navigating the relationship between enrollment and brand marketing

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The relationship between the brand marketer and the enrollment marketer on a college campus seems like it should be supportive and symbiotic. However, with different metrics to hit, audiences to serve, and functions to perform, it can sometimes feel like a bit of a turf war.

The fact is, neither can survive without the other, but if it feels like you’re at odds sometimes, you’re in good company. That’s why we wrote a blog about it. Here’s a sneak peek into what we cover:

It’s too expensive not to be buddies. Especially with the waning ROI of digital ad spend and the increasingly crowded digital market, you need to leverage every content avenue possible. Brand marketers are building great content that, with a little creativity and website optimization, enrollment marketers can leverage to reach prospects without spending much extra time and resources.

Inconsistent storytelling loses enrollments. If enrollment and brand marketers aren’t on the same page, the rhetorical journey breaks down for the student. And when students find cracks in your messaging, it creates doubt, erodes trust, and makes it harder for them to believe in the education you provide. That’s why the messaging alignment between all marketing must be consistent, and it starts with a healthy relationship between brand and enrollment marketers.

If you want to hear a little more about what we’re learning about this relationship, read the full blog!

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Hear from Halda's Head of Research

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Bentley Folkman, our Head of Research at Halda, has been in higher ed for over a decade, both on the enrollment and the tech tools side. He’s even served as Senior Director of Enrollment Management at Rocky Mountain University of Health Professions, a school that caters specifically to graduate healthcare students.

He leans on this background to find the right students and ask them the right questions at the right stage in their enrollment journey. Listen to him discuss his research process, the implications of what we’re learning about personalization, and the best personalization strategies he’s drawn from student interviews.

If you want some insight into our insights, listen to the full pod here (Spotify) or watch a clip!

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Thanks for checking in, and stay tuned for more data and AI insights!