Love it or hate it, we live in a world of commercialised education. Institutions are in competition with each other to attract the best students. How can you design a world-beating recruitment and enrolment programme that meets and exceeds the expectations of the type of students you want to attract to your higher education institution?

Students as customers
Students have a choice, and they will gladly exercise that choice. Students today have more ways to find out about your university than ever before: they can search the internet for everything from official websites to chat forums. This can be a double-edged sword – but, thankfully, the internet gives you more opportunities to stay in touch with prospective students and explain why your university should be their first choice.

The question is, what do students really look for when they choose a university?

The half-a-million students that enter higher education each year in the UK look for a number of different factors when choosing which university to attend. Every student will have different personal criteria, but surveys suggest ‘employability’ (33%) and ‘teaching standards’ (23%) are the two biggest factors. These are followed by ‘student experience’ (21%).

How these three factors are linked
With the right IT systems, these three seemingly separate factors suddenly become inter-related: teaching quality can improve with the right analytical tools, while the student experience can be improved by offering personalised digital services to students. Using data throughout the student lifecycle then makes it easier for employers to find the right graduates, improving the overall employability of your university.

But for this blog post, our focus is recruitment and enrolment in higher education. From initial touch points to admissions and approval and everything in between, the ultimate goal is to do everything right so that you don’t miss a prospective student. But two obstacles stand in your way.

The two biggest challenges facing higher education recruitment today
Your higher education institution has to overcome two challenges:

• The problem of how to transform the experience of prospective students, employees, agents and influencers to increase student recruitment.
• How to maximise the use of data and insights to deliver hyper-personalised experiences that increase engagement and conversion.

To respond to these challenges, you need to maximise the use of data and insights to deliver hyper-personalised experiences that increase engagement and conversion. Higher education needs to think like an ambitious tech start-up, leveraging agile marketing techniques like never before. Are you taking advantage of the latest technology? For example, are you using digital marketing software to keep in touch with prospective students?

Do your staff, teachers, and other educational influencers have all the analytical tools they need to get the best results? Is your enrolment process identifying the best students for your institution?

Are you getting meaningful and actionable data to make smart decisions that can elevate our institution’s performance?

Avanade helps you answer all of these questions and more. We’ll help you implement and make full use of CRM and marketing technologies like Microsoft Dynamics 365 and powerful multi-channel engagement and digital marketing tools like Sitecore, Adobe Experience Cloud, Marketo and Optimizely. Universities need use data to boost decision-making – Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Power BI can help you take raw data and make sense of it. We’ll show you how.

How Avanade can help transform your student recruitment journey
How you can transform the experience of students and employees:

• Maximise the use of data and insights to deliver hyper-personalised experiences that increase engagement and promote seamless interactions across all channels (campus systems, social media, email, etc.).
• Connecting with students and academics to get a 360-degree view of the student population to understand how you can best support their needs
• Consolidate and streamline processes across faculties for consistent experiences and outcomes. Say goodbye to operational siloes.

But why Avanade? We’ve completed these kind of higher education projects for multiple institutions, such as The University of Manchester and Open Universities Australia.

Get in touch
To find out how Avanade can help you enhance your student recruitment and enrolment process, contact us today.