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hello and welcome to today's webinar regain control of your enrollment funnel my name is emma o'grady and i am actually a marketing manager here at capture higher ed and i will be today's moderator for this presentation as well so i am going to go ahead and pass on the baton to max max it's all you now thank you emma and good afternoon everyone thank you all for joining today's webinar regaining control of your grad enrollment funnel my name is max costrack and i am a graduate and post-traditional solutions specialist here at capture higher ed i'm an alumni of wku's amazing education program i've been working in the realm of education all over for about a decade now but i've found focus the past several years in graduate enrollment management gem and i've worked at the opm level recruiting and retaining students for graduate business programs in philadelphia and over the past year i've been working alongside captures deep well of experts prescribing recruitment solutions for captures graduate partners and to be clear you're not reading that wrong i am a semi-professional balloon artist as well now with me here today is ann freihofer a long-standing capture and behavioral intelligence expert and would you please take a moment to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background here at capture absolutely hey max hey everybody happy tuesday again anne freyhofer fancy title courtesy of marketing a senior enrollment solutions consultant which essentially means i've had the opportunity to work in an outbound sales environment connecting prospective institutions all over the country uh with capture solutions i've been with capture for it'll be nine years this year and that entire focus has been in the space of higher education technology uh everything from helping institutions figure out how to find the retrospective student to how to connect with their parents i am also a bravo and food network enthusiast which has gotten to an entirely different level as a function of the pandemic and i'm very blessed to have a husband who does not have a sensitive palette um as i am not qualified to consider myself a cook but i certainly pretend to play one so i'm really excited to join you max i'm looking forward to sharing all things graduate uh with our audience today absolutely let's start with that quick timeline ann if you wouldn't mind covering a little bit of our background here sure uh so as many of you know we've been in this space since about 2011 that's when capture was formed and it was very much based on the notion that the ability to put in the hands of admission counselors the information that they need to be able to say yes to a student should be streamlined how can we help our admission counselors do what they do best which is forge those relationships so we entered the space with the goal of not only generating decision-ready applications but doing that through the recruitment of mission fit students a lot of buzzwords in there essentially what capture still does to this day is try to make that perfect fit between the prospective student and their institution and at the same time recognizing that institutions need to be looking for the right fit for their group as well so that is our core at capture over the years we've infused the enrollment process with things like marketing automation machine learning artificial intelligence these primary technology tools that we interact with as consumers on a daily basis our overwhelming goal through all of this technology in pair with our solutions and our management teams is to truly help enrollment managers meet their goals admission counselors forge those relationships and for institutions to stay healthy in a world in which roi and resources are becoming slim so in our 11 years we've grown a lot from representing a handful of institutions to about 100 or so today small private large state institutions and then all types of enrollment uh prospective students in between uh today really excited to talk about how we've been pairing with our graduate partners excellent thank you anne and so let's shift our focus over towards uh that topic and the first question i always address we do a presentation like this one of course is why why are we talking about controlling the grand funnel well i've spent the past year here at capture talking with graduate enrollment leaders across the country in the middle of this transformative period and one unspoken message has rung out loudly the graduate enrollment cycle is worryingly unpredictable right now i mean really just about everything still feels a bit unpredictable but especially any of those high-level metrics surrounding prospective students so even those schools i talked to with strong 2020 numbers and confident fall 2021 trends still have concerns that these numbers are ephemeral and are you seeing similar concerns in your conversations absolutely um i feel like people are cautiously optimistic if i had a dollar for every time i had heard those words in combat income excuse me uh folks are feeling really positive about the way that students are returning in a sense of being able to be on campus and interact but there's this notion of uncertainty mainly because so many of the factors that we use for forecasting and predictability uh were taken away from us in 2020 so in true enrollment management fashion everybody is optimistic but also in true enrollment management fashion everybody seems a little cautious absolutely that's that's exactly what i've been hearing and i think that leads us to our question today how can we secure steady growth in this unsteady environment and so the answer that question is going to require us to address our level of control over the graduate enrollment funnel at our institutions so our focus today is control but i'm certain that this topic is going to resonate very differently for most people on the other side of the screen today because our concept our visualization of the graduate funnel varies wildly between different institutions and titles i know there are probably a few people out there with stem heavy programs like engineering that are facing a greater focus on growth