Encoura

5 Steps to Drive Your Yield Strategy

Intro

It seems that each year brings new challenges to colleges and universities trying to yield their classes. Whether its lower high school graduate numbers, an influx of less-committed student applicants from app pushes, or unexpected FAFSA challenges that discourage students and families, it’s clear that enrollment teams need strong yield strategies. 

This action plan will walk you through the important steps to perform a yield analysis and develop your most effective yield marketing plan. By the end of these six chapters, you will have what you need to empower your team to successfully engage the right students in the right ways to maximize your yield.

Chapter 1

Understanding What Yield Season Really Means

If you’ve worked in higher education for more than a year, you know the significance of May 1. May 1 is the finish line of the yield season race—the time to find out if all the effort you’ve invested the previous few months to engage students has paid off. Even if your college has rolling admissions, May 1 is an important milestone to mark your progress and likelihood of achieving your enrollment goals.

But what if you view the yield season as a marathon and not just a sprint? What if you can invest in students along their college search journeys, rather than ramp up efforts for a brief time in hopes to yield more students?

Your applicants aren’t waiting until they receive their acceptance letters from your college to narrow down their college decision lists. They’ve started from the exploration stage, and you should be there along the way to support and guide them.

Are the spring months important to your yield efforts? Definitely. But that can’t be the only time your team is thinking about yield, or you will lose students to competitors who are recognizing the importance of each interaction.

It’s time for you to yield students all year, and this action plan was written to empower you to do just that.

Let’s get started by reviewing the top three yield mistakes that we see colleges and universities making when it comes to yield. 

Now that we’ve covered when yield season is and the top errors to avoid, it’s time to discuss how to create a successful yield strategy.

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Chapter 2

Performing a Yield Analysis To Inform Your Strategic Plan

We discussed that while yield efforts ramp up in spring, there are important steps you can take any time of year to contribute to strong yield and enrollment. So what can you do at any time of the year to best prepare for yield? The first step is to perform a yield analysis to inform your strategic plan.

There are two main parts to a strong yield analysis—a year-over-year comparison and a competition analysis. The deeper you can dive into each of these steps, the better prepared you will be to effectively yield students. However, even a quick overview of each of these can put your team in a great competitive position to enroll students who may be deciding between your college or another.

Year-Over-Year Yield Comparison

To begin, take an analysis of your yield from the last three to five years. Specifically, look at your funnel over time, focusing on your yield rates from admits to enrolled students. 

Year-over-year funnel yield analysis in Encoura’s Insights Cloud™


If you can, break down this information by demographics, such as gender, ethnicity, and major (especially your top or new programs) to analyze how your yield strategy is performing among different populations.

Year-over-year yield analysis by program in Encoura’s Insights Cloud

Another strategic view is to look at your year-over-year yield rates by source and/or state, and even break down your home state into geomarkets.

Year-over-year yield analysis by state in Encoura’s Insights Cloud

When viewing these breakdowns, consider where you are losing yield and where you are gaining. After pinpointing where you are doing well, consider what changes you may have made to your enrollment strategy in those areas. Were faculty helping with outreach? Did you launch specific email campaigns for that population or major? Consider how you can apply similar strategies to other populations, especially those that you may be struggling with, in order to boost your overall yield.

Competition Analysis

You’ve taken a deep dive into how your yield strategy has been working for your team the past few years. The next step is to check out your competition to get direction on how you can help your institution stand out from others that your admitted students may be considering. 

Specifically, consider how competitive you’ve been in your top markets, like your home state. Looking at your shared student markets, are you enrolling more students from those areas than your top two to three competitors? 

Competition Analysis (current year) in Encoura’s Insights Cloud

If you have access to Encoura’s Insights Cloud, you can also click on the “Other” column (as seen in the picture above) to see where your shared students with your top competitors are choosing to enroll instead.

To get an understanding of trends in your competitive standing, look at these same competitor insights over the past few years. Have your top competitors changed over the last year or two? Given these trends, is there a specific type of school that you are mostly competing against (e.g., highly selective privates, less selective publics). 

Now that you’ve identified your top competitors and any trends, use this information to refine your messaging. Make sure that your communications with students intentionally highlight your competitive advantages and the values that your prospective students care about most.

