Dr. Brenda Harms Provides Five Best Practices for Communicating with Prospective Students

During Converge 2015 in New Orleans, Dr. Brenda Harms of Harms Consulting provided valuable insight into best practices for communicating with prospective students during the enrollment decision process.

In case you weren’t able to attend Dr. Harms’ session, here are some of the key takeaways:

Agree on frequency and timing. There is no perfect formula when it comes to recruitment communication flows, but your institution must find a process that can be followed without exception. Consistent follow up is critical, so make sure that your process can be supported with your available human resources. Be sure to use a high enough frequency to stay within a prospective student’s mind on a consistent basis.

Your goal is to get the conversation going. Not to have prospective students go through each step of your communications flow. Your highest priority is getting prospects on the phone and starting a real, genuine conversation about their aspirations. Tailor your communication strategy to motivate students to engage in a dialogue with your institution.

Build a relationship. The hard truth is that having a highly differentiated academic program is extremely difficult to do, and most are not much different than competing programs. This is why establishing a genuine relationship with prospective students is imperative to your recruitment strategy. The message promoting your program may be phenomenal, but it is a lost cause if the relationship piece isn’t there. Pick up the phone and build a relationship with your prospective students.

Make it about the student, not the program. Follow up emails to inquiries are often guilty of sharing every minute detail about the program in question. These messages are packed with commonly used phrases touting the program such as “faculty with real world experience” and “great student-to-faculty ratios.” At this point in the decision process, messaging should be all about the prospective student – not a laundry list of program benefits.

Focus more of your energy on “cold” leads. It’s tempting to spend the majority of your time and energy focusing on your best prospects or your hottest leads. But these are the leads that are most likely to convert anyway – shouldn’t you spend more time trying to start a conversation with cold leads? To see improvement in enrollment, all your lead sources must be given as much attention as possible – this includes dedicating more time to cold leads.

On a final note, Dr. Harms expressed the importance of starting a communication flow today. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but you risk falling behind if you don’t make an actionable plan soon. Strive for execution rather than perfection – you can always make adjustments later.

It’s not too early to register for Converge 2017. Reserve your spot today!