than before and you know maybe in the position of needing to establish a stronger funnel but whether your funnel needs to be controlled optimized or even established the concepts we cover today are going to be relevant and let's take a quick look at those topics on the agenda we're going to start with the discussion of the funnel itself and the specific challenges that come with wrangling students at the graduate level then we'll introduce behavioral intelligence as a central piece of strategy that can help you gain and maintain control we're going to cover how this strategy works to maximize the resources you have at your disposal so your team can gain proactive control and then we'll have time at the end set aside for audience questions and preview a few more exciting capture events on the horizon so let's start with that quick look at the funnel itself and here's a big problem that i i hear a lot you know there are a lot of solutions out there that try to force undergraduate strategies under graduate frameworks so we end up seeing a lot of graphics like this one does this look familiar to you at all ann yes uh i would say it's probably the symbol of my career at this point yeah that's right the uh the you know the framework here the funnel of higher ed recruitment and you know to be fair at the at the graduate level we can still rely on this framework as sort of the platonic ideal of higher ed recruitment you know the perfect funnel transforming a big list of leads at the top into a tailored mission fit collection of future alumni at the bottom um but you know and in our graduate conversations that we've shared i i think you'd have to agree with me we're not seeing this kind of uniformity are we no absolutely not in fact uh you know quite a few years ago i remember when we introduced the notion that the the funnel had been shattered uh and that the mentality or just the thought of only building the top and hoping gravity did its job was the way that students behaved or the way that they were influenced needed to be re-engineered and reimagined so really thankful to capture that we've had the tools to be able to visualize that but uh yes i would agree uh the funnel has never looked different than it does before absolutely yeah and it's you know we look at the graduate level and the process i think top to bottom is just more likely to become fractured or delayed i think um all of us aspire in some sense toward a unified gem model but decentralized requirements and outreach can split this funnel between multiple departments staff and strategies and so what that leaves us with are plenty of spots where unseen or unmeasured leaks can occur where things don't quite align and students fall out and we enter into scary territory when those leaks are the result of predictable and therefore preventable issues so our funnel is fractured it's imperfect how do we establish control well we need to focus on a human element we need to follow our graduate prospects from the top of the funnel all the way to enrollment not as a metric but as a unique human being we have to understand where our prospective students are falling off the track and how they are making these decisions without that level of understanding this funnel is going to remain outside of our influence so before we reach possible solutions to this big funnel problem let's outline some of these individual challenges a little more clearly so there are a ton of possible obstacles between us and a level of perfect predictable control obviously we aren't going to hit that perfect one-to-one level of control because there are forces we can't impact no matter how hard we institute our gem strategies we can't remove coronavirus or the economy from the equation so our focus today is on the challenges we have the capacity to address and the first obstacle i want to highlight there visibility as graduate enrollment professionals it's our job to present ourselves as a guiding hand to our prospective students making sure we're leading them in the right direction and clearing potential obstacles out of the way but when that guiding hand reaches out in a dark room we can end up 10 feet ahead of our student or in some cases poking them right in the eye so in order to meet the student where they are we have to know where they are that's going to bring up our first stat here 75 of potential graduate students bypass traditional marketing attempts and go directly online so if we're talking about where the student is it's online so when i say visibility i'm i don't just mean these high-level metrics i don't mean lists of student names in the lead inquiry and app pools just because we assign a status to these records on our end in our crms does not mean that the prospect considers themselves at that stage and the most obvious example of this inconsistency is the stealth inquiry or stealth applicant and these are students who you've never heard of before intentionally raising their hand at that last possible minute i want you to think for a moment of the ratio of stealth applicants to identified applicants as a temperature check for the level of control you have in the top half of your funnel without having an eye on these students we have no way to tell how many are dropping off and heading to a competing program before they even have that first conversation with a counselor the second challenge standing between us and control is a question of prediction and forecasting so visibility is where a student is now forecasting is telling us where a student is going to be and anne i know you work with our undergraduate partners frequently on captures predictive modeling could you speak a little bit on you know why undergrad predictive modeling is so successful compared to what we're seeing in grad world sure i've been bothering our data science team about some prediction tools in the graduate space for years and although we're so eager to provide that same level of accuracy in the prediction of apply and enroll in aid the way we are in the undergrad space we just cannot argue with the fact that sample sizes in our graduate partners and in graduate programs in general are typically significantly smaller in order to be able to build