E-Marketing and the Enrollment (Purchasing) Decision of Students at Higher Education Institutions

Learners and students today are influenced by e-marketing at every stage of the decision to enroll (and stay enrolled) at a higher education institution.  Colleges and universities need to be involved in e-marketing strategies which reach out and exchange communication with students at every step of the student life cycle (prospect, student, and alumnus) to ensure positive decisions on students’ behalf to enroll for classes and complete certificate and degree programs. 

Breaking down the buying (or purchasing) decision process, an institution’s and student’s position is as follows in marketing exchange. 

Recognition of a Need or Desire to Enroll and Complete a Certificate or Degree Program

Prospect students recognize a need or desire to complete a certificate or degree program due to a variety of reasons, including:

• Search for a new or better job (as in the case of a worker at a firm seeking a supervisory position)
• Interest in learning about a particular topic (as in the case of someone with an interest to learn more about a particular disease or biological function) 
• Boredom and uncertainty after high school (as in the case of a recent high school graduate who is unsure of what they want to do in life so they enroll in their local college until they figure it out)
• Improvement of lifestyle (as in the case of someone coming from an inner-city background and wanting a better lifestyle for themselves and their family) 
• Search for financial stability (as in the case of someone seeking high-paying jobs and the ability to save for retirement and emergencies) 
• Continuance of a tradition (as in the case of a student who studies law because his or her parents and grandparents studied law) 

Colleges and universities need to understand each of the reasons a need or desire is created in prospect students.  Institutions need to be able to identify what are the commonalities and differences amongst each of the reasons prospective students have a need or desire to complete a higher education program.  Appropriate understanding of each of these reasons will ensure colleges and universities connect with prospective students through e-marketing appropriately in the next stage of the buying decision process.

Development of a Need or Desire to Enroll and Complete a Program at a College or University 

Once a prospective student recognizes they have a need to complete a certificate or degree program, they have to develop the concept of the need or desire.  The development of prospective students’ needs and desires to complete a certificate of degree program may be divided by the following phases.

• What information is needed to find out if enrolling in a college or university is appropriate and beneficial?  Prospective students identify the factors which are detrimental in the decision to enroll in a higher education program.  Factors include cost, length of completion time, location, required time per week, access to professors and resources, rankings, and accreditations. 
• Based on the qualification factors, what are the options?  After identifying which factors are important in the decision making process, prospective student will compare what are the available options.  Prospective students will conduct a search and investigation process to find the values of the decision making variables by available options. The following questions will be asked by prospective students: What college or university is best regarding one particular variable? (Which college is the cheapest?  Which degree program is the shortest?)  What college or university is best regarding all variables? (Which college is best all-around for cost, length of completion time, available resources, and social life?)

Colleges and universities need to keep in mind the phases of a prospective student’s development of their need or desire and decide what are the best ways to reach out to prospective students at this phase for optimum interaction through e-marketing. 

Fulfillment of a Need or Desire to Complete a Higher Ed Certificate or Degree

Upon attaining enough information on the decision making variables and comparing available options, prospective students finally complete the marketing exchange and decide which program and institution they wish to purchase from (or enroll in). 

Higher education institutions need to be active with an e-marketing strategy up until this point and beyond.  Interaction through an e-marketing strategy is needed to nurture the prospective students and take advantage of the prospective students’ needs and desires before a decision is made to influence the prospective students’ purchasing decision.  Additionally, an interactive e-marketing strategy is needed after a student enrolls to ensure the student maintains enrollment and does not drop out or transfer to another institution.  E-marketing is also one of the methods to stay in touch with past alumni and monitor life and career developments for demographics and data collection services which may be used to find and nurture new leads part of the alumni’s network. 

How Should Institutions Manage their E-Marketing Strategy?

When developing an e-marketing strategy, colleges and universities need to break down each of the above phases and analyze what is the best way to interact and reach out to prospective students, currently enrolled students, and alumni to ensure a successful exchange of communication to positively influence purchasing decisions.  Influence may be initiated and nurtured through a combination of search and display ads, blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter tweets, Youtube videos, email distributions, and online word-of-mouth efforts.  Making the phases of the purchasing decision process as easy as possible for prospective students, current students, and alumni should be the intermediate goal of institutions with the ultimate goal of stable and increasing enrollments.  E-marketing is the fastest and easiest way to ensure colleges and universities influence new and current students in their enrollment decision.  

What e-marketing strategy has proven successful for enrollments at your institution?

Social Online Interaction - Roadblocks for Higher Ed Institutions

Education is no different than the rest of products and services being sold and marketed via online mediums and social platforms in that interaction is the key to building strong ties with customers, but platforms have to be built to allow easy interaction across platforms to allow connection amongst and between the following groups:

• Institutions and prospect students
• Institutions and current students 
• Prospect students to other prospect students
• Current students to other current students
• Prospect students to current students  
• Alumni to other alumni
• Alumni to prospect students
• Alumni to current students

It is important to also define and identify each of the above groups in such a way that will allow the building of social and online platforms to flow smoothly and correctly.  Understanding who the customers are is the perfect starting point when building an interaction strategy for online and social channels. 

This all looks pretty on paper, but why are the majority of higher education institutions failing to plan and execute an online social interaction strategy? Let’s consider the following road-blocks.   

