To provide affordable, quality education to a diverse population by recruiting and enrolling qualified freshman, transfer, adult learners, and graduate students for admission. (Enrollment Pipeline)
Objective
Expand Communcation For Graduate Prospects.
Expand Communication plans through Hobsons Connect Product to include graduate and online students. Hobsons Connect is an Enrollment Management Tool that acts as a prospective student database. The database allows us to create unique and complex communication plans to engage prospective students and applicants to help guide them through to enrollment. Currently we use Connect for undergraduate students only.
KPI
Tracking In Connect
We have the ability to track the number of communications being sent to students as well as the open rate of each email. We can also track a student’s movement through the enrollment funnel through sources codes. We hope to increase the amount of communications to prospects by 25% and to implement an applicant communiation plan as well.
Result
Email Results
The attached spreadsheet outlines the communication plan, prospects by term, emails sent rates and how students heard about SHSU. For highlights:
From February 2013 to August 12, 2013, 1638 emails were setn with an open rate fo 48%. This open rate is very high, typically we see an open rate of about 20%. Since emails were not tracked in the past, we do not have any comparable data.
Again, please see attached for more details.
Action
Communication
We have all of our prospect communication plans in place.
We have started developing applicant communication plans.
We have implemented a system to actually call all prospects which should help our conversion rate of inquiry, applied, accepted to enrolled.
Objective
Program Marketing
Continue with program marketing efforts to increase undergraduate enrollment in specified programs. Twelve programs are chosen each year based on either ability to grow or declining enrollment. A series of marketing efforts are deployed to help with promotion of program.
KPI
Cognos Program Report
A Cognos report has been created to show applied to accept, accept to enroll per program, with comparative data from the previous year. This will be used to assessment a program's performance. We hope to show an overall increase in applicants of 3%.
Result
Results
We have realized an overall increase in number of applications for each of the programs. Only 9 of the 12 are trackable and of those 9, four programs saw a signification increase in enrolled students for fall 2013. Please see the attached spreadsheet for addtional details.
Action
Funding
We will provide $3000 to each program for continued marketing for FY2014.
We know that we must continue to market programs - only one year of marketing will not have a long lasting impact.
The program landing pages (websites) that were created for each program will continue to be monitored and updated.
Goal
Competitive Marketing/Web Optimization Project
To expand the University’s competitive advantage by optimizing the delivery of communication and services for the emerging needs of new and current students.
Objective
Web Optimization And SEO
Optimize SHSU websites in order improve Search engine optimization (SEO). By improving search engine optimization, we improve the ability of prospective students to find our webpage and learn about the programs that we offer at SHSU. We want to improve the relevance of our webpages on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
KPI
Google Analytics
Use Google analytics data to show improvement of navigation on our site and show improvement in Seraph Engine Results Pages (SERP) when searching for key words such as SHSU, Texas University, online programs. We hope see a 10% inprovement on search engine results of the key words indentified.
Result
SERP Traffic
We track total number of unique visitors to our webpage. As of March 2012, we had 118,323 visitors since we started tracking this in January 2010. Between March 2012 and March 2013, we had an additional 59,330 visitors which is an increase of over 50%. We have found our initial work to be successful.
Action
Continued Improvement
We continued to work on search engine optimization of our websites. We have created over 50 program landing pages that are being tracked through Google ANalytics with relevant content on the pages for prospective students.
Continue to monitor new visitors to our website. We have seen a 4% increase of new users to our site in the last year.
We will continue to convert old website pages to the new template which is more user friendly and has better SEO processes in place.
Objective
Digital Marketing
Engage in digital marketing with a focus on graduate and online. By using a third party vendor (Hobsons Media Services), we can create, design, and implement a complex marketing strategy to engage adult learners. This will include lead generation, website advertisements, targeting communications, and strategic ad placements.
KPI
Hobsons Reports
Hobsons will provide monthly reports which will include metrics on advertising and conversion of leads generated from advertisements. We hope to see a 5% increase in graduate and online new student enrollment in fall 2013.
Result
Digital Marketing
To date, we have recieved over 250 leads from the digital marketing. However, we have found that most students are interested in a future term. Graduate students tend to start looking for programs 2 years before the anticipated entry term. Therefore, we believe the digital marketing efforts will have more of an impact on fall 2014 and later terms.
Action
Digital Marketing
Continue with weekly calls with Hobsons
Review weekly reports that are created internally and from Hobsons
Personal contact with prospects that are collected through Digital Marketing efforts.
Goal
Enrollment Process Barriers
Identity process barriers through surveys and focus groups of prospective and current students and then use this information to work to remove such barriers which include content on websites and targeted email communication to supply necessary information.
Objective
Identify Process Barriers
Identity process barriers through surveys and focus groups of prospective and current students and then use this information to work to remove such barriers which include content on websites and targeted email communication to supply necessary information.
KPI
Tracking Of Responses And Barriers
Track response of focus groups, surveys, open rate of targeted emails and monitor Google analytics on key websites to show improvement of navigation and dissemination of information. We want to identify 5 key barriers for students and begin process evalution on how to break down the barriers.
Result
Identify Barriers
We have identified the following barriers:
Students are confused about the financial aid process They have difficulty with the book buying experience Grad students are not always told their admission status (accepted, denied, etc.) Some students do not know what an online course entails It was difficult for them to determine what classes were offered online
Please see attached results.
Action
Barriers Identified
We will start surveying students each semester with another survey being sent out next week.
Surveys will identify additional barriers and track progress on practices put in place for previously identified barriers.
We will continue to hold focus groups to identify additional barriers.