SightLine’s Top Five Tips for Mid-Funnel Conversion
In the past few months, we have seen a lot of higher ed leaders scrambling to look at new enrollment and communications solutions throughout the student funnel. Across the board, the goal is to increase enrollment without sacrificing discount rates, overall revenue over four years, or the caliber of the incoming class. At SightLine we are focusing on the best strategies to improve on mid-funnel conversion of the highest quality students who are interested in your institution. We have five strategies to focus on this year.
Set a Custom Financial Aid Strategy for Your Institution
We have a lot of enrollment and financial aid leaders that approach us because they have been working with a financial aid leveraging, or optimization, partner for years and have seen diminishing returns. In the current higher ed market, it is difficult for your institution to stand out.
Colleges and universities that are leaning into differentiation, not only with their brand, but also with their scholarship strategy and personalization are going to be the stand outs to prospective students. This requires working with a partner that is going to develop unique awarding strategies based on your individual institution’s data and the specific segments of students that are the best fit for your institution.
In our whitepaper “A Roadmap to Financial Aid Leveraging and Optimizing Net Price”, we walk through eight steps to assessing the market, identifying differentiators, analyzing student level data, testing award scenarios, and optimizing strategies to increase enrollment and overall revenue.
2. Communicate Financial Aid, Scholarships, and Pricing Early
Surprisingly we still see institutions waiting to offer merit awards well after they have admited a student. Now that many institutions are offering merit awards based on GPA only or have a test optional award matrix, students should see what they qualify for in merit at the time of their acceptance. Waiting to communicate what merit awards the student qualifies for gives them more time to consider other schools where they may have more information earlier on in the process.
Additionally, we recommend updating your net price calculators to a more modern solution that focuses on using a language that students and parents understand. We recommend Meadow with the best net price calculator for the current generation of students. We are also sharing the most recent podcast episode from our partners at MeetYouClass. A new first year college student shares her experience with net price calculators, financial aid, and award letters with us. There is a lot we can learn from her experience to inform our strategies in communicating financial aid.
3. Engage with Students in the Communities they Organically Use
We know that today’s students research just about everything through social media or Reddit style platforms where they find authentic opinions and information on just about anything. This is why platforms like MeetYourClass are so critical for meeting students where they already are, in college and university group pages on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and just about any other social media platform that students use daily.
On this platform, we are gaining valuable information on which students are actively interested in your institution, what other institutions they are considering, and what factors are driving their enrollment decisions. Institutions that aren’t investing in building or accessing these online communities and the valuable data they produce, are missing out on a significant opportunity. The good news is that we have the tools and communities built out to help!
4. Get Ahead of FAFSA Challenges this Cycle
It just so happens, that the MeetYourClass platform will also help all higher ed leaders get ahead of the FAFSA challenges of this cycle. In the last enrollment cycle, most institutions didn’t get valuable FAFSA data until very late in the cycle. Without this data, it is much more difficult to predict overall enrollment, identify the individual students who are still in your funnel and on their way to enrolling, those who have dropped off, or students that need extra guidance and support.
We can provide detailed information on each student, better understanding where they are in the funnel without requiring any data from your institution. This is because we are getting information directly from the students themselves, rather than waiting on FAFSA data this year.
5. Engage with the Highest Quality ‘On-the-Fence’ Students
Combining all these tips and strategies allows us to identify which students to prioritize for outreach. We combine MeetYourClass data with enrollment predictive models to understand which students are committed to your institution, committed to another institution, or are on the fence. We believe this holistic approach is not just a nice to have, but a must have for the current and future enrollment cycles.
