When Faith Haley and Shonta Sellers planned the journey they wanted for potential students, they knew they needed scalable, personal interactions that moved students toward the ultimate goal: Enrollment.

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“Whether students are looking for financial aid, scholarships, the application, enrollment information, we needed ways to get that information to them automatically,” Haley explains. “Whatever the situation, Halda takes students down the path we want, without letting them get lost in any rabbit holes. We just say ‘Here’s what you actually want!’”

Shonta Sellers, Director of Institutional Marketing at ISU, was happy to bring Halda on. “We were looking for ways to get information to students faster without navigating an antiquated website.” Sellers continues, “We needed something that would engage prospective students quicker based on wherever they were in the enrollment cycle.” 

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To do this, they expanded the scope of Halda’s tools to address the entire enrollment funnel in an unprecedented deployment of website personalization. 

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How Indiana State took Halda full-funnel

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Sellers and Haley deployed Halda’s tools differently to address lags in their enrollment funnel. “We knew people struggled with their portal activation after they’d already been admitted. It’s just a part of the process where they get stuck,” Haley explains. Halda’s tools provided a personalized, efficient way to address the barriers to getting students on campus.

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“Students say all the time ‘I really do want to come here, but I just can’t do it for some reason.’ Halda gives us the chance to find out if they’re stuck somewhere. Then we can contact them and get them where they need to be.”

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Halda’s DLPs provide the stage for this outreach. “I started an Enrollment Confirmation DLP to get insight into what students are thinking,” Haley explains. “Every day there are down-funnel prospects who have gone there, submitted this information and said ‘Here’s where I’m stuck.’”

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These interactions have transformed their outreach as they prepare to welcome new classes. 

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“We get 20,000 applications a year”, says Sellers. Figuring out how that will translate to a fully-realized class is challenging. 

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“Before, we didn’t know our real class size until students showed up at orientation. We would go August-May without really knowing who would end up on campus.”

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Now, they have a better sense of who’s really interested in Indiana State, while also gaining a follow-up tool to combat summer melt. “It’s been working great,” continues Haley. “The conversion rate on the Enrollment Confirmation DLP is high, and it gives our counselors the power to be as specific as possible for follow up with our most interested students.”

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Early personalization creates down-funnel results

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Sellers sees Halda’s greatest value in Halda’s student-centered engagement. “It’s a benefit to us as an enrollment team, but it also makes the process easier for everyone coming to the site. It immediately alleviates pain points we know they have.”

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Alleviating those pain points has had a significant impact on reaching down-funnel enrollment goals. Since using Halda for the past year, nearly 15% of students who have submitted information via Halda forms have converted to enrollments–that’s a total of 741 enrolled students as of December 2023. 

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This immediacy is a huge part of why that interaction goes so well. “It all comes down to the 3-second rule. Our attention spans are about 3 seconds. Halda is an attention-getter. It cuts through the noise and gets people what they want faster,” continues Sellers.

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Haley sees Halda as the best tool for reaching those hard-to-capture student populations. “Everyone has this stealth traffic–people who come to your website without telling you they’re there. And normally they’re pretty interested in what you have to offer as a school. So engaging with them is really valuable.”

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Impacting stealth traffic and transfer student enrollments

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Halda has had a similar effect on another hard-to-reach public: Transfer Students. “Transfer students are a population that everyone is trying to recruit and no one is quite sure how. So the volume of lead capture Halda had with that population really surprised me,” Haley explains. “Their willingness to give us so much information, then the ease of follow-up with those leads has been great.” 

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These online interactions also spike the curiosity of other folks on campus with an eye toward representing their programs. “We have these people across campus who will see Halda and say ‘What’s this? How does it work?’ And it’s easy to explain that we’re trying to capture all these people you don’t realize are on your website,” Haley continues. “Our programs really like that we can change our settings to give students the right experience based on what they’re looking for.”

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For Sellers, Halda’s effectiveness comes down to a simple principle, “Halda reveals the necessity of getting people information faster and not depending on them to sift through your website to find what they need.”

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Ultimately, it’s an empathetic, thoughtful approach to connecting with students. It respects their concerns, their time, and their vulnerability in this decision-making process. It also, perhaps most importantly, quickly delivers in-the-moment value that nudges students down the enrollment funnel.

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This unique deployment of personalization started with a deep understanding of down-funnel interaction–a realization that scalable, automated personalization could make an impact along the entire enrollment journey. The results of that hunch–from first interaction to enrollment–have led to dramatic enrollment success.

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