accurate and repeatable models you need sample sizes that give you the ability to rely on those predictions so from a primary standpoint what i hear our data scientists say is that until we're in a place in which we have larger sample sizes and we feel confident about our ability to repeat that same sort of prediction over and over again we're going to be in a place in which we have to get creative in the way that we do forecasting so um i won't spoil all the surprises for the rest of the webinar today but the good news is um that although we do not have the same prediction tools available for our graduate partners we have some great indicators um that we help them use to better understand likelihood absolutely and and you highlighted a really you know the big point i really want to highlight there is that sample size because undergrad world we have a large sample size we have a modicum of uniformity but grad world is kind of this jungle of all these different beasts you know a student looking for an mba is going to have a wildly different experience than one looking for a coveted research position or a specialized degree like jd or md and all of these disparate populations can exist under the same roof leading to split samples but even when an institution has the benefit of uniform focus we still have some of these massive divides between circumstances pace and expectations of individual graduate students and you know this means the predictive efforts that are centered around an average graduate student aren't going to be accurate either it's certainly difficult to hold on to any semblance of control with such a high level of data variance and this is where that fear i discussed at the start comes into play it's really difficult to trust some of our positive graduate trends when we don't have established predictive frameworks and that's going to lead me into my my third and most obvious obstacle here of course resources you know unlimited time and money you can solve most problems but the graduate enrollment pros i'm talking to are constantly being asked to do more with less or in some cases do more with nothing and this is where we end up with a balancing issue when counselors or leaders get bogged down in this day-to-day reactive outreach there's simply no time left over for strategic growth we enter into a state of inertia where our goals shift from growth to stability and things begin to fall apart so whether you have a fleet of counselors or three overworked administrators in a cramped corner office making effective use of time and budgets has to take priority so in order to solve some of these disparate challenges what we need is a powerful and more importantly an adaptive framework and we've found that the best way to gain control is by reckoning some of this high level impersonal funnel data with individual human prospective students basically we're looking for a strategy that meets the student where they are and not where we assume them to be to follow them through the funnel and keep them on track the answer to that metric human divide is a concept that captures spent the last decade perfecting behavioral intelligence now unless you're already familiar with capture or keeping up with the cutting edge of marketing this term may be unfamiliar to you luckily the meaning is right there in the name behavioral intelligence revolves around taking the hard behavioral data what we know for a fact prospective students are doing on your institutions website and combining that behavioral data with effective intelligence marketing automation and data analysis best practices so capture took this concept of behavioral intelligence and brought it to the reality of enrollment management with our behavioral intelligence platform and and this is part of the reason why i invited you to join us today because and i know you've been working with this platform and our partners through its evolution um for about nine years and and i was hoping you could speak a little to that experience to the history and evolution of this platform sure uh when capture started in 2011 uh we obviously didn't have a lot of the very commonplace tools that we do today one of the things that really i think moved capture forward and the way that we help institutions solve uh this impossible problem of being able to get into the minds of prospective students and families is to use tools that are common day for us as consumers uh so if you imagine all of the other major purchasing decisions that you make in your life whether it's a vehicle or a home you're typically doing your due diligence likely researching online looking at options making sure that you're informed imagine a world in which zillow didn't exist or you didn't see those advertisements for the vehicle that you were shopping for out in an experience or when you landed on a website like amazon you didn't have that familiarity that the system knew you we as enrollment managers communicate now with consumers in which that is a part of their everyday life um so how can we as individuals that are trying to make this really emotional connection that can typically be very driven uh not only by finances but also fit gather as much information as possible so that we can fast forward the relationship building time because that's really why we all got into this business was to be able to build relationships and find that right match so i'm just pleased as pi to this day uh that engage exists so that we can send better electronic messages and that our account executives can be empowered to share this incredible rich behavioral data and make sense of it make it actionable for our enrollment management partners again across the spectrum you all are the experts in your institution you know these programs you understand the fit of students with academics and if we can arm you with that behavior in real time so that you can just focus um on getting students to the finish line what we found is that we're building stronger relationships that are a little bit more seamless and get really exciting for both parties because they feel good so i could go on and on for days about engage i'm sure many of you who are joining us today have likely heard