5

LEADING ADMISSION STRATEGY

FOR HIGHER EDUCATION 2022
EVERYTHING YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT ADMISSIONS,
WE ARE HERE WITH ALL THE SPECIFICATIONS!
 TABLE OF
CONTENTS
1 INTRODUCTION

2 STRATEGIES TO SKYROCKET
YOUR ADMISSION RATES
• 4 DIRECT INVESTMENTS IN YOUR ADMISSION TEAMS
• ENHANCE YOUR STUDENT EXPERIENCE
• DIGITISE YOUR ADMISSION PROCESS THROUGH
CRM AND AMS
• CHECK YOUR COUNSELOR COMPETENCY

3 FEW ADDITIONAL POINTS TO

REMEMBER

4 CONCLUSION
INTRODUCTION
Firstly let’s have a look at the prospect base you need to cater to,

A report by Deloitte named Annual Status of Higher Education (ASHE), which

came out in October 2021, reveals that the student enrollment in higher
education in India in 2021 is 34.3 million, with 50.4 percent male and 49.6
percent female enrollments.

So technically you have a huge prospect base this year for 2022!

Now let’s have a look at your competition

CENTRAL UNIVERSITIES 54

STATE UNIVERSITIES 443

DEEMED UNIVERSITIES 126

PRIVATE UNIVERSITIES 403

TOTAL 1026

Tough competition, No?

But your targets can be achieved with a strategic approach. So, here we are
sharing a few major points that can help you ace your competition!
 5 STRATEGIES TO
SKYROCKET YOUR
ADMISSION RATES
After going through various research, studies, and articles, we have summed
up all the result-oriented strategies to boost your admission rates by 10X

4 Direct investments in your Admission Team

You must be investing a lot, in your college campus, classrooms, professors,

and more. But these investments will only get returns when you have higher
enrollment rates!

At this moment the correct or right thing to do is to invest in your admissions

team, particularly invest wisely.

The 4 most direct investments you should turn your attention to are:

• Invest in leveraging social media to build brand awareness: You should hit
on your target audience where they spend a major chunk of their time, i.e.,
Social media!
Social media offers a great chance to build a strong community within your
existing customers as well as a huge prospect base thereby improving the
chances of client retention and maximum lead generation.

Posting on social media regularly and creating content that is both relevant
and informative definitely connects you to your target audience which can be
converted with proper nurturing. Also read 6 tips to leverage the power of
Facebook in education marketing

Interesting Fact
Know the average user base of popular social media platforms:

Facebook: 2.934 billion Youtube: 225 million

Instagram: 1.440 billion Linkedin: 85 million
Twitter: 396.5 million
• Invest in offline lead
generation, as we are in this era of digital marketing and online means of
promotions we have unconsciously stopped considering traditional and offline
methods of lead generation which in turn stunts the promotional rates and
communal visibility.

Interesting Fact-
Some best offline lead generation practices exclusively for
higher education:

Newspaper advertisement: Go for eye-catching taglines such as scholar-

ship offers or about your new programs and events.

Pamphlets: Well-designed pamphlets with targeted distribution can defi-

nitely turn heads.

Tie-up with schools: The opinions of school teachers and principals matter
the most to any high school student when it comes to university admis-
sions so tying up with them will definitely help in generating qualified leads.

Connecting to education
consultants: Consultants know when and where to approach the students
and convince them to enroll. Also hiring a consultant within the same geo-
graphic area will be more fruitful as they know the touch points to ap-
proach.
 SEO
• Invest in improving your visibility rate
through SEO. When your
prospective students search for the best
institution, your university website should
definitely be the first to seek the student’s
attention. This can only be achieved with a
strong SEO presence. Briefly, SEO helps to
attract the right audience to your website
which means more opportunities to
increase
admissions.

Also just bringing the audiences is not

enough. You need to generate the leads via
the same, and for that, you need a chatbot
that will act as an asset in your lead
generation.

