The redefinition of higher education has only just begun. Covid-19—and resulting variants—have disrupted global business operations, inclusive of higher education and catalyzed innovation.
That said, pre-pandemic, many traditional higher education institutions faced, and still face, the incredible demographic shift looming in 2025/2026—with an estimated 15% decline in the college-aged population(1). While just one of these phenomena comes with significant disruption, it is unfathomable to think about how these events have changed the plans of college-going students now, and over the next few years.
The expansion and adoption of online learning has allowed for a shift in the supply and demand economy in favor of the consumer (2). Geographic boundaries have been eliminated and today’s students are inundated with messaging from colleges and universities of every kind as the investment in digital marketing continues to increase. As we can learn from our business brethren, the first step in strategy building is to define the customer. For those of us in higher education, we need to define our student segments – aka our “customer”, to future-proof our institutions against the impacts of CV-19 and the looming enrollment cliff.
Defining Your Student Segments
The definition of “college student” has morphed over the last several years, and COVID poured gas on that transformation. Think about this: When someone says “student”, does that bring the 18–22-year-old traditional student to mind? Does it bring the new traditional student to the conversation – the 25–34-year-old student demographic that is expected to grow 11% through the next several years3?
Big Data has helped any organization, public or private, understand who their customer is and why they choose one brand over the other. Colleges and universities all have this data at their fingertips and analyzing data has accelerated the effectiveness of 1:1 marketing. Consumers today understand their data is being used and expect that messaging is tailored toward their buying preferences. Individualization, at this point, has become table stakes.
For higher education, it’s critical to crystallize the student demographic for individualization purposes or we grossly oversimplify the challenges of working with a diverse population of students. Individualizing the student experience to an 18-year-old first time freshman and a 42-year-old online business student is completely different. The individualization process includes branding, marketing, admissions, student services, educational delivery, and daily expectations of what “experience” means.
To tackle the challenges in front of us, disaggregating data to identifiable student segments can facilitate the individualized student experience. In marketing terms, that translates to attraction, retention, and expansion.
Considerations of Specific Student Segments
Once you have defined your student targets and understand what student the institution is interested in serving, it is important to create messaging that caters and resonates with each group. If you can define student segment characteristics, you can craft student lifecycle marketing and brand messaging that is individualized. Through that individualization, you start capturing the hearts and minds of this population with the goal of creating engaged alumni and brand evangelists.
Student Segments
Traditional students – the typical 18–22-year-old college-going student balancing their decisions on college attendance between community college, private/public 4-years, and is inundated with family pressures and little knowledge of their range of choices.
The Working Student – this student is generally between 25-34 years old. Maybe a BA/BS student, maybe a grad student. Typically, this student has a job but not a career but needs education to advance or is looking for skill-set diversification. Some college, potential BA/BS degree holder.
The Ever-Evolving Professional Student – this is the adult student, generally 35+ years-old, balancing career and family, more interested in the flexibility of online learning and earning credit for prior learning. These students are aware of the global economy and the relevancy of upskilling. Graduate students more likely.
As mentioned before, the business of building lifetime loyalty starts with attraction, but retention and expansion are equally, if not more important. Attracting a student to the University is only one step in a multi-step model of engagement. It’s critical to maintain individualized communication with students through their educational transformation and career advancement stages.
The Marketing Holy Grail: Attraction, Retention, Expansion
The model presented here has three specific stages that the student navigates through.
- Attract: The individualized messaging and communication that attracts potential students to the University.
- Retain: The individualized messaging and communication that spans the student’s time at the University.
- Expand: The individualized messaging and communication that helps to launch student’s careers, engage them as alumni, or facilitate their return for advanced degrees.
Within the three stages are ten steps of the Student Life Cycle: cultivate, capture, apply, enroll, facilitate learning, innovate, develop community, graduate, advance, and engage alumni.
ATTRACT
Cultivate:
Activity with potential, current, and past students and occurs throughout the entire student experience. Branding and top of funnel messaging. Unique and varied approaches are critical in this step. Our business partners have proven that digital only is not effective. A combination of physical and digital is where that engagement connects with students as well as their parents.
Capture:
Gone are the days of institutions (unless the institution is considered “elite”) of waiting patiently for an incoming class to manifest itself just based on the institution’s brand. It’s been well documented that coronavirus catalyzed online learning adoption by several years, and many institutions will keep online learning as a primary or alternate delivery option (3). The result of online adoption is incredible competition. Competition tips the supply and demand scale in favor of the consumer (the student and parent!) resulting in the necessity of active contact and communication in the recruitment process rather than the passive approach many institutions have relied upon in the past. Simply waiting for a student, of any age, to stay focused on one institution given the competition created by online learning is hopeful, not strategic.
Tip: Customized direct mail with QR codes, blended with a digital campaign and then capped off with a personalized unboxing event.
