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 and created a vision for its long-term enrollment success. The Vice President had previous experience with big Student Search budgets often create big pools of soft inquiries, and that a large percentage of overly-soft inquiries do not translate into yield. The Vice President sought enrollmentFUEL's expertise to enact a plan to generate and increase return on investment (ROI) by choosing to invest in a microSEARCH^® campaign.

By selecting this campaign, the Vice President was promised flexibility for both 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 hypothesis testing possible.

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

Additionally, the strategic team directed the efforts of both the creative designers and HTML developers shaping an experience that effectively integrated social media display ads, IP targeting ads, emails, nurturing emails–that were drip sequenced–when triggered by engagement. Lastly, high-performance direct mail ignited the campaign that 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 efforts of the school’s admissions team and the results were new levels in secured deposits.

With the help of microSEARCH^®, this private liberal arts university successfully met their 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 a part of every college’s arsenal of Student Search options. Our university can always expect a significant percentage of its enrollment to originate from the microSEARCH^® campaigns.”