Two Things To Consider Before Planning Your 2023 CRM Road Map For Higher Education
CRM/Marketing Automation consultant leading the practice for EigenX, specializing in manufacturing, higher education, and financial services
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If you are a higher education CXO or in admissions and marketing, one of the primary challenges with the upcoming financial crisis is to ensure that your institution meets the enrollment goals for the next year. With most of the public and private institutions leveraging a CRM solution and having a specific solution for admissions or marketing automation, the challenge of siloed systems with multiple integrations for prospective and enrolled students makes it more complex to come up with a strategy to ensure alignment on enrollment.
So if you are preparing for the next calendar year and doing a road map, how do you ensure that your institution’s CRM, marketing automation and admission systems will help meet your institution’s goals? Before you plan to purchase the next shiny tool or revamp your current system, my article will help you start with a strategic approach.
Where is your student data and which system is the system of truth?
For most institutions, enrolled student data generally resides in the student information systems, and prospective student data lives in CRM, admissions and external lead management systems—and it’s all over the place. Even though the enrolled student data is partly managed well in SIS with student IDs, the challenge for most institutions is to identify what additional courses or programs your enrolled students are interested in. With students using multiple emails and phone numbers, the challenge of duplicates muddies the water more. So here are some concrete, tactical steps that you should budget for next year.
1. Create a prospective student data discovery project that will identify all sources of prospective students, solutions internal and external, channels and disparities in the program of interest across the solutions.
2. Have a data champion lead the initiative and have them work with your partners to come up with the following outcomes:
a. Solutions for deduplicating prospective student data with enrolled students
b. Solutions to identify the most recent program of interest, primary source channel for the prospective student and key influencers to get them enrolled in a program
c. Solutions for cross-selling and upselling programs and ways to identify prospective student interests across channel touchpoints
d. Identify one system of record for prospective students that can be your CRM
e. Invest in a cloud MDM solution that can get all your prospective student data from multiple channels, deduplicate the prospective student with robust rules and help to flag the student as a prospect or enrolled
f. Have a data quality process owned by the data team that will look for exceptions and data quality scores and help your schools keep the data clean and reward them for hygiene, completeness and innovation
Are you marketing to the right students on the right channels with the right programs and courses?
For marketing departments in higher education, the challenge is always to ensure that they get the right program of interest from the prospective student and whether they are targetting the right enrolled and prospective students for the programs or courses. The reasons for the challenge are that most of the time the CRM systems, which have bad data quality, feed the marketing automation systems with duplicate student data; there is a lack of the most recent programs of interest available in the CRM; and the channel where the student has expressed interest is not always explicitly defined in the CRM. As a result, most of the students are bombarded with duplicate messages, contacted through the wrong channels where they are not even reachable and given the wrong program of interest sent at the wrong time. So here are some key tactics that you can plan for next year to ensure your marketing teams are aligned on the enrollment goals.
1. Create a road map or strategic project for effective marketing in which marketing teams identify the top three challenges to market to prospective students, which include identifying the right channel, ensuring duplicate messages are not sent and using an effective content strategy for the student.
2. Start a data quality initiative that identifies the top three to five challenges that marketing departments face with duplicate data and identify sources of duplicates and solutions to fix the problem.
3. If there is a gap in one centralized system for prospective student data that does not get all the feeds from prospective students in your other lead-generating systems, plan to have a strategic discussion with your CRM vendors on a prospective student data warehouse or CDP.
So before you start identifying budgets and priorities for next year, it is very important to ensure your current investments in CRM and marketing automation work for your enrollment goals. Instead of just planning for features or buying products, your budget should address the following questions.
1. Does my budget address the challenges faced by my marketing and admissions team to meet their enrollment goals?
2. Do we have any initiatives that address data quality, harnessing data to market to and service prospective and current students?
3. What is our AI strategy that will help the admissions and marketing team identify the right student personas, channels and campaign effectiveness and help increase the capability of the institution to data lead decision-making?
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