It's that time of year again: your post-secondary educational institution is headed out to recruitment fairs across the country and you want to ensure that students are going to remember your school as the one they want to attend.
What are some of the ways you can catch their eye and make them remember you when it comes time for them to start filling out their applications?
Use tablets with signup forms
One way you can encourage engagements with students at the fair is to offer them the change to sign up to receive communications from you. Make this process more efficient by using tablets with a form pre-loaded onto them.
Other schools will also ask students to sign up for more information, yet they will go the old-fashioned pen and paper route, which leaves room for human error when trying to translate that data into a computer information storage database. Letters can be rendered illegible, or a simple typo could possibly prevent the student from receiving communications from the institution. In short, lots can go wrong when there are too many steps to the signup process.
By having students type their information out directly into the signup form on the tablet, this eliminates most of the cause for error, ensuring that you reach the highest amount of students as possible.
Once you have received the contact information from the student, you can now begin to send them more information about your institution through automated messages.
Why wait to start communicating?
Send all the students who signed up a message that day saying that it was nice to have met them and that you hope they will consider your institution for educational needs.
The students probably encountered representatives from at least several different post-secondary schools during the run of the Recruitment Fair, so it is important to reach out as soon as possible so you remain at the forefront of their minds when they make their application decisions.
Personalize the message
If you want to go the extra mile during that initial contact with students who signed up to receive messages from you, why not add their personal touches to their messages, such as their name, current school, or area of interest?
This can be done easily with the information you collected from them through the signup form. The information collected was stored in a personal profile in your CRM and all you need to do is add merge tags to your messages to make use of it.
Merge tags allow you to continue to send automated messages to the students, and yet they will still have that personalized feeling, which will leave the students feeling valued and may increase their inclination to apply to your institution.
Send to students' preferred contact method
Another way you can set your post-secondary institution apart from the rest is through the method in which you contact your students.
Some students will prefer to receive messages via text message, and others by email, so why not allow them the option to choose which way they would like to be contacted?
When you have interested students complete your signup form to receive communications from you, give them an option as to how they would like to receive these messages. Through the use of a marketing automation platform, you are able to easily send out messages over several communication channels, such as the traditional email, or via phone call, or SMS messaging.
The CRM will store the students' preferences and when it comes time to send out your messages, it will sort each student by their method of choice.
Again, this provides students the sense that they are valued by your institution and increases the chance that they will turn into leads.
Try automation for yourself!
If you are interested in how you can use automation to help you recruit potential new students to your post-secondary institution, beginning with Recruitment Fairs, try out SimplyCast's marketing automation platform for a 14-day free trial.