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Passive vs. Active Recruitment Passive Recruitment: • Institution waits for student to apply • Institution reviews criteria, GPAs, acceptance rates • Institution lacks full view of buying cycle management • Student acquisition costs fuzzy, if measured at all Active Recruitment • Speed from interest to outreach (speed to contact) is minutes, not hours, days, or weeks • Institution measures days between application and FA Packaging as key metric to forecast enrollment • A high touch contact model with a defined schedule of outreach • The cost per student metrics defined, measured, and visible same or next day • Tangible materials sent to student to create brand evangelists |
Apply:
This sometimes-stressful time when students and their parents have narrowed their choices. Perhaps the application pool is 3 to 5 colleges and universities. This is a critical time to engage and cement their decision to choose your institution. That waiting period and ultimate decision notification should have high engagement from the college or University. The higher the engagement, the more your institution is assuaging the stress and anxiety of waiting for those coveted admissions letters. Again, this should be a heavy combination of digital and physical with messages targeted towards the appropriate student segment or the parent.
Enroll:
What an exciting time! This step includes the administrative, academic, and extra-curricular activities in which a student is involved during their first year of college. Communication engagement here is largely digital, but of course, everyone makes their trip to the bookstore to gear up (unless the institutions has moved to Open Educational Resources). Engaging signage helps increase revenues through those quintessential annual trips for parents and students alike.
Tip: Engage your students & parents through a scavenger hunt driven through your school’s app. Have several stops in your bookstore where high value (revenue & profit) items reside!
RETAIN
Facilitate Learning:
The learning experience, regardless of student profile, happens both in and out of the classroom. Think about student engagement activities that ‘transform’ the student intellectually and personally and allow them to emerge as engaged citizen scholars. These include peer research projects, community engagement and on-campus activities. Engagement at this step is both digital and physical. Campus signage (on the ground, on the walls and hanging from the ceiling) generates awareness and helps reinforce the experience. Direct mail can inform and attract attendance to studies abroad and the like.
Tip: For online universities serving the adult student market, run split tested email campaigns and measure your open and click through rates.
Innovate:
Academic programming in and outside the classroom, such as lectures, tutorials, study, and other elements to enhance the intellectual experience of the students. New technology can enhance the overall learning experience.
Community Impact:
Activities and experiences involved on the social and logistical side of being a student. These include all co-curricular activities, campus student life, online support, and wraparound services. The institution should create opportunities for the student that enhance the student’s standing as a citizen at the University and in the broader community. Exploring 21st century leadership skills and the impact of decision-making on a global scale.
EXPAND
Graduate:
The day has arrived! The ceremonial highpoint in University life. We all have fond memories of our graduations! When COVID cancelled graduations around the world, we saw colleges and institutions step up in a big way. The creativity and ingenuity shined brightly with graduates being celebrated through virtual events including “Graduation in a Box”. Simply put, the University should do whatever possible to create the individualized experience that celebrates individual achievement.
Tip: Some institutions invested in creatively branded boxes which include the student’s degree and unique university branded swag and memorabilia.
Advance:
This takes place throughout all three stages of the life cycle and includes the activities that engage students in thinking about, gaining experience in, and preparing for their post-study careers. This holds true all of the student segments as well. Communication throughout this stage is critical as this is where the return on investment (ROI) is defined. Did the graduate get a job? A better job? Advance in their career? A raise? This is a critical, yet often overlooked loyalty inflection point. A successful graduate translates to a very loyal and vocal alum.
Engage Alumni:
This step is where significant payoff comes for the University or college. Loyal alumni translate to lifetime donors and returning students. They also become parents whose children become future students/legacies. A college or University’s alumni are also brand evangelists. Whether they are wearing their gear to cut the grass, attending football games, or are featured guest speakers in an undergraduate class, they become both active and passive revenue generators. Understanding the lifetime value an alumnus is critical, and engagement efforts need to correlate to that value. Alumni events, digital newsletters and exclusive on campus celebrations are possible touchpoints. Engagement at this phase of the student lifecycle is truly priceless.
Savvy and intentional individualized marketing and communications strategies to defined consumer segments will yield quantifiable results. Embedded within all communications should be a distillation of the value proposition of attending a college or University – what makes this University special and why should that be important to your targeted audience? Appropriately communicating institutional differentiation amidst increase competition is the difference between survive and thrive operations (4). Taking that one step further, communicating that differentiation and what your students will get out of that unique experience will help them choose your institution and invest in their education. Unlike the majority of transactions in our lifetime, higher education success becomes part of our identity that we communicate to others for the rest of our lives.
- https://www.cupahr.org/issue/feature/higher-ed-enrollment-cliff/
- https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/04/27/survey-reveals-positive-outlook-online-instruction-post-pandemic
- https://collegiseducation.com/news/admissions-processes/what-adult-students-want-the-clearest-shortest-most-efficient-path/
- https://www.fierceeducation.com/administration/innovative-strategies-to-help-universities-attract-and-enroll-students
Dr. Joe Sallustio is Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Claremont Lincoln University. He is also Co-Founder and Host of the EdUp Experience podcast and an Advisory Board member to Fierce Education.