Ever feel like your team is working hard, but you’re not sure it’s actually moving the needle on applications?
In e-commerce, it’s easy to track. Every step brings a person closer to the sale:
Higher education is different from e-commerce.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t bring clarity and structure to your recruitment process.
Sketch your conversion path
By mapping out the key steps a student goes through—from hearing about you to hitting ‘Apply’—you create a shared reference for your team and a more focused experience for prospective students.
Think of it as the “spine” of your recruitment strategy. Everything else should support and connect to these core steps.
Here’s what a basic path might look like for a full-time programme:
“Interaction” can mean:
- Asking a question
- Filling in a quiz
- Downloading a brochure
- Chatting with a student ambassador
Now you can measure
Once your path is clear, you can start measuring two key things:
1. Reach at each step
- How many people did your ads reach?
- How many visited your website?
2. Conversion to the next step
- How many website visitors interacted?
- How many open day attendees applied?
What this makes possible
Over time, this lets you predict and plan.
Want to increase applications by 10% next year? Then you’ll need to:
- Increase website visitors by 10%, or
- Improve conversion at one or more steps
- Or a combination of both
What does your conversion path look like?
I realise that this newsletter may feel like “marketing 101”, but in my experience working with education providers, it’s rare for institutions to have this kind of high level overview, and this makes it hard to know where to focus your efforts.
And I get it – as elements get added to the mix, it’s easy to get bogged down in piecemeal statistics and loose the high level overview. Or to measure what’s easy to measure rather than what matters.
Do all your major marketing activities support the path to enrolment—or are there elements that aren’t clearly connected to the spine?
