How Colleges Can Use Data to Improve Enrollment Marketing: 7 Practical Tips

Key Takeaways

• Link enrollment metrics directly to institutional revenue so marketing prioritizes programs that drive the most financial value.

• Break down the funnel stage by stage and align reporting cadence. Use weekly data for quick optimizations and monthly reviews for broader, strategic insights.

• Leverage AI tools to extract and present insights clearly. Transform raw enrollment data into compelling visuals or stakeholder-friendly language.

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Enrollment marketers need to keep a close eye on the enrollment funnel, but knowing which data points to track and how to connect them back to a strategy can feel overwhelming. It's easy to get lost in the numbers or go down a rabbit hole that takes up the marketing team's valuable time. The tips below will help enrollment marketing teams focus on the right data to develop and optimize marketing strategies.

1. Connect Enrollment to the Bottom Line

The marketing team should understand the financial side of a college or university. Every institution relies on revenue to continue running, and enrollment is central to that. Communicate the growth areas of the college to the marketing team and make sure they know what types of programs bring in the most revenue.

2. Define What You Need to Know

Before the marketing team even looks at data, they should determine why they are looking at it. What questions are they trying to answer and why? When they know this upfront, it will make it easier to focus on pulling data that will be most helpful without getting lost in numbers.

3. Break Down the Funnel

College marketing teams with limited bandwidth need to be efficient in analyzing data. Looking at the quantity of prospective students and conversion rates along the enrollment funnel, one stage at a time, helps make the data more manageable and actionable.

For example, marketing might generate a lot of inquiries, but the inquiries don't convert into applicants, or accepted students don't make it to deposits. Each of those issues needs a different marketing strategy to address them effectively. Plus, making changes further down the funnel can have a bigger impact than continually adding to the top of the funnel to increase enrollment.

4. Prioritize Your Programs

Many enrollment marketing teams are small, so staying on top of the enrollment funnel for every degree program can be hard to manage. If that is the case for your team, then prioritizing is critical. Marketing should find out the program goals across the academic and enrollment teams. When they have the institution's priorities, marketing can more easily align their resources.

5. Align with the Admissions Team

Managing the enrollment funnel is a collaborative effort between the marketing and admissions departments because the work of each team impacts the other. Strong marketing teams have fostered transparent relationships with the admissions team and are open to feedback that may lead them to adjust marketing strategies.

Marketing and admissions both evaluate the marketing funnel, but they focus on different areas of it. However, they should both be pulling data from the same central source in a CRM so that college leadership has a clear picture of enrollment activity without confusion from conflicting data.

6. Separate Weekly and Monthly Reporting

With so much data at your fingertips, it can be tempting to look at it frequently. But it's important to differentiate metrics that inform quick adjustments vs. data that shows longer-term trends.

Weekly reports are useful in situations where quick changes can be made. For example, online advertising spend can be adjusted weekly based on enrollment funnel activity.

Monthly reports provide a broader view. If there was an integrated marketing campaign of traditional radio and TV plus online advertising to launch a new program, the overall impact is clearer when viewed monthly. Monthly reporting also makes it easier to compare the enrollment funnel and associated marketing activities across programs to see where marketing is contributing the most to enrollment.

7. Use AI to Present Insights

AI can be a valuable tool for helping to analyze and present enrollment marketing data. If your institution allows it, spreadsheets of enrollment data can be fed into AI tools to help identify insights. AI can also assist in tailoring findings in a way that is relevant to various departments across the campus. For example, AI chat tools can reframe an insight into language that college leadership will easily understand or generate a simple visual that makes the data more compelling in a presentation. Provide the insight, then ask the AI tool to translate it into a clear and descriptive visual to use in presentations.

Turn Your Data Into Smarter Enrollment Marketing Decisions

Most enrollment marketers don't have a deep background in data or statistics, and that's ok. Being data-driven in enrollment marketing is about understanding the bigger picture, asking the right questions, and tying data to marketing strategies to help contribute to the enrollment funnel.

Are your institution's enrollment marketing efforts truly data-driven or just the way they've always been done? At Wise Marketing Strategy, we help colleges and universities leverage the data they already have to make smarter, more effective enrollment marketing decisions. Reach out to learn how we can support your enrollment goals.