it so max i will let you take back over uh but yes i would say engage is one of the most special things um that capture can bring to our partners today absolutely and before we move entirely away from engage i did want to highlight a couple of pieces that are going to be relevant to our funnel discussion here today um and you know where we're seeing with our partners some of the success in the structure of the funnel thanks to three of these points here the first one being you know metrics scoring engage assigns each individual student multiple scores to measure their engagement and inform our best outreach practices our partners typically use these scores to focus communication on students that are most engaged with the institution the second being dynamic content that content that is being deployed specifically to students based on their web behavior and of course analytics captures being data transparent providing those reports and dashboards to ensure that you have this visibility necessary to remain strategic at a high level so that's capture that's engage and and with an understanding of that behavioral intelligence what i want to do is shift our focus a little bit back to the funnel itself consider for a moment how individual student data might impact your strategy because personally i used to work enrollment retention at the student level for gps programs and i can tell you firsthand the importance of speaking to a student's needs and interest on a one-to-one level so when it comes to that graduate audience understanding what the average prospective student is going to do isn't much use because of that lack of uniformity we discussed earlier what you really need for a graduate population is an understanding of what the individual prospective student is thinking right now i think back to my time recruiting mba students and how amazing it would have been to be able to focus my efforts like this to know that you know john doe has been visiting the pages of two different mba concentrations this week and knowing that i can reach out and help with that decision because the goal here is to maximize the efficacy of your current outreach and marketing efforts targeting those students that are most engaged and active to keep them in the funnel and moving towards enrollment anticipating obstacles and clearing them out of the way you can gain control and security in your funnel by focusing your limited resources on those students that are most engaged with you this sort of focused outreach measured meaningful engagement is the center of what we call captures essentials we see success with our partner institutions you know focusing outreach on these outcomes identifying new prospective graduate students converting students from one stage to the next with that measured managed strategy and leading towards that stronger yield and overall enrollment and so i want to highlight a little bit of of what that looks like here with a more realistic uh example break down a little bit here with jared one of our example uh uh graduate students here um let's say um we're looking at an mba here so a pretty traditional grad enrollment path but basically to establish what these three pieces look like so take a look at this timeline here we're going to start with the identify stage where we have a lead source and that can be a lot of different places when it comes to grad world if you have the uh you know if you're lucky enough to have gre gmat names or a undergrad feeder program but you know afterwards the email comm flow starts students visit the website and they are identified after completing a behaviorally triggered identification form on the site this is that identify stage where we are learning about the student and sourcing them as an inquiry then jared we move a little bit further along he has served dynamic content on the site some of this specific outreach driving towards application we can see pushed into a web banner campaign utilizing advertising not just the top of the funnel not just at that brand overall grad school level but at this specific programmatic level and this we can see that utm tracking with that digital campaign on june 20th and that online application being submitted and being accepted so that's where we hit that convert stage and finally we wrap up with the the enroll stage where we are solidifying what we have a little bit of extra dynamic content targeted focused outreach on those students that are engaged where we know where they are in the funnel the second piece i want to hit for maximizing resources automation everybody loves automation you know it's one method that obviously here at capture we are fond of and one that we deploy through our strategies with that dynamic content but we certainly don't have a monopoly on it you know through your crm through your existing tools you can find a lot of value standardizing and automating outreach efforts but i do want to include ample warning here because controlling the grad funnel it's reliant like you know on jared's journey there it's relying on that individual interaction and simply automating com plans it can backfire if you're sending canned responses to students seeking that one-on-one connection an out-of-office message is technically automation but we should be seeking automated outreach that continues to grow more personalized and relevant to students um and to to demonstrate that a little further and if you don't mind i'd like to toss it over to you for this for this next piece to talk a little bit about what some of that content some of that automation looks like absolutely so one of the questions that i hear all the time is alrighty and this sounds great how do i do this in real life how do we do this to scale how does this apply to my institution or my unique program and how do we make sure that we're doing things right so let's talk a little bit about identify convert enroll in action today max can you go to that next slide for me and i'm going to be cognizant of time here folks because i know we have a busy day to get back to uh but i want to spend about the next five minutes talking about some of these examples so what you have here and what you'll see is an opportunity in