How a School CRM Can Improve Your Enrollment Marketing

What is a school CRM, and how can it improve your enrollment marketing?

One of the most challenging aspects of school enrollment marketing is keeping track of “where” in the recruitment cycle every prospective family currently sits. Having a good system in place allows you to personally nurture every contact from interested, engaged, and ultimately, an enrolled student/family.

However, this can get challenging when you are trying to do this well for a large number of prospective students.

I once worked with a client that was trying to recruit 100 new freshmen for their second high-school campus while simultaneously enrolling 150 freshmen for their existing campus.

As anyone who has worked in enrollment knows, recruiting 250 new students means you are probably coordinating over 400 tours and interacting with up to 800 prospective families.

One of the improvements this client made was to implement a “customer relationship management” (CRM) software called SchoolMint Connect. SchoolMint Connect allowed them to automate a significant amount of the work and track “where” in the recruitment cycle every potential family was.

The best CRM software for schools (like SchoolMint Connect) can significantly improve the operations of your enrollment efforts and allow you to provide a more effective student recruitment process. 

In this post, I’ll talk about why your school should implement a K-12 CRM system.

What is a School CRM?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software gives you a holistic look at all your prospective customers (for you, your “customers” would be parents and guardians). Think about CRM like a spreadsheet on steroids.

School CRM systems allow you to capture customers’ contact information and to group them in buckets, track interactions, and — most importantly — segment these customers for automated interactions.

While CRM software is a common tool used in business, recently, schools are understanding how school CRM systems can benefit their operations by incorporating it into their enrollment efforts. 

Let’s look at how having a school CRM can help you.

A School CRM Can Be a Single Repository for Data

One of the hardest parts of enrollment management is in identifying prospective parents.

Knowing and identifying “who” is interested in your school is the costliest and most time-consuming part of a good enrollment system.

Having a single spot for all your prospective parents’ contact information to reside in is a huge boon for a school. No longer are you having to juggle multiple Google Sheets and worry if somebody is changing all the information by accident.

A school CRM can easily improve other operations of your school.

Many times, schools have a lot of silos of data. A certain parent may gather donor information for your big gala, but often that information doesn’t translate into next year’s event because the documents weren’t handed over properly.

Or we don’t realize that Mrs. Jones was asked to donate for the gala but was never asked to support our athletic fundraiser as well. We may not realize that Mr. Smith not only is the parent of a fourth grader but he also owns the largest printer in town and might be willing to donate some services.

Having all your data in a school CRM allows you to more easily conduct data analysis and connect these dots.

Many schools gather a lot of data, but because none of it is centralized, they can’t easily analyze it to spot patterns, and, most critically, can’t use it to drive improvement.

Remember that good data is the key to a strong enrollment system. School CRMs like HubSpot or SchoolMint Connect help to get you there.

The Best CRMs for Schools Automate Your Enrollment Activities

A good student enrollment program requires a lot of follow up and personalized interactions. Anyone who has done this knows how labor-intensive these things can be.

Here is where a school CRM can significantly improve your activities and save you a ton of time.

Let’s imagine a scenario where you have a “request more information” form on your website. This is a great way for parents who are interested in your school to get more information as they are shopping. This also represents the first, critical step as they go from a prospective parent to an engaged parent.

With a school CRM, you can easily integrate this website form into your system.

When a parent puts their contact information into the form, that information automatically creates a new parent record, tags them as a “prospective parent,” and automatically sends out an email to them with a link to your infographic or another pre-created email that gives all the relevant information about your school.

Next, you can easily set up a rule that allows you to send a couple of more emails over the next two weeks to that prospective parent, sharing more information and asking them to register for a school tour.

No longer is someone having to actively monitor that email box — or, even worse, parents getting an out-of-office notification because someone is on vacation.

This automation takes a little bit of work to set up on the front end, but once it’s done, you save an incredible amount of time by automating these repetitive tasks. Additionally, you have created a much better initial experience with your school.

Using Your School CRM to Segment Your Contacts

Nobody likes to get mail that is addressed to “occupant” — or worse: “Dear valued customer.”

Similarly, when you are attempting to recruit parents to your school, they want you to feel like you are treating them as an individual and addressing their needs. A school CRM improves your ability to personalize interactions.

For example, let’s say you have a great arts program as well as an award-winning STEM program. By “tagging” each prospective parent by their interest (STEM vs. Art), it allows you to customize your follow-up emails with information relevant to the parent.

For my client I described above, we created a couple of different follow-up “streams” depending upon the interests of the student.

For the student who was interested in STEM education, they received the standard first email that was sent to every prospective family. But their next two emails were oriented specifically to the STEM programs that the school was known for. They even received a personalized email from the head of STEM education asking them to sign up for a tour.

We also designed automated follow-up emails for students interested in athletics as well as students who had an interest in the arts. This customization allowed us to tailor information and our “selling message” specifically to that family’s stated interests.

The school’s attendance at tours skyrocketed as a result.

School CRM Reporting and Analytics

Another significant benefit that CRMs can bring to a school is the ability to track and manage all of the enrollment data in one easy to access place with simple reports.

Being able to provide a snapshot to the leadership of the school of the number of families in the inquiry stage, nurturing stage, or who have signed up for a school tour is priceless. This also gives you the ability to track how effective each “lead generation” tactic is because you will know how you first identified that parent in the first place.

Many schools struggle with rich data analysis when it comes to enrollment. But a school CRM (especially SchoolMint Connect, which was built for admissions) simplifies this task immensely.

Is a CRM for Public Schools as Important as a CRM for Private Schools?

Much of our discussion of school CRM has centered on recruitment and admissions, which are obviously more pressing issues for private schools than public schools.

However, even though public schools might not need a CRM to track applicants, they should still consider a CRM for school management.

For example, a public school still needs to store all of its families’ contact information in a centralized, easily searchable location. Also, many public schools rely on volunteers to help teachers in class and to help with fundraisers, school clean-ups, and chaperoning, etc.

A school CRM would allow a public school to tag families based on their volunteer and giving history, providing the school with easy access to lists of families to contact when new volunteer and giving opportunities arise in the future.

Implementing a School CRM

At this point, I hope you are salivating at the prospect of using a school CRM for your enrollment marketing. But I am sure the question that is foremost in your mind is how much does one of these things cost?

The most important thing to remember as you start to look at these is not only the purchase price but the amount of customization that you need to do for that CRM to fit your school’s needs.

That is why I recommend SchoolMint Connect. It was specifically designed for enrollment marketing so there is minimal customization needed.

However, there are other options out there. Both HubSpot and Salesforce offer free versions that give you a lot of functionality right out of the gate. But if you do not have a more technical background, you might struggle to customize them and incorporate their features into your workflow.

Finally, remember that the most important thing in getting the most value out of these tools is to clearly map out your business processes and ensure you are incorporating a school CRM where it makes the most sense.

These are very powerful tools, but you need to ensure you are using them in the right way to derive the most value. And if you cannot commit to changing your business processes to leverage the power of a school CRM, it will not help you at all.

Once you start using a school CRM and start to see the value in how it makes you more efficient and personalizes your recruitment efforts, I guarantee you will wonder how you lived without it!