Interesting Fact-
• Google currently has over 85% of the search engine market (Statista)
• SEO can reduce the cost of customer
acquisition by 87.41% on average
compared to digital advertising (Terakeet)
• 70% of marketers see SEO as more
effective than PPC (Source: Databox)
• 75% of marketers feel their SEO tactics are ‘extremely effective’ or ‘very
effective’ at helping them achieve their marketing goals (Source: HubSpot
State of Inbound)
• Google has already received 943 billion searches this year (and counting)
(Source: Internet Live Stats)
• 49% of marketers report that organic search has the best ROI of any
marketing channel (Source: Search Engine Journal)
• Invest in setting up regular training
sessions for your counselors to keep them
updated with the new market trends and
approaches to be implemented.

This practice will upskill your

counselors which escalates their
confidence and
credibility when guiding students.
Also every parent and student
expects the counselors to be
answerable of their each and
every question, which is valid too.
The regular training session will
help your counselors
provide insightful information to prospects thereby increasing lead
generation rate.

Interesting Fact-
Some online training platforms:

Trainual Creatix Campus Mindtickle

SAP Litmos eFront BizL ibrary

Invest in a good CRM to digitise your admission process and eliminate
manual work through automation. Your institution needs an automated
workflow straight from lead integration to allocation, integrated communica-
tion channels and at the end provides you insightful analytics with
customisable reports.

This automation will certainly improve your admissions team efficiency and
accelerate timely follow ups thereby increasing your conversion rate.

To dive deeper into the topic, Read an insightful article on How an education
CRM is the secret to next generation education
marketing?

Interesting Fact-
Impacts of CRM on the admissions process:

33% decrease in marketing cost

10% decrease in lead leakage
30% increase in follow-ups
52% increase in counselor efficiency
Enhance your Student
Experience
You cannot attract your target audience without leveraging your present ones.
Now the fact is, your prospective students don’t prefer hearing about your
institutions from your mouth! They will rather trust other sources such as
student case studies, testimonials, events, recognitions, or awards, as all these
add to the credibility of your institute.

You can publish the testimonials of your alumni on your university website, and
various social media platforms to reach out to the maximum number of
students. Also organizing informative webinars by your current student around
trending courses can be an exclusive way of lead generation as well upskilling
your existing students.

All these parameters of attaining credibility can be fulfilled by enhancing your

current student experience.
Some major ways that can help you achieve this are:

Ask for students' feedback through various surveys and polls. See, nobody
knows your institute better than your own student tribe

*Free Feedback Google Form Sample

Show the students they are important by applying their suggestions wherever
possible and acknowledging their efforts.

Cultivate stronger connections between students and faculty by arranging

one on one sessions, building team activities, and increasing
collaboration across departments.

Provide online forums to students where they can ask questions, learn at their
own pace, create stronger ties with peers and also share knowledge.

Help students create clear educational and career plans by guiding them
wholeheartedly through their student journey.

The student should have a go-to person. They should have someone they can
turn up to whenever something goes wrong.

Embrace the Diversity that your students offer by creating a dedicated

department to support multicultural backgrounds and ensuring every student
is on the same page.
Digitise your Admission Process
through CRM and AMS
The students from this millennial generation are most comfortable applying
online instead of standing in queues and filling out paper-based forms and
attaching multiple xerox copies of required documents! This fact definitely
creates an urgency for you to adopt a paperless and entirely digitized
application system. Application Management System is the thing for you,
which automates your application process end to end.

Now, when we look into it deeply the Application Management System

digistises and tracks the application form status and also integrates payment
gateways to make the process extra smooth. But don’t you think something
which digitises the whole student journey will be a boon to your admissions
team?

This digitisation of a complete student journey can be attained by a CRM that

is completely dedicated to the education industry. The key benefit of acquiring
an education-focused CRM is that it will completely serve your use case!
Key areas where a CRM can help in simplifying and making the admission
process efficient:

• Integrating different lead channels such as Facebook, Instagram,

Just dial, Sulekha, your website, publisher panels such as collegedunia,
collegedekho, Shiksha etc, and preventing lead leakage.

