We recently launched a new set of features designed to help you reach families of prospective students. With support from five innovative pilot partners, the early results are in. This blog will give you the what, the why, and the “wow” from our pilot... and introduce you to our new enrollment management solution.

“We’re in a crisis right now, and it’s a complicated one.”

The number of students is going down, and the competition for their enrollment is going up. Changing demographics, rising tuition costs, and a strong economy have created the perfect storm for those responsible for student recruitment and retention. Many institutions say enrollment is reaching a crisis level.

Every professional in enrollment management knows the pressure. It’s time for EM’s to get creative about reaching students, proving their value, and finding ways to differentiate their institution.

Sometimes the answer is staring you in the face. Literally.

80% of parents say they are involved in college planning (and the other 20% are probably lying). Parents are very influential when it comes to scheduling campus visits, talking to their students about options, and even–whether we like to admit it or not–completing applications on behalf of their students.

Most institutions do understand the influence of parents, but they do not often actively focus it on their recruiting and retention efforts. The partners that participated in our Pre-Enrollment pilot shared the same vision. They wanted to leverage family involvement to: 

• Differentiate marketing efforts

• Increase visits, applications and deposits

• Improve student yield

In addition, this year institutions are looking to minimize summer melt and stay competitive with new NACAC changes.

From Pilot to Product

Since launching the pilot in Fall 2019, we’re now live or implementing the Pre-Enrollment Module at nine institutions, including the University of New Orleans, Kean University, and Hanover College. 

As Mary Beth Marks, AVP of Enrollment at the University of New Orleans explained:

“Parents have been and continue to be the leading influence when it comes to deciding where their student will enroll. It’s important to engage them at the earliest stage possible so they assist you in moving prospective students through the funnel.”

Engaging parents of high school students is not a new idea… but personalizing the outreach, qualifying the activity, and connecting it back to your enrollment pipeline certainly is. The CampusESP Pre-Enrollment Pilot was designed to help colleges and universities:

• Utilize parent and student data from their CRM

• Send personalized nudges to parents based off their student’s admit type and stage in the enrollment funnel

• Qualify parents (and their students!) according to email opens, campaign clicks, and parent portal usage

Introducing: The Parent Promoter Score™

To help our customers quantify the value of parent involvement, we’ve added a new feature called Parent Promoter Score. It’s simple: This score helps you identify the parents with the highest levels of engagement. Understanding which parents are most engaged is one way to understand which students are most likely to enroll at your institution.

High parent engagement → High likelihood of student enrollment

Low parent engagement →  Low likelihood of student enrollment

This data helps simplify and focus the process for those who need to meet enrollment numbers. According to Marks:

“In the future, we plan to connect parent engagement levels with the student interest levels to super score our inquiries and applicants.”

Early Results

We know enrollment management is a data-focused world, so wanted to provide a data-focused update. Here are some of the results we’re seeing so far. 

Prospective Parents

Over the last six months, over 25,000 prospective parents have joined our Pre-Enrollment pilots. That is a lot more users than we expected. By linking up with your existing CRM data, it’s easy to get a lot of parents in there quickly. 

Email Open Rates

The average email open rate for prospective parents that “convert” (or fully register their account in CampusESP) is 80%. That’s not a typo. The email open rate is 80%. Looking for a quick list of your parents with students most interested in enrolling? There it is. 

Average time to implement

Every institution is different, but our average implementation timeline for Pre-Enrollment is three weeks. Really. We use your existing initiatives and our best practices to get you set up without any technical support. 

Student Yield

An initial test case showed yield rates up to 30% higher for students with parents using CampusESP. With a wider range of customers and campaigns involved in this pilot, we’ll see if that number holds. But if it does...wow.

Although it’s early, the results are extremely promising. This early data will help us create repeatable models for all of our customers. Ultimately, by helping schools engage families, we can connect that engagement to strategic enrollment management.