Having identified your strengths and opportunities in your yield strategy, the next chapter will discuss how to best engage your right students.

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Chapter 3

Focusing Your Engagement on the Right Students

Now that you have your foundation, it’s time to prep your engagement strategy. You have your admitted student list, but what’s the best way to support them through enrollment?

With limited time, staff, and budget, you have two options:

  • Create general yield emails, mailings, web pages and/or admitted student events for all your admits.
  • Segment your admitted students and focus more effort and resources on specific students who are most likely to yield at higher rates as a result of this intentional outreach. 

The chances are that your college has tried the first method for years and you’re here because you know the second option would be most effective if you had guidance deciding which students would best respond to more intentional support. 

Here are a couple of tactics that our Strategic Enrollment Consultants are using to boost yield with our partners:

Support Undecided Major Students

Students who are undecided about which academic program to pursue but have still applied to your college are likely considering factors outside of academics to enroll. You have a strong opportunity to provide support that makes them feel like a part of your school and to reassure them that they can succeed at your college and beyond if they commit to your institution. 

Special email, text, and phone campaigns to this audience can make a big difference in your yield.

Leverage Admit-to-Enroll Predictive Modeling

Another tactic is to use the data you have from past cohorts of admitted students to predict the enrollment behavior of your current cohort. Tap into an admit-to-enroll predictive model that regularly scores each of your admitted students and easily syncs to your CRM, like Encoura’s Yield+™. 

These individualized score updates empower your team to track how each of your admitted students is trending toward enrolling or not so that you can adjust your engagement with them accordingly.

Yield+ dashboards show each student’s yield scores (initial and current), as well as areas of strength or growth opportunities for them to yield.


Once you have your yield scores synced, engage students within different score ranges depending on how your yield is looking.

If your yield numbers overall are struggling, ramp up your interactions and support of your top-tier students (scores 0.8-1.0) to make sure your students who are most likely to enroll are actually on track and making their decisions.

Once those students are enrolling and your yield is steady but still needing growth, focus on the middle-tier scores (0.3-0.7). These students are key to meeting and exceeding your enrollment goals because they will enroll with extra support from your team. Try to increase your personalized outreach by counselors and consider how your marketing can best serve their needs and concerns.

If you have limited resources and need to narrow down your middle-tier score students even further, focus your efforts on specific strategic areas. For example, ask yourself:

  • In what market(s) am I running digital ads? Consider adjusting to tactics that better engage your mid-range score students.
  • For what market(s) do I have parent/guardian emails? Prioritize those mid-range scores and deliver family-specific communications. 
  • Can I layer in programs that I want to improve? Focus on outreach to students interested in those areas first.
  • Where are my alumni? Organize recruitment events in those areas that alumni can host to connect with and yield your prospective students who need extra convincing.

As you consider which admitted students to engage to maximize yield, we’ll dive deeper into specific marketing and events strategies for those students in the next two chapters.

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Own Yield All Year With Insight From Yield+

Encoura’s newest predictive model, Yield+™, is a machine-learning admit-to-enroll model that identifies opportunities to improve yield performance.

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Chapter 4

Digital Marketing To Support Yield Efforts

Once you have a thorough understanding of your past yield performance and how to focus your engagement on the right students, it’s time to create the plan to engage. You’ve already crossed one hurdle—these students have confirmed their interest in your school by applying. 

But, to get these students all the way from application to enrollment, it is crucial to stay in front of them. To do this effectively, you want to meet them where they already are–and Gen Z and Gen Alpha students are on multiple devices and platforms.

Use Video Ads To Engage on Top Platforms for Gen Z and Gen Alpha

Gen Z and Gen Alpha students are already spending their time on TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube, so having a presence on these platforms is a great way to connect and offer targeted messages to your accepted students. 

The true power of video ads lies in their ability to show students how they will fit in at your school, from video testimonials from current students and snapshots of campus life to videos answering their most frequent questions such as cost and the value of a degree from your institution. 

Remember, your institution doesn’t need a TikTok account to run ads on the platform. We understand that many of our partners don’t maintain branded accounts; our experts will work with your team to best optimize messaging on this platform.

