Using data and personalised marketing to maximise admissions

“Schools can have many overlapping selling points so it’s quite often the experience that the family has talking with the admissions team that sets the school as the top choice.”

Sophie Clark, school partnerships manager, Virtual School Experience, shared her insights on data and personalisation to improve the admissions process for prospective families in the recent webinar on ‘Using data and personalised marketing to maximise admissions’ hosted by Virtual School Experience and WCBS. 

Joined by Andrew Elias, global partnerships manager, Virtual School Experience, and Stephen Bilboe, CEO, and Ian Adams, academic product manager at WCBS, the session discussed current trends in school marketing and admissions, the digital admissions landscape, and how personalisation can create the best in class customer experience. 

The digital admissions landscape

Taking a commercialised approach

Many schools are now taking a far more commercialised view of their admissions process than ever before and are more focused on delivering an excellent customer experience. Stephen Bilboe, CEO, WCBS says: “Schools are viewing admissions as the key revenue generator for the school, so rather than relying on an excellent open day or telephone conversation, they’re looking at every single touch point across the customer journey to see where they can drive excellence.”

Schools have had to look at how they can be more competitive and differentiate their offer due to a number of factors, one example being the Covid-19 pandemic. Stephen says: “Whilst it was a challenging time during lockdown, on a positive note, schools were forced to reflect on their offer and make it more competitive.” Some schools, for example, started to offer discounts because some demographics of their parent community had been hit harder by Covid-19. 

Another factor is that there is now a stronger realisation that parents are time poor. While admission teams tend to work 9-5, parents are looking to submit an enquiry or communicate at a time that suits their schedule, which could be late at night. Stephen says “being able to service enquiries outside of typical office hours is really important to turn initial enquiries into applications faster.” 

Through using digital tools to personalise and automate their approach, schools are offering a ‘best in class’ customer service and building connections in a digital-first world. 

Cloud native business

In our personal lives, we use technology that has excellent user experience and is so intuitive it requires little to no training at all. Yet, schools are still using the same clunky systems built decades ago that aren't suited to today’s day and age and are expensive to rebuild. 

Stephen says this “technical debt” leaves school underserved by the technology available to them and meaning they can be left behind. In the Finance world, banking apps like Monzo, Revolute, Free Trade are transforming the sector offering a differentiated experience and generating genuine advocacy through a personalised and helpful customer service experience. And most importantly, they’ve been able to avoid the technical issues more traditional banks have had by building their systems using the very latest cloud-native technology. 

So what is cloud native? You often see businesses using the cloud, but what they’re doing is simply shifting their technology from a server-based platform to the cloud. This solves an access problem and reduces the infrastructure costs of service, but that doesn’t deliver a differentiated customer experience.

WCBS have invested £5 million over the last couple of years to deliver their next generation cloud native solutions, HUBadmissions. Built for the cloud providing a guaranteed 99.5% uptime and rolling out updates twice a week so they can iterate quickly, the platform offers the best in customer service. Stephen says: “Customers expect things to be fixed quickly so we are delivering that. Be it a bug fix or a new update, we are able to iterate much faster and ensure a fantastic user experience.”

Why is that important to admissions? Well, looking at the admissions process, the initial experience before a family joins your school can be viewed as your ‘shop window’. That experience is key, so making sure it’s intuitive for parents to use so they can submit their application, pay their application fees, and submit visas in a secure portal is delivering the best possible experience to your customers by making it as frictionless as possible. Stephen comments: “A streamlined, easy admissions process should come as standard - it’s what all consumers expect in their daily lives. But parents don’t see it from most other schools, so it’s a great opportunity to deliver a differentiated experience and at the same time, help to save your admissions team time.” 

Striking the balance between human and digital

Schools are placing more emphasis on the front end of their admissions process and data management products and services going forward, but are we losing the human element? Not at all says Stephen; “Data is integral for any school, but we mustn’t be completely data driven so that we forget the personalised touch. It’s very important we keep a human element that can provide a personalised experience to potential parents.”

