Breaking Enrollment Records with microSEARCH®

When the enrollmentFUEL^® team partnered with a private liberal arts university located in the Southeast, the institution saw record-breaking enrollment in the subsequent year.

The bachelor's and master's degree granting university, with approximately 1,200 students, is also ranked high in 3 separate higher education media resources and is considered one of the top colleges in its state for value.

The Vice President for Enrollment Management joined this Southeastern university’s team, creating a vision for its long-term enrollment success. The Vice President’s previous experience with big Student Search budgets informed the vision: such budgets often create large pools of soft inquiries, and a significant percentage of overly soft inquiries do not translate into yield. The Vice President sought enrollmentFUEL’s expertise to enact a plan to generate inquiries and increase return on investment (ROI) by investing in a microSEARCH^® campaign.

This campaign promised the Vice President flexibility for senior and junior Search, allowing them to deploy resources where the university felt they were needed. The Vice President also wanted to test a hypothesis regarding the timing of a Senior Student Search campaign, and microSEARCH made that testing possible.

enrollmentFUEL studied the university’s value proposition and decided to highlight its small class size with a roundtable classroom where professors and students participated in a collaborative learning setting.

Additionally, the strategic team directed the creative designers’ and HTML developers’ efforts in shaping an experience that effectively integrated social media display ads, household targeting ads, emails, and drip-sequenced nurturing emails when triggered by engagement.

Lastly, high-performance direct mail ignited this campaign, which had strong digital premarketing investment. All channels pushed suspects to a personal uniform resource locator (PURL) landing page, which included a tracking pixel, capturing and measuring activity by students who later returned to the university’s website. Activity Reporting by enrollmentFUEL aided the school’s admissions team’s efforts, and the results were new levels in secured deposits.

With the help of microSEARCH, this private liberal arts university successfully met its numbers for freshmen recruitment and grew overall enrollment. The Vice President for Enrollment Management said, “enrollmentFUEL’s microSEARCH enabled us to run the type of campaign we needed at the right time. The campaign’s impactful high energy captured the university’s voice and highlighted the value proposition of the school. They produced quality leads and high yield. microSEARCH should be part of every college’s arsenal of Student Search options. Our university can always expect a significant percentage of its enrollment to originate from these microSEARCH campaigns.”