Use Custom Audience Targeting (CAT) To Reach Specific Interests

Another vital digital strategy for improving admissions yield includes CAT. This strategy allows you to optimize the data you already have to further engage a select group of prospective students based on their demographics and interests, including:

  • Those who have visited your campus in the last 90 days
  • Past website visitors, like those to a specific landing or major-based page
  • Their specific hobbies, like film or video, to promote your film program
  • A specific age range interested in travel to promote your study abroad programs

Use Residential Targeting to the Entire Household

It’s also important to remember to include parents/guardians in your yield plan to not only encourage them to get involved and stay informed, but to ensure them that your institution is the best fit for their students.

Residential targeting allows you to reach students and their families at home on their most-used devices and is a powerful way to maximize your budget and reach the households you want. 

These aren’t the only digital tactics for yield; explore more below.

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Digital Marketing Strategies for Yield and Melt Prevention

Ensuring students and their families relate to your institution’s identity is even more important to strengthen yield and avoid melt.

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Chapter 5

Other Marketing Tactics To Support Yield

Segmented Email Marketing

Segmented email messaging and communication flows that speak to where students are in the enrollment process is a powerful solution for any institution. Eduventures® Prospective Parent Research™ uncovered that 49% of parents/guardians begin the college search by ninth grade. Students, while often searching in stealth mode, are looking sooner as well, so starting outreach to sophomores will put your institution top In addition to the digital tactics discussed in chapter 4, using traditional marketing and event strategies can help drive yield and prevent melt.of mind early on. 

Email outreach should continue through junior year and segment in senior year based on what you know about them. Encoura’s Student Mindsets™ and Parent Mindsets™ are useful tools to uncover primary motivations and expected outcomes for college. Other segmentation options for yield include major-specific, FAQ, campus life and clubs, and more.

Strategic Print Marketing

Print is still a powerful marketing tool. Admissions guides, engaging direct mail promoting your institution’s top features, applications requirements, and invitations to campus visits and other events are useful ways to stay in front of students and their families. 

Incorporating QR codes in your print materials is an easy way to tie back to your website and track engagement. Remember that you can retarget website visitors, so print is always a great strategy to get families back online and engaged with your institution.

Virtual and In-Person Events for Students and Parents

Event marketing is also an important piece of the yield puzzle. Campus tours, both virtual and in-person, can make a huge impact on a student’s final decision. Whenever possible, try to personalize these visits to key student segments, from major and interest specific options to programming that is specifically for families.

In addition to the traditional tours, hosting student and parent/guardian-specific events throughout the year can help increase engagement. Strategize ways to get students to visit earlier in the academic year, then perhaps again once admitted. One way to do this is to host info or FAFSA sessions, providing opportunities for admissions staff to connect with students and answer their frequently asked questions.

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Struggling to build out segmented email marketing campaigns? We can help your institution stand out in inboxes and mailboxes, engaging the entire family throughout the funnel.

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Chapter 6

A Checklist for Driving Yield at Your Institution

Let’s do a quick recap on what we’ve learned in this action plan with specific steps you can take now to start uniting your team around a solid yield strategy. This helpful checklist will guide your team in getting started.

  • Perform a yield analysis to inform your strategic plan.

    Review the last few years of your data to consider how your yield rates have been overall, in addition to breaking them down by geography, demographics, and/or academic programs. Then, take an assessment of how you are enrolling compared to your competitors.

  • Using your yield analysis above, make adjustments to your marketing.

    Ensure you are highlighting your advantages over top competitors, in addition to speaking to the needs and goals of populations you’ve struggled to yield recently.

  • Focus your engagement on the right students.

    Access an admit-to-enroll predictive model to focus on students who need the extra support to enroll. Also consider increased engagement to your undeclared students.

  • Develop your digital marketing yield strategy.

    Engage students and their parents/guardians with short video and/or custom audience targeting ads that answer their most pressing questions and feature content created by current students.

  • Solidify your print, email, and events strategies.

    Engage the full family with marketing and events that speak to what they value most using Student and Parent Mindsets. Remember to start engagement with parents/guardians as early as possible!

You’ve ready to own yield all year! And remember, you’re never alone. Whenever you’re ready, we’re here to partner with you to develop and implement your best yield strategy yet.

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