• Reduce response time by automating responses via WhatsApp, emails, bulk

SMS etc.

• Timely follow-ups through rule engines as it can automate your whole com-
munication across the admission cycle by creating workflows using email,
SMS, video, chat, and bots, that get triggered by events such as opens, clicks,
or no response.

• Increase counselor's efficiency by 10X as now they can connect to prospects

from anywhere and everywhere through mobile CRM. It not only makes out-
bound calls easier, but it also allows instant access to lead data, recordings,
chats, and reports.

• Manages lead/student data at a single platform as the CRM eliminates the

system of filling multiple excel sheets. Every single detail of your lead/student
will be provided within a single screen.

• Tracks the application process very smoothly. You can track your prospect
journey end-to-end and follow up accordingly.

• Integrated payment gateway through clickable links, and integrated various

payment channels to ease out the fee payment process.

• Customised reports help in making data-driven decisions as you can have

a tab on your ROI and plan your marketing campaigns accordingly. Also these
reports will help you assess your counselors performance.
Check your Counselors
Competency
Your counselors are the first point of human interaction in the entire
admissions process. They significantly influence the students decision of going
ahead with your institution or not.
Not only this, the counselors are the first block of relation the student will have
with the institution for the rest of their journey.

Interesting Fact-
Study shows that 68% of college-bound students agreed that their college
admission counselor influenced their decision about which college and
course they should opt for!

After reading the fact you must be wondering what are the parameters of
competency you need to keep in mind while hiring your admission coun-
selors and also, are the existing counselors competent enough?

For this we have an activity for you!

Here are 7 parameters you need to look for in your admission counselors!
Do put a tick mark or a cross and know your counselors competency
percentage:

Communicate with conviction: Your admission counselors know how to

talk, but do they talk with conviction? Talking with conviction makes a last-
ing, and positive impact on the prospects thereby increasing your overall
conversion rates.

Have a clear intent: All counselors will have different communication styles,
different methods of persuasion, and different ways of dealing with their
prospects but one thing that should be common is their ‘intent’.

Should counsel not sell: Okay so when you try too hard to sell, you will defi-
nitely fail. The student should feel a sense of empathy with the counselors,
and take them as their guide, not a salesperson.

Always has an answer: Students portray a counselor like a Jin, they think
the counselors know it all. Your counselor should keep up with this image. If
not an answer then they should definitely have an active relevant response.

Supports diversity: Your counselor should understand the cultural differ-

ences and uniqueness of their prospective students so they can connect at
an intellectual level.

Disciplined and organized: Your counselors should be disciplined enough

towards their targets and organised when it comes to the methods for
achieving those targets.

Reciprocate honesty and integrity: Your prospects love to talk with some-
one who is an honest, integral, and sincere advisor.

*A poll result: Percentage

 Few Additional Points
to Remember
Set a marketing strategy that is digitally sound but does not ignore the
traditional media methodologies. People still have a place for newspapers,
pamphlets, and magazines on their tables.

Do reach digitally via marketing automation techniques but never ignore the
importance of one-on-one human interaction.

Understand the fact that about the students that they are not just looking for
the education they are looking for holistic education.

Try to learn the Gen Z style of communication; Direct and Crisp.

Dive deeper into the behavioral evolution of students, one thing that is
significantly important to note here is that Gen Z may not be mature enough to
take the right decision but they are definitely well-informed.

The last and most important point to remember, is DO NOT FORGET TO MENTION
THE ROI! Because this is the only point which can create a major deviation in
their decision-making.
Conclusion
Now you know the most impactful
strategies on how you can level
up your game of lead generation
in this tough competition.
Although for a more in depth
knowledge about each aspect of
lead generation do refer to our
blog ‘Top 5 strategies to boost
your lead generation by 10X’

We hope we have provided you

with some valuable insights
which will help you in long run but
we do have something more to
offer and
i.e. Our Education CRM which is
exclusively built to aid in the
admissions process of higher
education.

Do sign up for our 30 minute free demo and

have a look at our product.

BOOK A DEMO NOW