Rich Majerus, Vice President of Planning and Strategy at Queens University in North Carolina, was Capture’s special guest during the recent webinar, Data Insights: How to Focus Enrollment Efforts & Pinpoint Marketing Budgets. He joined Capture’s Jamie Gleason and John Foster in a discussion about the connections between marketing automation, predictive analytics and achieving enrollment goals with fewer dollars.
These days, enrollment and marketing professionals are facing budget freezes, personnel reductions, increased pressure to build their classes and pressing questions about the return on their marketing investment. Never has it been more important to create a targeted and engaged enrollment funnel that leads to stronger yield and a reduced marketing spend per student.
At Queens, Majerus leads a campus-wide strategy that focuses on using data technology and partnerships to improve revenue and efficiency across the university. With a diverse background in both admissions and university advancement, he also helped run a higher ed-focused, data science startup for five years.
During the webinar, Majerus, Gleason (Capture’s Director of Undergraduate and Secondary Ed Initiatives) and Foster (Capture Assistant Data Scientist) talked about about data and efficiency … and how to apply unique insights from more than 90 million student profiles to the upcoming recruitment cycle — even amid the uncertainty of a global pandemic event.
Key Findings
Much of the data they cover can be found in Capture’s recent report, Key Findings: How Students Engage with a University’s Website.
Over the last six years, Capture has tracked more than 200 million visits and more than 450 million page views on the websites of client universities and served more than 15 million pieces of dynamic content to those visitors using ENGAGE, marketing automation specifically designed for higher ed recruitment.
Out of those visitors, Capture tracked more than 12 million visits from identified students who have viewed more than 44 million pages. For the 2020 class, Capture tracked more than 360,000 identified visitors, or about 12,000 students per school on average. This was enough interested and engaged students for schools to fill their classes 12 times on average.
These findings offer a unique view into how students engage with a school’s website as they make their college decision. The report distills some of them.
One important takeaway: ENGAGE’s marketing interventions had an enormous overall impact on the Fall 2020 class for Capture’s clients. When considering all channels — students who opened or clicked an email, clicked through digital display advertising, who saw dynamic content or were Capture Prospects — ENGAGE had an influence on about 137,000 applicants and 35,000 deposits to partner schools, according to the report.
This works out to 807 applicants and 237 deposits for the median school. ENGAGE had an impact on 24 percent of applicants and 53 percent of deposits for the median school, giving schools irreplaceable value, the report concludes.
For more insights and key findings, listen to the webinar and download the report.
