Key Takeaways:
- Traditional “funnel” models for enrollment management are outdated, as they focus on broad recruitment rather than personalized, data-driven approaches.
- Modern strategic enrollment management emphasizes identifying and nurturing quality applicants through tailored strategies for different student profiles.
- “Flipping the funnel” allows institutions to start with end goals in mind, creating customized recruitment pathways that enhance retention, satisfaction, and long-term student success.
- Using data analytics and CRM tools, institutions can craft personalized communication and aid strategies to engage students and other influencers more effectively.
- Continuous refinement of strategies with real-time data ensures institutions can adapt to shifting enrollment trends and meet both student needs and institutional goals.
Enrollment management teams are facing new and complex challenges that make traditional strategic enrollment management (SEM) approaches seem obsolete. The conventional approach using a “funnel” system, where institutions expand their recruitment pool and work to narrow it down throughout the enrollment process, is proving to no longer meet the needs of modern institutions or students.
In this new reality of higher ed enrollment trends, institutions must take a more nuanced and strategic approach to SEM, focusing not on the quantity of prospective applicants but on their quality and fit. The rise of deep data analytics and CRM-enabled communications has highlighted the need to develop more personalized, focused, and data-informed strategies to recruit, retain, and support students in a market that continues to question the value of a higher education more than ever before.
This new era requires “flipping the funnel,” which involves institutions starting with end goals in mind and then developing customized strategies for different cohorts of students. No longer can recruitment efforts be generalized; instead, tailored approaches must be designed for diverse student profiles. By growing individual cohorts, as opposed to taking a one-size-fits-all approach, enrollment leaders will be able to effectively meet their enrollment goals while meeting student consumers where they are and addressing their unique, highly personal educational priorities.
This blog will provide a comprehensive guide to embracing a new vision of strategic enrollment management by exploring key strategies for identifying the right students at the right time and with the right message. By adopting a more focused holistic approach, institutions can enhance student success, meet their enrollment goals, and thrive in today’s competitive education marketplace.
A New Approach to Undergraduate Enrollment
The traditional funnel model of undergraduate enrollment management, in which institutions seek to recruit a large pool of prospective students and gradually narrow the field through various stages, is proving to no longer be a sustainable approach. In an era marked by demographic decline and increased scrutiny of the value of higher education, many institutions have realized that simply expanding the top of the funnel by buying more student names or reaching out to larger geographic areas is not enough. As prospective student pools shrink and competition intensifies, institutions must rethink their enrollment strategies.
The concept of “flipping the funnel” reimagines this process by starting with the end goals in mind—student retention, satisfaction, and long-term success—and working backward to design recruitment strategies that are highly personalized for different student profiles. Instead of adopting a one-size-fits-all approach, this new strategy requires tailoring recruitment efforts to the unique needs, aspirations, and potential of each student or student cohort.
One useful analogy for flipping the funnel is the idea of filling every hole in a sponge rather than trying to expand the size of the sponge itself. In practice, this means recognizing that a prospective engineering student might need a different recruitment approach than a fine arts student or a student interested in a multidisciplinary program. This shift from quantity to quality focuses on nurturing meaningful relationships with students that reflect their academic goals, personal interests, and financial circumstances.
By adopting this approach, institutions can not only attract the right students, but also create a more supportive, individualized pathway to enrollment. When each student is treated as a distinct individual with specific needs, the result is not just improved enrollment numbers but greater student interest in the institution, which leads to higher yields, satisfaction, and retention. Ultimately, flipping the funnel leads to better outcomes for both students and institutions by ensuring that the enrollment process is aligned with a student-specific approach from the very beginning.
This approach provides a secondary benefit by naturally enabling a deeper recruitment engagement between the student and the institution’s academic departments. By focusing on students as individuals, especially through the yield phase, faculty can be more effectively integrated into the process, allowing for tailored communications, program highlights, specialized aid offerings, and more.
With the funnel flipped, the next step is to focus on finding and attracting the right students. This is where the newest data-driven strategies come into play.
Identifying the Right Students With Data-Informed Approaches
Finding the right students for your institution has never been more critical. With fewer students available to recruit and increasing pressure to meet institutional enrollment goals, a data-informed approach to recruitment is essential. Traditional methods like mass list acquisition followed by broad marketing campaigns are proven to no longer be effective as a singular approach. Instead, institutions must shift to being present where students are and focus on strategic student identification using real-time data, predictive analytics, and personalized outreach.
A significant shift in student recruitment moves from outbound efforts, like sending emails or postcards based on purchased lists, to inbound marketing strategies. Institutions need to capitalize on micro-moments—such as when students scroll through social media or engage with streaming services—to reach them where they spend most of their time with the right message. By using targeted SEO and ensuring the institution appears in search results when students actively seek information, higher education institutions can engage prospective students who are already searching for programs, experiences, and opportunities that coincide with their interests. This approach leads to higher conversion rates because inbound students come from trusted, organic sources.