This view was echoed by Sophie Clark: “Virtual School Experience is all about making it as personal as possible, not replacing that human-first approach with a tool, but creating the digital tools that help and enhance the customer experience, making it as easy as possible for prospective parents to choose a school.”

So while digital technologies are being implemented across the admissions journey, they should only be used as a tool to aid and strengthen the process. Platforms like HUBadmissions and Virtual School Experience can reduce the administrative burden school marketing and admission professionals face and add personalisation to every customer touch point. At the same time, the data used can lead to a better understanding of the current families who attend your school, which can be used to inform your school marketing and admission tactics for prospective families. 

HUBadmissions: Collecting and managing data

How do you currently collect admissions data? Is it via a form on google or embedded into your website? Perhaps you use a printed form? And how many forms are parents expected to complete across the course of the admissions journey?

If schools want to use data to help inform their marketing and admissions strategies, they need to start by considering how they collect data from parents already. Having all school admissions data in one place allows you to better monitor your admissions process as well as analyse and track trends for the future. The beauty of HUBadmissions is that it gives you one central point to hold those forms from enquiry through to application through to enrolment. 

How are you using your admissions data to inform your marketing activity? The data collected by HUBadmissions can be used to form a snapshot of the health of your admissions funnel thanks to the dashboard and projection tools. That way you can look to the future to see where you’re likely to need to fill places and budget for marketing spend accordingly. 

Ian Adams, academic product manager, WCBS says: “Schools should understand the value of their data. If you were to go out into the open market and purchase data like that it would cost a lot of money so understanding the value of what you already have access to and making the most of it is key.”

Virtual School Experience: Personalise to differentiate

“It’s very often the personal touch that acts as the added value,” comments Ian Adams. That couldn’t be more true, so how do you currently personalise your communications with prospective parents?

The one way to get ahead is to offer a truly personalised customer experience tailored to the prospective family from the very start of their admissions journey. By showing the customer that you understand their needs and interests and are prepared to go the extra mile, will undoubtedly make you stand out from the schools on their list. 

Virtual School Experience is a marketing and admissions tool that allows schools to create tailored communications that meet individual family’s needs, helping to tap into the emotional aspect of this investment, and differentiating the school from the rest. 

Key takeaways

1. Your school data can help to inform future marketing and admissions activities to drive more enquiries to conversion.
2. Only through personalising the admissions funnel can a school truly differentiate their school from the competitors.

FAQs

Does each personalised experience need to be created by a member of the admissions team?

Sophie Clark: “Certainly not from scratch - there is a drag and drop functionality. One thing Virtual School Experience does as part of the onboarding process with the school is get those templates created and set up, so all the school is doing is personalising it to the enquiry, which can take 2-3 minutes.”

How can an admissions system like HUBadmissions generate ROI?

Stephen Bilboe: “The ROI is very obvious with admissions. With school fees being cerca £18-25k per student, if the school receives just one extra application which converts to a new student, then you’re probably looking at a return on investment where the system will pay for itself for at least four years from just one enquiry.”

How quickly is it for schools to get set up on HUBadmissions?

Stephen Bilboe: “It’s very quick to set up but it would take about 4-6 weeks of training and implementation time to create personalised workflows that work for your school.”

Does HUBadmissions integrate with MIS suppliers?

Ian Adams: “While HUBadmissions has been built to work alongside other WCBS solutions, it’s possible to extract that data to upload into other MIS systems.”

Do I have enough content to use Virtual School Experience?

Sophie Clark: “A lot of schools ask this - they worry about not having enough professional-looking content to create a personalised communication in Virtual School Experience. However, where our customers have had a lot of success is using what some might call ‘scrappy’ content. The type of content you might shoot on a smartphone or use on social, for example, videos from a recent sports day or an orchestra practice. This content is really authentic and gives a real insight into day to day life at the school. That’s the kind of content that engages prospective families and works really well.”

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Interested in hearing more about Virtual School Experience or HUBadmissions? Please book a demo at the links below. 

Virtual School Experience: Book a demo  

HUBadmissions by WCBS: Book a demo