Time for the next rodeo! Welcome to 2025 recruitment. This time can be a little funky within the Capture data. Since we are tracking all visitors on your website, you may still see your Fall 2024 students on your DVR. They’re figuring out the campus, housing, athletics, while you want to focus on your incoming prospects. Advanced Search can help us more narrowly pinpoint which students you need to focus on while also highlighting the students who are most interested.
As your responsibilities may no longer be with those 2024’s, my first suggestion is to use the Advanced Search feature and filter to your 2025’s. Your “advanced filter” button is found next to your search bar.
Here’s where I plug CES and CAI again! With CES (Capture Engagement Score), focus on that “s” and think SPEED. The CES is monitoring all the places we can track your prospects; visiting your website, reading emails you or Capture send, clicking links, in essence “making moves”. The closer to 100 the more that visitor is engaged and excited to learn more about your school. We want to keep them excited! A CES of 60+ is highly engaged right now.
With CAI (Capture Affinity Index), we focus on the A. “Affinity” – a natural liking. The Affinity Index will never fluctuate down; it will only build towards 100 over time if the visitor continues to show a liking for your school. While I focus on a score of 75+ once applications start coming in, you must note that this is the beginning of the cycle and CAI scores may still be low.
At the beginning of the recruitment cycle, as CAI builds over time, I mainly watch those CES scores.
The search criteria can be used to create an entire query; however, each can also be used exclusive of the others. This is when I start to think of where our goals lie for the year and our steps to enrollment and help lead our top prospects down the right path. Additionally, don’t forget, you can create saved searches in Capture to make your daily outreach flow.
- If you are embarking on some travel, you can also use the “Location” to search the area you’re headed to. Check who has already visited the website, what they clicked on, and maybe bring a special piece of swag for your top prospects.
- Use the “Custom” criteria to input big dates: prospective student events, days you visited their high school, days you were out of the office. The Custom feature can help you stay in the know.
- I LOVE doing a saved search of “application started.” While I may not quickly reach out, I can use this list to keep my eye on anyone who stays in an “application started” status for more than a day or two. As funnel status changes, your prospects will fall off the report.
Just some ideas to get your juices flowing. You’ve done amazing work for 2024. Let’s rock on!
By Cat Hollands, Capture Client Trainer, Capture Higher Ed