The most successful institutions are also relying on highly sophisticated data analytics tools to create detailed student personas in ways that did not even exist just a few years ago. These personas consider factors such as academic performance, geographic location, personal interests, and socioeconomic background. By understanding these variables, institutions can predict which students are most likely to succeed and then target their recruitment efforts accordingly. For example, instead of casting a wide net, a school with a strong engineering program might focus its efforts on specific high schools known for STEM success, targeting those students with highly relevant messaging, content, and aid leveraging.
Doing this successfully involves understanding how students engage with your institution online. The highest-converting prospective students often come from organic search results. Therefore, institutions must adopt forward-thinking approaches by appearing for relevant search terms and providing valuable content that resonates with their target audience at the right time. By combining inbound SEO efforts with more traditional student search methods—such as custom audience targeting, digital media, and retargeting—institutions can ensure they reach the right students with the right message.
Developing student personas also lets institutions craft specific messaging that resonates with different types of students. For example, a first-generation student from a rural area may respond better to messages about affordability and support services, while a prospective student interested in competitive STEM programs may be more interested in research opportunities and career pathways. By tracking in real time how students engage with these personalized messages, and by understanding how students like them have historically responded to those messages, institutions are able to continuously optimize their strategies throughout the entire recruitment cycle for the best results.
Institutions can also target influencers like parents and counselors through specialized outreach. Engaging these key decision makers with tailored campaigns can help influence a student’s decision to enroll. Whether through geotargeting parents near top feeder high schools or delivering timely messages to specific influencer groups, this targeted approach enhances the effectiveness of recruitment efforts.
Of course, identifying and targeting the right students is only part of the strategy. To further boost enrollment, institutions need to use financial aid strategically.
Leveraging and Optimizing Financial Aid for Enrollment Success
Financial aid is not just a tool for making college more affordable—it’s a key driver and strategic lever in a well-designed enrollment initiative. Institutions can use their own funds, combined with federal and state resources, to strategically shape their incoming class in alignment with institutional enrollment goals. Beyond traditional leveraging models, a next-level strategy to deploy is the optimization of aid leveraging models. Optimization occurs when those models are continually refined and combined with all other student behaviors to maximize the likelihood of that student enrolling at your institution while maximizing net tuition revenue. By deploying aid packages that align with a tailored enrollment approach effectively, institutions can attract and retain students and support broader institutional objectives.
Financial aid leveraging enables institutions to shape their incoming classes by combining institutional, federal, and state aid to best meet enrollment targets. Typically, institutions develop an annual financial aid strategy, making adjustments based on how well they met their goals in previous cycles. Liaison’s approach focuses on continuous evaluation and adjustment as needed throughout the year, using real-time data on student engagement at all stages of the recruitment cycle. This real-time adaptability lets institutions fine-tune their aid packages based on daily occurrences in the enrollment funnel, ensuring maximum efficiency and impact.
Using tools such as Liaison’s Othot AI solution, which provides predictive and prescriptive analytics, institutions can monitor how merit- and need-based aid is impacting student enrollment decisions throughout the year. By continuously analyzing students’ enrollment decisions and their financial aid engagement—using FAFSA data and other inputs—institutions can ensure aid packages are tailored to individual student needs and are progressing them toward enrollment. This granular, multitiered, data-informed, and student-centric approach contrasts with broad, aggregated strategies and allows for a more effective use of financial resources. Tailored financial aid strategies can take into account various factors, including where a student lives and whether they have visited the campus, to create a comprehensive aid formula that adapts in real time, allowing for continual fine-tuning for students and cohorts to drive toward your enrollment goals.
Another essential aspect of financial aid optimization is making sure that aid crosses a critical threshold. Offering enough to make the institution affordable, without over-awarding, can alleviate the strain on institutional resources and help maximize net tuition revenue. As a result, campuses are able to feel confident that they are maximizing their aid programs to their full effectiveness. Ultimately, this turns the financial aid conversation into a non-issue in the student’s decision-making process, freeing institutions to focus on other recruitment methods to refine further. Such multivariate, multilevel analysis (enabled by tools like Liaison’s Othot data analytics platform) helps predict which levers to pull for each student to increase the likelihood of enrollment while keeping financial aid within the institution’s budgetary constraints.
Real-world success stories highlight how financial aid optimization strategies can evolve to meet specific campus needs. For instance, an institution that adjusts its merit aid strategy to account for the inflation of high school GPAs could see a higher net tuition revenue (NTR), even if its enrollment numbers remain steady. This reflects a growing emphasis on maximizing NTR while ensuring equitable access for all student types.
