Enrollment marketing is a crowded space.
Prospective students embarking on their college search are inundated with ads, brochures, social media, college fairs, direct mail, and many other marketing channels from schools that are trying to hit their enrollment numbers.
In fact, each year, colleges spend billions of dollars on advertising and other channels in order to attract their prospects.
With all of this focus on attracting incoming students and top-line growth, there is one critical area that many Higher Education institutions are overlooking: retaining current students.
As we mention in our blog post, What the Research Tells Us About College Student Retention, schools are not investing nearly enough time or resources on student retention.
Why Student Retention is Important
There are many reasons that Higher Ed institutions should be focusing on student retention, including:
- Improving profitability
- Depending less on high advertising budgets
- Easier class scheduling
- More accurate revenue forecasting
- Improving institutional reputation
And many more!
To accurately track and improve your student retention, you first need to have the right software in place. Keep reading to learn about the importance of student retention software.
The Role of Proactive Communication in Student Retention
Being proactive is one of the most essential ingredients for building effective student retention strategies. This is true not only from a software systems perspective but also from the human perspective.
If you wait until students start showing signs of burnout (or even start transferring/dropping out!) to do something about it, you may have waited too long. The key is to recognize these signs early and have an intervention management strategy in place so that you can make sure they don’t cross “the point of no return.” You can find more tips on that here.
So, what exactly is proactive communication when it comes to student retention?
Proactive multichannel communication with your students is about more than just reaching out and letting them know you’re there when they are in need (though this is important).
Most of all, however, being proactive is about creating a culture of engagement at your institution so that students feel welcomed, heard, understood, and excited to be part of your community.
4 College Student Retention Strategies
You Can Implement Today
Unified Data and a Single Source of Truth
At your school, who’s responsible for student retention?
Does that responsibility fall on Enrollment? Student Life? The faculty? The Career Center?
How about everyone?
Improving student retention is the collective responsibility of every department at your institution. These different teams need to work together to create a positive, memorable, and personalized experience for their students every single day.
Having the right student retention software in place allows each of these different teams to work cohesively together and make data-driven decisions.
Student retention software creates a single source of truth so that all of the data for attendance rates, student communication, grades, and pre-built solutions (workflows, reminders, internal alerts) all live in the same place. There’s no more guesswork or being in the dark when it comes to recognizing early signs of student burnout.
Creating Better Student Experiences
The two points we’ve covered so far (proactive communication and accurate data) work closely together toward a unified goal: creating the best possible student experiences.
To improve retention rates, colleges and universities need to do a better job of understanding what their students like, what they don’t like, what drives them to action, and most importantly—why they leave.
Every student body is different. Creating positive student experiences for a small trade school won’t always look the same as at a large university.
However, there are some universalities regardless of how many students you have, where you’re located, or what programs you offer. Every college student wants the same things from their schools:
- To be part of an engaging community
- To feel welcomed and accepted
- To meet people and form meaningful relationships
- To know that what they’ll learn will help them in their careers
- To feel that their investment is worth it
And, most importantly, having the right software in place will help you identify the initiatives and tools that have the highest impact on student retention. We’ve built these solutions right into our CRM and SIS. Let us show you how we help schools like yours improve retention, efficiency, and profitability!
Catch the Signs of Student Burnout Early
We’ve talked about the importance of being proactive with student communication. However, in order to be proactive, you first need to be able to recognize the signs of burnout.
College student burnout is one of the top reasons why retention is becoming an increasingly important priority for Higher Education institutions. When students burn out, they tend to disengage.
We cover exactly how to identify these signs and what you can do about them in our guide. Download it to start building your student retention strategy today!
