Is your institution ready to optimize your funnel, achieving your enrollment goals while maximizing your return on investment? From the basics of an enrollment funnel to how to expertly use data to evaluate the effectiveness of your recruitment and marketing, this action plan is packed with information to empower enrollment leaders.
Whether you’re a new enrollment professional or more seasoned, we’ve got you covered. Using the table of contents above, start at the level that best suits where you’re ready to glean new strategies.
Level 1What is Your Funnel
Every enrollment strategy begins with understanding your funnel. Knowing where your prospective students are — and how they move through each stage — helps you make informed, timely decisions that drive results.
Start With the Foundation: Defining Your Funnel
Your funnel represents the full journey a student takes with your institution — from their very first awareness of your school to the moment they start classes.
At its core, it’s a framework for understanding how students move closer to enrollment and how your team’s work, across marketing, admissions, and financial aid, contributes at every step.
Prospect
Inquiry
Applicant
Admit
Deposit
Level 2Break Down Your Funnel by Market
Once you understand your overall funnel, it’s time to take a deeper dive. Breaking it down by market — whether by population, program, or geography — helps you uncover opportunities, strengthen ROI, and move closer to your institutional goals.
Build on a Strong Foundation
Now that you’ve defined your enrollment funnel and clarified how each stage works in the first chapter of this action plan, it’s time to take a closer look inside it. A single funnel view gives you the big picture, but sub-funnels reveal what’s really driving your results.
Every institution serves many “mini-markets” — students from different regions, backgrounds, and academic interests. Understanding how each of these groups moves through your funnel allows you to make precise, data-driven decisions that support both enrollment goals and mission-based priorities.
Segment Your Funnel With Purpose
Breaking down your funnel by market doesn’t just mean slicing your data; it means connecting strategy to your institution’s purpose.
Ask yourself:
- Are we meeting our goals for first-generation or underrepresented students?
- How are international applicants converting compared to domestic?
- Which academic programs or majors have the strongest and weakest yield?
By answering these questions, you link enrollment performance directly to your institution’s strategic goals, such as becoming an HSI, launching a new engineering program, or increasing diversity and access.
Level 3Strengthen Your Funnel With Predictive Modeling
Levels one and two of this action plan covered everything from the basics of your enrollment funnel to strategically zooming in to track how specific populations are moving through your funnel. Now it’s time to explore the strongest solutions that institutions use for strengthening each stage of their funnels: AI predictive models.
Benefits of Predictive Modeling
The majority of colleges and universities today are using at least one predictive model, and that’s because they continually prove their return on investment.
Predictive models improve your ROI by focusing your resources — both time and money — on prospective students who are most likely to move through your funnel toward enrollment at your specific institution.
As a whole, predictive models combine your college’s historical data (stripped of your students’ identifiable information to keep your data secure) with advanced AI to score prospective students according to how closely they resemble students who have previously inquired, applied, committed, and/or enrolled at your school.
By assessing your prospective students, you can choose to devote student search and marketing budget to reaching out to those with scores that show the highest likelihood to inquire/apply/enroll, knowing that they are most likely to engage with you. Similarly, your admissions team can use these scores to determine which students make the most sense to spend time supporting one-on-one.
Types of Predictive Modeling
Predictive models exist for every stage of the funnel. Depending on your budget, you may have to consider which stage needs the most support to achieve your enrollment goals. Let’s take a look at how each type of model works.
Level 4Empower Your Counselors To Manage Their Territories
One of the best ways to optimize your funnel year over year is by empowering your whole team to own your enrollment funnel. While it’s important for enrollment leadership to make strategic, high-level decisions that support students and maximize ROI, tapping in to your counselors who affect your funnel daily is essential. When each counselor understands their part in your funnel and embraces managing their territory, your strategy trickles down to strengthen each area of your funnel.
Here are a few ways that you can empower your counselors to successfully manage their territories:
- Create dashboards and goal trackers for your counselors to visualize their progress in their territories
- Develop resources to inform your counselors before travel season that include student and competitor information
- Group students in your counselors’ territories by similar qualities for more intentional outreach
Territory Dashboards
The first essential step to empowering your counselors to manage their own territories is to create individual dashboards for them to visualize their work. Whether you use your CRM, or technology like Encoura’s Insights Cloud, including visualizations of their funnel progress is a daily reminder of their part in your overall funnel.
Level 5Continually Evaluate Your Effectiveness & Campus Unity
After understanding the intricacies of your enrollment funnel, adding AI that maximizes your ROI, and empowering your counselors to own their territory funnels, the final step in optimizing your funnel is to continually assess the effectiveness of your strategies for achieving your goals.
Foster Unity With Campus Leadership
One of the strongest means of solidifying your strategies is to get your campus leadership behind you. With strategies aligned across your institution, you can get everyone on board — including board members and academic departments — with working toward your enrollment success.
A key way to achieve this unity is to develop dashboards and/or reports that help your whole campus understand your data and strategies. For executive leadership, consider building dashboards that visualize your goal progress, revenue drivers, and profiles of your incoming class(es). For academic leadership, consider dashboards that show funnel stages by program and top feeder high schools, as well as top competitors.
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.