Financial aid can also be tailored to meet institutional goals beyond enrollment numbers. For example, institutions can use aid to promote diversity, recruit underrepresented students for specific programs, and target specific geographic areas. By aligning aid strategies with broader institutional objectives like these, financial aid becomes a powerful tool for mission-driven enrollment.
Financial aid leveraging isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it strategy. Institutions must continuously optimize their models by analyzing how aid recipients perform, not just in terms of enrollment but also in terms of their retention and success rates. This longitudinal data approach allows for refinements that can improve future aid offerings, ensuring that financial aid supports not only enrollment goals, but also long-term student success.
Once financial aid strategies are fine-tuned, institutions need to focus on making their communications equally effective.
Crafting Timely and Personalized Communication
Effective communication with prospective students is crucial to enrollment success. Students no longer respond to generic messaging; instead, they expect immediate, personalized, and relevant communication that speaks directly to their interests and needs. Institutions that adopt a data-informed approach, incorporating automation, omnichannel strategies, and real-time feedback, can significantly enhance engagement and enrollment outcomes.
Immediacy is a foundational element of successful communication strategies. Sending the right message at the right time is critical for maintaining student interest. Many institutions mistakenly believe they are delivering personalized communication simply by inserting a student’s name or hometown into their messages. However, this level of personalization is superficial if the content itself doesn’t match what the student is seeking and may give the impression that their academic experience will also fail to meet their specific needs. For instance, sending a student interested in engineering a general overview of all programs will likely result in disengagement. Because students expect institutions to “get them,” personalized, relevant communication is essential to making them feel not only understood but welcomed.
Automation plays a pivotal role in sending timely, consistent communication. Without automation, there’s a risk of missing key engagement opportunities—whether due to human error, staff absence, or delays in processing. Automated workflows, driven by effective CRM systems, help institutions deliver consistent, relevant messages without depending on manual intervention. For example, institutions can automate reminders to complete applications and follow up after campus visits, using personalized content based on each student’s specific academic interests. Automating these processes ensures continuity even when staff members are unavailable and frees up their time to focus on more personalized outreach and one-on-one counseling.
Real-time tracking and feedback are also critical components of a successful marketing strategy. Many institutions struggle with tracking the effectiveness of their communications in terms of ROI. Tools that enable real-time analysis, such as monitoring email open rates or tracking social media engagement, let institutions adjust their messaging throughout the enrollment cycle. For instance, if an email campaign is not resonating with its target audience, institutions can tweak subject lines or messaging to better capture students’ attention and engagement rates. Real-time data allows for immediate, responsive adjustments to ensure that communication efforts are always in sync with student preferences.
Institutions must also adopt an omnichannel approach to communication in order to have an effective strategy. Students engage with multiple platforms, including email, social media, text, and even print. Institutions that use only one or two channels risk missing out on important opportunities to reach their target audience. Additionally, a disjointed approach that does not tie all the omnichannel approaches together based on the student can create a highly negative experience. An omnichannel strategy creates consistency across platforms, enabling a cohesive and memorable experience. For example, while email may engage the student, printed materials, like highly customized brochures sent to their home, can involve key influencers, such as parents, in the decision-making process. Print continues to remain one of the few mediums that brings the entire family into conversation.
Engaging other influencers, such as counselors and teachers, is also crucial, as they often play a significant role in shaping a student’s college planning decisions. Tailoring communication to these influencers ensures they have the information needed to support the student’s journey. For example, highlighting financial aid options or campus visit opportunities can help counselors steer students in the right direction and make parents feel more comfortable with their children’s choices, reinforcing those students’ decision to enroll.
A trackable, ROI-focused communication strategy with measurable outcomes ensures that all efforts are aligned. Liaison, for example, delivers real-time analytics solutions that let institutions monitor their campaigns in a way that provides clear, actionable insights. This approach—with every communication effort being immediate, relevant, automated, and trackable—has led to significant ROI improvements for institutions with carefully executed communication campaigns.
Continuous Refinement and Optimization of Enrollment Strategies
Institutions must be agile, adapting their enrollment strategies based on emerging higher ed enrollment trends, real-time data, the newest tools and services, and shifting student behaviors. Successful enrollment management can no longer rely on static, one-size-fits-all models to meet enrollment goals, but instead needs to embrace a dynamic, data-informed approach that enables timely adjustments and improves outcomes in real time.