Resource Commitment

Colleges and universities are restricted to their budgets, particularly, individual units and departments are restricted on how much to spend on the following resources:

Platform development and integration.  Higher education institutions are tied to the platforms they use for admissions, student retention (if any), and alumni tracking (if any).  Additionally, many departments within the same university or college sometimes have different platforms for each of the above activities.  This makes it difficult to track data on a macro scale for the institution as a whole and to use data to the institution’s optimum for social interaction purposes.

This brings us to the question, where do we factor in the marketing and social media platforms in order to track and manage the entire customer life cycle with social interaction built into the equation?  There is no doubt social interaction (or lack thereof) is a factor in the customer lifecycle of universities and colleges, but how do you interpret data coming from different platforms (i.e., the admissions CMS, student retention CMS, alumni CMS, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.)?  How do you prove to a university or college administrator which particular social interaction activities have the highest return? 

This is where the integration (and maybe even replacement and unification) of platforms comes into the picture.  Resources (money and staff) are needed to develop and execute the integration of the management of marketing, lead creation and tracking, admissions, student retention, and alumni tracking, but many departments and institutions do not allocate enough funding for these activities.

Staff. Looking past the start of the implementation of a social interaction strategy, colleges and universities soon realize by how much they underestimated the time which would be required by a staff member to manage the social interaction channels.  It boils down to resources, after realizing more staff time (money) is needed to manage and execute the social interaction strategy, colleges and universities (as a whole) and departments (as a unit) back down and stop feeding the exponential algorithm of what it takes to maintain and manage a growing and successful interaction strategy. 

Complaints Visible to All Social Channel Users and the Public
 
The flight-or-fight response, which one will a college or university choose to deal with negative feedback public to anyone?  An institution should not fail to acknowledge that word-of-mouth can hurt its enrollment numbers, and simply ignoring the negative word-of-mouth does not mean it is not there.  After implementing a social interaction strategy and a negative complaint is made public for all users to see, many institutions tone it down a notch or decrease the level of interaction users are allowed to have with each other.  Why flight?

Fight instead.  Fight by listening to clients and showing to all users on all channels the institution cares about every individual complaint and responds to solve issues.  Sharing with users that the institution responds to complaints is a way to gain the trust of new clients and increase the trust of current clients. 

Competitors and the Law of Diminishing Returns

Universities and colleges (more precisely the staff and administrators) first starting out on social interaction mediums may be intimidated by other colleges and universities with a set and successful strategy in place.  Moreover, they may be intimidated by products and brands from other industries with a successful strategy.  The key is to use other institutions and brands as benchmarks and analyze how to be different and where it would be most appreciated by users. 

What should and institution do after it is already doing the same activities as its competitors and other benchmark companies and a slump in interaction occurs?  This is where innovation comes into play.  Institutions must constantly be innovating the way they interact with users, the services (career services, health services, sports and recreation) and programs (new academic programs and in-demand professional programs) offered to students, alumni, and the community, and the use of the latest technologies and developments for interaction through the latest trends (developments in the telecommunications field, apps, and gadgets).

Keeping Up with Consumer Interaction

After establishing and implementing a social interaction strategy, higher education institutions realize the commitment (staff time and money) it takes to maintain close ties with users.  How do institutions deal with the increased demand in staff time and resources to keep up with the increasing interaction users request after a social strategy is on its feet?  Again the underestimating of needed resources comes into play and many colleges and universities back away from their interaction strategy.  The problem lies in resource distribution and management.  Usually, individual departments are burdened with having to cover the costs of a social interaction strategy for the unique programs they manage.  University and college and administrators need to understand that the social interaction strategies carried out by individual departments is beneficial to the entire institution because other departments and units benefit from the efforts of a particular department (this is due to the visibility and access social interaction has on a variety of different consumer groups, i.e. those interested in anthropology vs. accounting).  It may be a better option to allocate all the funds individual departments spend individually on social interaction and sum them together to be managed by a head university or college unit for the entire institution and all its departments and programs. 

Potential for Damaging Interaction

An open social interaction strategy also makes an institution and its user base accessible to competitors and antagonistic groups.  Higher education institutions are always under the magnifying glass by various interest groups, and institutions also have to be wary of aggressive competitors (especially the ones with big budgets and successful social strategies with many followers).  This is a concern higher education institutions have to keep in mind, but it is also a form of checks-and-balances.  Transparency is the key to preventing and managing antagonistic attacks.  Transparency needs to exist in a college or university’s processes and procedures, and transparency may also lead to many units of an institution redefining its processes and procedures to allow for efficiencies and positive views amongst the public.  Why shouldn’t an institution who is teaching tomorrow’s workforce and decision makers be transparent anyways?

Social Interaction - How Much is Necessary for Colleges and Universities? 

Higher education institutions which are focused on tackling the above road-blocks are sure to be ahead of the game when it comes to social online interaction.  Colleges and universities need much support (financially and by administrators) to engage in a healthy and profitable social interaction strategy.  The higher education industry has to segment the many phases its customers go through (lead, applicant, lower-class student, upper-class student, and alumni), and this requires high involvement and interactivity for successful growth. 

How does your institution manage its social online interaction?