Interested in knowing how your recruitment practices compare to your competitors? Suspecting your key messaging points are the same as the school down the street?  Concerned that your approach is costing you students?  One of the best ways to better understand your competitor set is to secret shop them – here’s how.

1. Identify the six schools you are most interested in better understanding.
2. Set up an email account purely for the purpose of Secret Shopping.
3. Using the inquiry form that the majority of schools have online, submit your information.
4. Submit your inquiries on the same day to compare frequency of communication.
5. Now sit back and watch the communication come in.

At this stage in the game, I suggest you take the approach of being the “non-responsive” prospective student. It is easy to recruit a student who wants to engage, but sticking with students over time until they are ready to begin a discussion with you is how you increase conversions and enrollment.

Tracking is the key to this effort. Email is easy to track, additionally the majority of schools will leave voicemail messages that should be tracked and recorded daily. I suggest you let your “test” run at least 30 days to truly understand how others are communicating with their prospective students.

Now, you are ready for your analysis:

1. Chart all points of contact for each school by setting them on a 30-day schedule (I personally find an excel spreadsheet helpful for this process).
2. Color code calls/emails/mail/text messages to identify the total number of “contact efforts” made in the timeframe.
3. Track and evaluate content by identifying the key message/messages for each point of communication.
4. Add your own standard recruitment process to your chart.
5. Critically evaluate where you land in comparison to frequency, messaging, and overall tone of your communication.

Gathering this information is only helpful if you actually decide to do something with it. Once you understand how others are recruiting, identify three things you are going to do differently at your institution. Add in more digital communication touch-points. Cut down the size of your mailed packet. Increase the number of phone calls you have your recruitment team conduct. Whatever it is – take action.

Check out our webinar recording for Recruitment: Communication to Grow Enrollment for more insights. Interested in secret shopping for competitor analysis, but need additional resources to execute the effort? We can help! Contact us.