Higher Ed Enrollment Marketing Success with Hubspot

Spring is finally in the air and that means clear skies, birds chirping, and Spring Break for a lot of high school seniors. For enrollment marketers, spring break usually means planning for the next student recruitment cycle. It’s a great time to get your back-end processes in shape.

This spring, we wanted to share three things you can do today to set yourself up for success in the fall by optimizing your Hubspot Marketing and Sales Hub.

1. Use Smart CTAs

With smart CTAs (calls-to-action) in HubSpot, you can display a customized button to your different visitors based on data stored on their HubSpot contact record, or based on information known about their device type, country, referral source, or preferred language.

Create a smart CTA based on a prospective student’s indicated academic interest. For example, if you know a prospective student has indicated interest in your Psychology program, invite them to download an academic one-pager, register for the upcoming Psychology open house, or to connect with a professor in the department.

Using smart CTAs improves conversion rates, enhances the user experience on your site, and delights your prospective students, meeting them at the right place at the right time with the right content.

2. Develop an Automated Ad Strategy

Targeting can make or break your ad campaign. There’s nothing worse than serving up an ad asking students to apply to your institution when they’ve already been accepted — or rejected. With HubSpot, you can leverage campaign details and ad interactions with valuable information to automatically segment your audiences.

• Trigger a lead nurturing campaign by using the ad interactions enrollment trigger. Segment audiences based on their engagement with your Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn ads campaigns.
• Create active, contact-list audiences to nurture your prospective students. These lists (and these audiences) will dynamically update based on whether or not the contacts meet the criteria you set. Want to take into account your custom properties or default qualification properties like Lifecycle Stage or Lead Status? You can use workflows to update them based on contact behavior, such as email opens, page visits, or form submissions.
• Follow up with an automated email. Send an immediate follow-up communication that’s personalized to the ad they converted on and expressed interest in. Think critically about how you’re following up with students after they’ve engaged with your ads. If they’re already contacts in your CRM, chances are you’ve already started to build a relationship with them.

3. Create Custom Reports

We all know how tough it is to make decisions on the fly. Help yourself and your Marketing, Admissions, and Leadership teams understand decisions and strategies this season by investing in your reports. With custom reports, you have more flexibility in analyzing objects and activities in your HubSpot account. There are different types of custom reports that you can create, based on your reporting needs. Here are two of our favorites:

• Contact attribution reports: Want to see which marketing efforts are leading to new contacts? If you’re like most higher ed marketers, you’re running multiple campaigns simultaneously. See which campaigns are generating the most leads by creating a contact attribution report. You can also learn more about successful lead sources, interactions, and content types.
• Funnel reports: Measure the conversion rates between certain stages in a prospective student’s lifecycle. This will help you determine how long it takes for a student to make that decision to apply and will help you allocate the proper resources at the right time.

Need some help automating your workflows or setting up custom reports? We can help you build out your lead-management strategy and implement it directly into your Hub. Let’s find time to chat.