4 Things Every Higher Education Marketer Should Know About Their Leads

All higher education marketers are faced with internal and external factors that impact their ability to create awareness, interest, and enrollment for their college or university.Generating high quality prospective student inquiries (leads) is one of the primary goals which define marketing’s value and success.

The intense competition to attract net new students requires a more in-depth knowledge about your leads so that you can better optimize marketing campaigns and spend. Jornaya can help marketers in higher education gain insights into their leads. Recently, a Jornaya higher education customer realized a $2.7M savings by using the Jornaya Intelligence solution to make data driven decisions about their leads.

The 4 things every higher education marketer should know about their leads

1. Lead Age
2. Consumer Velocity
3. Total Hops (Lead Aggregation)
4. TCPA Compliance

1. Lead Age | Is the lead new or old?

Ensuring that YOUR admissions team is the first to respond to your lead is crucial to successfully engage prospective students. The “relative age” of the lead (how much time passed since the prospective student hit “submit”) is often the difference between reaching a prospective student with high interest in your brand, and reaching someone who has likely already been contacted by a competing school.In fact, a 2007 Kellogg / MIT study by Dr. James Oldroyd found that when a lead is contacted within 5 minutes of submission, they are 100 times more likely to convert than leads contacted within 30 minutes.

2. Consumer Velocity | Is this consumer shopping around?

Consumer velocity ishow many times a particular student has filled out a lead form within a specified time range. This data point is generated by analyzing Jornaya’s Higher Education publisher network, and is a critical way togauge a prospective student’s intent and behavior in their journey to become a student.There are a limited number of prospective students searching for an education program at any given time and their research behavior spans different schools before making a final enrollment decisionBeing able to answer the question, “Is this consumer shopping around?” helps gauge a prospective student’s intent and approximately where they might be on their journey to becoming a student. One way to measure intent is to count the number of lead forms that have been filled out by a particular consumer over a set period of time. But this requires a broader view of the education market than an individual college, university or provider will likely have access to.

3. Total Hops (Lead Aggregation) | Is this lead coming to me from somewhere else?

Schools purchasing leads from affiliates or aggregators are able to use this insight to improve conversion quality with their lead generation partners. It shows the school how many times a lead has changed hands in the direct line between the generator and the school.This transparency with a school’s partner network optimizes the lead purchasing portfolio. Depending on your partner agreements, it can help you to improve your campaigns in the following ways:

• • Filter aggregated or non-aggregated leads
  • Improve efficiencies in lead buying

4. TCPA Compliant | Do I have the consumer’s consent to contact them?

TCPA Compliance can be a painful violation to face. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) has grown in scope and litigation in recent years, and continues to represent a threat to anyone purchasing or generating leads. As a result, in-house compliance teams are setting strict requirements to ensure a purchased or generated lead is compliant with their TCPA standards.For each lead, to avoid non-compliance, higher education buyers should be validating that an approved disclosure was used, that it was clear and conspicuous to the consumer, and that they gave their express written consent to be called or texted by the brand.The way prospective students are engaging with content is increasingly mobile, and SMS is now an accepted way for brands to communicate with consumers. Closely adhering to the TCPA regulation ensure you can reach consumers where they are, while mitigating the risk of TCPA related complaints.

Knowing these 4 things about your leads will deliver better results for your college or university with improved transparency of your partner relationships, building a rich understanding of your prospective student’s journey, and visibility about how to optimize marketing programs based on the quality of the lead.