How to Use Salesforce to Overcome Common Enrollment Obstacles

Salesforce has an incredible array of abilities. And with the right partner to bring them together,  you can achieve a more seamless, effective and cost-saving operation. At AArete, we can customize the Salesforce platform to help you:

1. Access a 360-Degree View of Each Student’s Life Cycle in One Place

Historically, admissions officers and enrollment managers have focused on the initial stages of student enrollment, primarily during recruitment and admissions. However, with low retention rates, universities can experience financial and reputational consequences by neglecting students’ overall experience and continued enrollment.

Proper management of the student lifecycle can have a number of benefits, particularly when it comes to retention improvements and student success. It essentially comes down to keeping the promises you made during your marketing and recruitment efforts so students have an enjoyable, successful experience getting the education they need.

With Education Cloud on Salesforce, we can create a 360-degree view of each of your students, tracking their academic progress, engagement with campus resources and extracurricular activities. Utilizing this data, you can make decisions early on, identifying at-risk students when there’s still time to intervene, growing your retention rates in the process.

This engagement doesn’t stop when students graduate. Our tool continues to provide your team with data so you can engage alumni in a meaningful way, encouraging ongoing donations once they’ve started their careers. This tool can help you easily manage these relationships, track and coordinate fundraising events and create targeted campaigns and personalized communication to continue building relationships with alumni long after graduation.

2. Discover Valuable Data on Your Current and Prospective Student Market to Identify Trends and Improve Recruitment

With every generation, there are new obstacles and challenges in how you market to them, increase student enrollment and propel them forward. Today, universities and colleges are more ethnically diverse and discovering more first-generation college attendees and graduates than ever before. There are also more financial needs as the cost of tuition continues to climb and state and federal aid dwindle. The problem becomes: how do you continue to attract new generations when costs are so high?

As you manage student enrollment, you must advocate for this new market to leadership at your institution, request more aid on their behalf, ensure that financial aid is utilized more effectively by investing in students that align to your institution and will have higher retention rates, and offer additional student support for academic progress and culturally inclusive campus life, focusing on admissions and the full student journey.

Using Salesforce, we can provide that 360-degree view of current and prospective students, as well as prospect tracking and application management needed for recruitment.

3. Use Competitive Data and Monetary Requirements to Determine Financial Aid Distributions for Sustainable Growth

While students may need more financial aid due to the rising costs of higher education, your institution also needs solutions that are sustainable, ensuring long-term growth in a competitive market.

Salesforce allows us to study the competition, as well as utilize tools like financial aid distribution, to manage how much financial aid is offered and distributed to be attractive while also making sense for your institutional success. 

4. Personalize Student Experiences to Improve Performance Reports for Ongoing Enrollment

Today, students want to connect. They want marketing to be personalized and tailored specifically to them. Even more so when it comes to their own education. Personalized communication, marketing and overall student journeys should be customized for each individual. But how do you personalize a student’s educational experience when you’re managing thousands at a time? The answer is data collection, analysis and automation.

Our experts use data collection through Salesforce to help inform decision-making for your organization. It can be difficult to collect, analyze and report on that much data generated by your student body, faculty and staff. The Salesforce platform can be customized to streamline your reporting analytics capabilities so you can gather insights into student performance, resource allocation and the overall impact on your institution, creating more personalized student experiences and more impactful performance reports for leadership, showing the value of your enrollment management strategies on an ongoing basis.
Not only that, but our automation capabilities streamline administrative tasks, allowing you and your staff to focus on more personalized interactions with current and prospective students.

5. Create Wider Portfolio Targeting to Appeal to Traditional & Non-Traditional Enrollments

It’s not just high school graduates enrolling for college anymore. Enrollment managers need to reconcile their marketing efforts to include other demographics likely to enroll in school. Not only that, but students who have bachelor’s degrees may return some time later to attend Master’s or doctoral programs, opting into non-traditional enrollments. 

The right Salesforce setup can help you create a wider portfolio for your enrollment market while Marketing Cloud allows for smarter target outreach based on your institution’s offerings. This helps reduce the chance of missing key prospective students who could add to your new enrollment numbers.

6. Connect Cross-Departmental Operations

Managing enrollment is no longer only helping students enroll at your university or for each semester’s classes. In such a competitive landscape, enrollment managers have to manage day-to-day operations, collect and analyze key data of current and prospective students, collaborate with leadership on institutional goals, guide recruitment strategies, market to prospective students, manage the student lifecycle, offer financial aid and improve student retention for continued institutional reputation and financial success.

With everything mentioned above, it’s no wonder your teams are being solicited multiple times a week with new tools to make their lives easier. The only way to effectively manage it all is through new technology.

Collaborating between that many departments and initiatives is daunting. But imagine if you could connect all of your data systems; streamline tedious, manual tasks; and address inconsistencies to reduce operational costs and deliver more positive outcomes. With a CRM system like Salesforce, you can. We can help transition you to Salesforce, which can bridge departmental divides and offer streamlined operations, clear communication, error reduction and lowered operational costs.

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