which we're assisting a partner with the identification of prospective students we all know the phrase pid rfi whatever you call that form that you're asking students to complete this is a primary way in which we're trying to help institutions understand who's investigating them that they may not know about i think this is a great piece for two reasons number one can you see this pid form on the left which is what was visible to the prospective student we also if you notice on the bottom right hand corner had 469 organic completions or organic submissions of this form which was a staggering number to me of the 527 that were submitted so case in point there are plenty of prospective students that are out there that are exploring you that are learning about you that may just not be ready to tell you yet uh so this is a way in which we can provide a mechanism that gives them the ability to raise their hand when they're ready and you still have an enormous ability to impact their decision journey and so um identification at the top of the funnel is very critical to capture however the identification of organic leads is something that i am hearing about and max i know you are too more and more every single day as our students get a little bit more stealthy let's talk about conversion all right so here's going to be two examples of how we're helping institutions convert to folks that they already know so you'll notice here we don't have any organic completions in some ways that's a really good indicator this is designed to go to individuals to whom we already know asking about their intention a different way to kind of get a temperature check without forcing these students to make an absolute commitment but to get a better understanding as to where they are uh one of the things that i hear a lot about right now is just this notion of radio silence we saw a ton of activity about two months ago and then things kind of died off and now we're worried about whether or not students are going to resurface uh so the flexibility in automation or the flexibility with dynamic content for capture says that we can really be dynamic in how we're serving these questions and strategic into who we're serving these questions to uh max can you go on to the next example here for me fantastic uh so another partner of ours that's not necessarily utilizing a form or radio buttons to address this question but instead giving prospective students the ability to request information or simply learn more what we have found is that particularly with our graduate and our professional students they're very very interested in some ways and characteristics or in features that our traditional undergraduate or a first-time freshman may not be really focused on academic rigor or really focused on research or really focused on publication opportunities so the ability to really request information about a particular program at a unique point in the journey is where automation absolutely shines so as much as it's very important to identify the right students we spend so much time figuring out who they are my goodness it's critical to make sure that we're being timely in the way that we're converting them through uh this fractured funnel as well let's talk about enrollments all right the grand finale uh obviously graduate students are in a little bit of a different world uh we have fewer steps we have different steps but the ability to connect individuals with something that essentially feels good whether it's the ability to be a hero and join that alumni population or to start sealing the deal when we're talking about finances capture is really intentionable about recognizing the differences between status recognizing the way that messaging changes and the likely uniqueness of each of you that are joining us today and how this applies to your programs so capture utilizes identify convert and enroll as our major gates but we recognize there's a lot of micro steps in each of those different categories so being able to serve timely messaging to prospective students whom you know based on their status is where the ability to identify convert and enroll becomes very powerful from an automation perspective so uh always very happy to share with anybody who is interested in capturing more about what some folks are doing today but here was just a couple examples of campaigns where we are seeing partners experience real-time results as a function of behavioral intelligence thank you and the excellent overview of the automation piece there with the dynamic content specifically is doing now one third and final point i want to keep us cognizant of time and moving along our third and final point here though which drives a lot of these concepts home is strong communication plans so when we combine student behavioral data with a consistent solid contract we free up that time those resources necessary to stay ahead of strategy to continue to evolve and refine the processes that keep us in control and this is where you have to stop and ask yourself what happens when a student does raise their hand when a student does interact with content what happens when a new application hits our system and if we can't point to a document if the entire team isn't on the same page doesn't have this understanding what we're going to be stuck in is this reactive out of control pattern so when it comes to maximizing resources investing time now in plans and automation is going to lead us to consistent growth i want you to prioritize efforts that free up resources to ensure long-term stability and growth to summarize there were three obstacles we identified standing between us and control over the graduate enrollment funnel visibility forecasting and resources and you know these little pieces of clipart don't do much to demonstrate how daunting these three challenges can really be but there's good news here and it's that gem professionals are not alone in facing these challenges i spent the last week listening to and interacting with the pros at nag app and i'm happy to say that the industry is energized right now these problems have solutions and there's a proven track record using concepts like behavioral intelligence to address these