A University’s CRM is a critical component of a marketing tech stack. CRMs allow Universities to organize massive amounts of data, create optimize communication pathways, and utilize the latest in smart segmentation or predictive behavior targeting.
The implementation of a CRM, while crucial, requires time, dedication, and expertise. Additionally, from a marketing perspective, a well-organized and optimized CRM creates advertising insights that can improve recruitment, retention, and internal communication.
Listed below are three key benefits that come with granting agency access to a CRM.
- Improved Marketing and Admissions Communication Alignment: The best marketing is one that aligns with the everyday life of the student. When a student receives their admissions email or direct mail, we can also be marketing to them with specific messaging related to that moment.
This can also include events and even messaging related to information needed. An example of this would be if a student as applied but has NOT registered for housing. We can align our messaging to speak to the needs of this student directly. - Better Student Insights: Where are the potential students coming from? Not just through application submissions, but through contact forms or event forms on the main website? Without access, the agency is only able to see the contacts that come through a form they manage – this doesn’t include a number of the contact forms through the CRM.
Also focus on understanding what pages they're visiting to tailor communication around. They may be interested in a couple different majors and can guide them to the correct contacts to learn more. Or if looking at student activities - send them information about what the event calendar is and how they'd be able to participate once they got to campus.
Additionally, what other touchpoints are needed to communicate to these students? With access to a CRM, we can better build out student audience personas based on the existing contacts in the school’s database.
- Expediency with Communication: The transfer of lists from the university to the agency can happen frequently, maybe weekly. While this might seem quick, the reality is that these lists then need to be handled by specialists, organized manually, and uploaded to our platforms. This also doesn’t account for people having to manually have to do this each week.
Direct access to the CRM allows us to not only control the segmentation of lists based on user data but creates efficiency when marketing to potential students.
Listed below are three optimizations that an agency can provide with access to a school’s CRM.
- Full Circle Reporting: An agency is most commonly graded on the number of students who ENROLL at the college or univeristy. However, an agency without access is only able to see the number of people to view the application. Limiting the access to this data also limits the agency’s ability to affect the most important KPI of the campaign.
We want to be able to answer the question, “How many students is marketing bringing in?” Access to the CRM will help get us closer than ever to answering that question. - Lead Scoring Optimizations: The ability to assign points for engagement is not a new technology for CRMs, however, the extent to which universities implement lead scoring can be greatly improved. With access to a CRM, Epicosity works with the admissions team to create triggers, lists, and nurturing workflows that take advantage of a custom point system created to identify the most qualified students early in the recruitment funnel.
- Marketing Campaign Integration: Modern marketing includes personalization. This can exist in a lot of different ways – marketing to people from the same state, same city, similar interests, etc. Utilizing lead scoring and advanced list segmentation, Epicosity is able to connect a school’s CRM to custom audience in specific ad managers that automatically ad contacts to a marketing campaign once they’ve qualified themselves with CRM activity.
There are only a sample of the advantages that come along with granting an agency access to your school’s CRM. Transparency with data, while maintaining security, is critical when creating a modern marketing campaign.
