Times have changed for business school admissions professionals. Generally speaking, application volume has been declining — and competition for students has been intensifying. As a result, it’s now more important than ever to connect with potential applicants as early as possible in order to fill seats and achieve your most important class-building goals.
Consider the facts. According to the Graduate Management Admissions Council’s Application Trends Survey Report 2019, “The combined effect of weak international demand brought on in part by the political climate and a strong economy… contributed to more US programs reporting total application declines (56% of programs) than increases (37%).”
Is your program doing the best job possible of responding to inquiries from potential students who visit your web page to request information? Or is your admissions office still using outdated strategies that could cause you to lose students who want to learn more?
Liaison’s new on-demand webinar, “The 2019 Business School Inquiry Response Project & What It Means for Your Communications Strategy,” will help you answer those questions by offering insights about the response strategies of more than 400 business schools recently surveyed by Liaison. It covers details about:
- The availability of information on their sites and the first impression it creates.
- How quickly the schools respond to inquiries.
- The relevance of their follow-up communications.
- The number of channels they use to communicate with potential applicants.
“The schools that are going to be effective in this day and age are the ones that are going to get prospective applicants to pay attention to them first,” says Dr. Monica Powell, senior associate dean and graduate dean of the University of Texas at Dallas Jindal School of Management and a member of Liaison’s BusinessCAS™ Advisory Board. “The schools that make them feel important and acknowledged will have an advantage in this very complicated and competitive marketplace. You’ve got to be able to capture them and keep them in that moment to get them to be a student in one of your programs.”
During the webinar, Dr. Powell speaks in detail with Liaison’s Robert Ruiz (managing director of BusinessCAS™) and Dr. Suzanne Sharp (executive director for enrollment marketing) about:
- Liaison’s recent study that involved submitting inquiry forms to more than 400 business schools and then tracking the schools’ responsiveness to those inquiries.
- Trends in communications to potential applicants.
- Best practices for driving applications and increasing enrollment.
- The benefits of using omni-channel marketing strategies to engage individuals who have requested program information.
“Ideally, having one system that puts all of this together is what’s going to help you be successful in your marketing when you’re reaching out to prospective students,” says Dr. Sharp. “That’s exactly what we at Liaison do for business school admissions offices.”