shortcomings you can brighten that dark room with behavioral data so you can properly guide their students towards enrollment you know turn the tables on those stealthy candidates and gain insight into their decision making process you can use engagement scoring as predictive power at the individual level to inform outreach ensure that your efforts are focused on the mission fit prospects that are most likely to engage and move forward and for resources marketing automation proactive planning can maximize those so your focus remains on growth and strategy so my favorite part of working for capture is working alongside our future partners and our experts here to develop the best fit solutions for their funnel so before we wrap up today i do want to extend an invitation to all our participants to reach out and make contact you can reach me directly at that email address at the bottom of the screen m costrack capture highered.com or if my name is too hard to spell i understand simply visit capturehirered.com contact anytime i'm always looking to extend my network and i'd love to learn about your funnel and the challenges within please don't be a stranger now before i wrap up emma do we have any audience questions max i'm back and thank you so much max and ann for taking us through all your insights in today's presentation we do actually have a question as of now and just letting the audience know too at any point in the next couple of minutes please feel free to ask anything that you learned about today anything that you have questions on either that were discussed in this presentation or even a question that you may have just in general feel free to go ahead and submit those in the chat panel or as max just mentioned you can do so on higher ed.com contact okay are you all ready go for it okay so here's our first question what are the most frequent pains you are seeing in a partner schools funnel that that's always an interesting question emma because you know i think that always depends on the time when i'm talking to some of these uh some of these schools and some of these uh graduate enrollment professionals because uh you know as of right now a lot of schools are focused on that app stage right now and they're looking at those numbers under a microscope uh three months ago man was it increased increase increase that's all we were talking about the problem is that now that we're here further along and and we're seeing some gaps in the application and and and a little bit in the in the yield area as well uh we're starting to see the result of some of those uh crises we were facing earlier in the year from an increased standpoint so when it comes to what is most pressing as we as we look ahead as we consider you know where the pain is right now uh for for me on the graduate level it is this weird top of the funnel inquiry question which from a graduate standpoint can go a lot of different directions and in fact might be something we could host a another seminar on entirely uh just addressing that very top of the funnel and what some of our strategies need to look like there um and is there anything you've been hearing any patterns you've recognized in conversations recently sure um i think actually one of them that has been an interesting champagne problem is the notion that a lot of our current partners and even some of the folks that we're talking to are looking towards launching quite a few new graduate programs over the coming years uh so most of us would say wow that is fantastic news new program offerings great ways to reach out to different types of prospective students but at the same time that can be a little bit daunting uh for those of us that know how difficult it can be to get a program off the ground uh particularly when we don't get 12 to 18 months of runway so what are we going to do for content how are we going to relate to the audience how do we know who to target for these things how are we going to be ready from an email standpoint who's going to receive information so one of the questions that i've been hearing a lot is what are the tools necessary or that we should budget and plan for as we expect as a college or university to launch maybe two three new graduate programs a year um how do we do that well because we've got a board uh or other stakeholders that are really invested so in addition to those conversation maps that you're having on a daily basis about meeting goals today i'm hearing a lot about institutions that are doing a great job of thinking about what's to come but the notion of enrollment management and marketing being able to plan for it is certainly top of mind as well absolutely yeah i would say i'm hearing a lot of that as well new programs on the horizon and and developing a solid plan like you said from an enrollment management standpoint uh emma have we had any other questions come through while we discussed as of now it looks like that is the only question and just to reiterate at this point if you do have any additional questions and in the next couple minutes go ahead and submit those and if not you can do so at any point in time on capturehirered.com max i'm going to pass it back to you before it comes back to me again all right yeah back and forth like tennis one last thing then before i hit it back over the net is a reminder that captures innovate conference will soon be here i want you to save the date june 16th and 17th for our national virtual conference designed for today's enrollment and marketing professionals we have some excellent sessions with some really interesting expert guests planned and i hope to see you all there i'm actually not going to sit here and and advertise all the guests what i want you to do is go ahead and visit that link and check out and see for yourself who's going to be there what some of our the topics covered are and to uh to sign up and join us this summer june 16th to 17th for innovate looking forward to it that's all i have today thank you for joining regaining control of your graduate enrollment funnel thanks for stopping by back to you emma yep we are finished so once again thanks max thank you anne so much for joining us today i hope everyone and tuesday afternoon