Level 1: Evaluating Your Current Engagement
Audience: All leaders ready to assess what’s working with their outreach strategies.
Level 2: Basic Segmentation for Student Engagement
Audience: For leaders ready to dial up their engagement with students.
Level 3: Diving Deeper Into Parent/Guardian Engagement
Audience: For leaders ready to start engaging parents/guardians, or for those looking for new ideas to engage this influential group.
Level 4: Creating Research-Driven Persona-Segmented Campaigns
Audience: For leaders ready to start segmenting their communications based on desired student outcomes and expectations.
Level 5: Adjusting Your Engagement Strategies for Success
Audience: For leaders who have set up segmentations, have run campaigns for a full academic year, and are ready to maximize ROI.
How are you engaging students and their parents/guardians in the search, application, and acceptance stages? This action plan, divided into five levels, will help your team explore how to evaluate what you’ve currently put in the market—and adjust to include other influential family members.
Level 1Evaluating Your Current Engagement
Before we dive into strategies and tactics for engaging the entire family, it’s time to assess what you’ve done so far. While this step can be time intensive, it’s vital before moving on to advanced segmentation, engagement, and more.
What are your goals?
Pick a piece of communication you’ve sent in the last calendar year. What was the goal of the piece? Was it to build awareness of your institution’s brand, get prospective students to your website, increase applications, or something else?
Being able to assess your communications will help you develop purpose-driven touchpoints rather than inbox fluff.
How did your outreach perform?
Let’s continue, still moving forward with the piece you thought of for the above question — let’s see how it went. What were the key performance indicators (KPIs) for its success, and how was it tracked?
If you’re currently not tracking the performance of your outreach, doing so is an important part in deciding whether it’s working, and if you should change or cut a piece of communication
Level 2Basic Segmentation for Student Engagement
Every piece of outreach you create isn’t made for every student you’re trying to recruit, and student communications won’t work as well for parents/guardians. In order to truly stand out and engage students and their families, it’s important to create intentional segments for your outreach.
Getting Started With Basic Student Segmentation
There are many ways to segment your communications, and it can feel overwhelming at first. When getting started, you should prioritize which segments make sense now, and which you can implement for future classes.
Consider starting by creating an outreach strategy for these basic student segmentations:
High School Year
Are you currently segmenting your outreach based on prospects’ high school years? What students want and expect from colleges as a sophomore will be different from their junior and senior years.
In-State and Out-of-State
For out-of-state students, telling a story about your institution – and city – will be different from the story you tell to local and regional prospective students.
Level 3Diving Deeper Into Parent/Guardian Engagement
If your institution isn’t already diving into different ways to engage parents/guardians in their students’ college search experiences, now is the time.
Parents/guardians want to be involved in their children’s college decision-making.
The Eduventures 2025 Prospective Parent Survey indicated that while 30% of parents/guardians are starting to think about the colleges their children will apply to in 10th grade; 44% of parents/guardians are thinking about it even earlier.
Level 4Creating Research-Driven Persona-Segmented Campaigns
Taking your engagement strategy to the next level involves strategies that empower you to stand out from your competition and speak directly to students’ and parents’/guardians’ motivators and top priorities. Persona-based segmentation will help you refine your messaging while standing out from your peer institutions.
Student Mindsets™
For this more advanced segmentation, you can speak directly to students’ college expectations by segmenting with the Eduventures Student Mindsets – six research-driven personas that highlight students’ desired academic, career, and experiential outcomes.
Level 5Adjusting Your Engagement Strategies for Success
As you develop your student and parent/guardian engagement strategies, it’s always important to remain agile – continually understanding what strategies are working, and which need to be adjusted (or segmented further) for success.
Use Real-Time Analysis
Diving into your CRM’s analytics, or digital analytics dashboard, will help your team assess which strategies are working and which need further development. Take a look at your recent engagement – are students and their parents/guardians clicking on content, staying engaged on web pages, and continuing through the next step.
- CRM Analysis: Look at your past email campaigns (segmented or not) to see your top performing messages and CTAs. If these are segmented, dive deeper into where students and parents/guardians are engaging with the content. If you’re just getting started with segmentation, this will help you better understand what’s resonating most in your current outreach.
- Digital Dashboards: Are you taking a look at the performance of your digital ads through a designated dashboard? Encoura’s digital clients get a live look at the performance of their ads through the Encoura Platform. If you’re working on these internally or with a partner, ask for updated analytics so you can adjust campaigns as needed.
Read the Full Action Plan
To start at a specific level, or to read the entire action plan, fill out the form below. We’ll also email you a link so you can jump back in at any point.