One of the most critical aspects of continuous refinement is gathering timely and relevant data across all enrollment metrics throughout the entire enrollment cycle. This approach allows enrollment teams to make immediate impacts on the current year’s class, rather than waiting until the end of the cycle to evaluate what worked and what didn’t. By continuously analyzing all relevant data points throughout the cycle—such as application-to-enrollment conversion rates, student engagement levels, and the effectiveness of financial aid leveraging models—institutions can adjust their strategies throughout the process. The ability to look through the windshield rather than the rear-view mirror empowers institutions to be proactive, identifying areas for improvement as they arise.
Predictive and prescriptive analytics tools, like Othot, are invaluable in this process. These next-generation tools allow institutions to assess how their enrollment strategies are performing in real time and predict future outcomes. For instance, by examining historical data, institutions can see which actions—such as offering virtual campus tours or adjusting financial aid—have led to higher enrollment rates in the past. Prescriptive analytics goes a step further by suggesting specific actions to improve outcomes so institutions can test potential strategies against historical data before fully implementing them. This “what-if” analysis helps enrollment teams anticipate challenges and refine their approach on the fly, without waiting for the end of the recruitment cycle to see results.
Another important aspect of meeting today’s challenges in a new paradigm is maintaining real-time feedback loops. Enrollment strategies should not be static; rather, they need to be agile and adaptable to student behaviors throughout the entire cycle. This requires ongoing communication with enrollment teams and frequent adjustments to your approach based on real-time data. For example, if a specific communication campaign is underperforming for a group of students, teams can adjust the message to better suit the needs of prospective students. Institutions that actively monitor and respond to real-time feedback are better equipped to optimize their approaches, ensuring they are always addressing student preferences and institutional enrollment goals.
Institutions also face the challenge of adapting to unexpected changes in the external environment, such as those driven by demographic shifts, economic pressures, or global events like the COVID-19 pandemic. These changes can impact student enrollment patterns in ways that require quick and effective responses. For example, during the recent FAFSA delays, many institutions had to pivot their recruitment strategies mid-cycle, adjusting their financial aid approaches so they could still meet enrollment goals. By utilizing scenario planning and “what-if” frameworks, institutions that evaluated the potential impacts of these variables and developed flexible strategies were able to quickly adapt to meet rapidly evolving circumstances.
In recent years, many institutions have also been struggling with increasing—and unanticipated—turnover within their enrollment management teams. Turnover disrupts continuity and leads to a loss of institutional knowledge, adjusted responsibilities, and delays in an already highly time-sensitive environment. However, by fostering a strong data culture and utilizing consistent tools and technologies across the team, institutions can mitigate the impact of turnover. Tools such as Othot provide a reliable foundation, ensuring that the data-informed insights and strategies being used are not dependent on any single individual but are embedded in the institution’s overall enrollment framework.
Furthermore, continuous refinement must go beyond enrollment to focus on long-term student success. By tracking key success metrics—such as retention rates and academic performance—institutions can identify which recruitment strategies lead to the most successful outcomes for students. This information allows enrollment teams to refine their strategies year after year so they can not only meet short-term enrollment targets, but also help students find their sense of belonging and thrive over the long term.
The Path Forward: Embracing a New Era of Strategic Enrollment Management
As higher education enrollment management continues to evolve, institutions must adapt to these new realities and take advantage of the newest tools and services with a more strategic and data-informed approach that addresses their enrollment goals. The traditional recruitment funnel is no longer sufficient to meet the demands of today’s higher education environment. By “flipping the funnel” and focusing on highly personalized, data-informed enrollment strategies, institutions can more effectively attract, engage, and retain the right students.
A holistic approach that begins with identifying the right student cohorts through data analytics is at the heart of this transformation. Such initiatives involve crafting timely and personalized communication that resonates with students and their key influencers while simultaneously using financial aid to align with institutional goals. By incorporating real-time feedback and continuously refining strategies through tools like Othot, institutions can remain agile and responsive to changing student behaviors and external factors.
Flipping the enrollment funnel and embracing strategic enrollment management 2.0 is no longer a luxury but a necessity for institutions looking to thrive in a highly competitive higher education market. By adopting a personalized, data-informed approach, higher education leaders can meet their enrollment goals and set their students on a path to long-term success. This dynamic, forward-thinking strategy is essential for ensuring that institutions remain resilient, relevant, and successful in the future.
Contact Liaison today to discover how we can help you flip the funnel and achieve your undergraduate enrollment goals.
About the Author
Craig Cornell is the Vice President for Enrollment Strategy at Liaison. In that capacity, he oversees a team of enrollment strategists and brings best practices, consultation, and data trends to campuses across the country in all things enrollment management. Craig also serves as the dedicated resource to NASH (National Association of Higher Education Systems) and works closely with the higher education system that Liaison supports. Before joining Liaison in 2023, Craig served for over 30 years in multiple higher education executive enrollment management positions. During his tenure, the campuses he served often received national recognition for enrollment growth, effective financial aid leveraging, marketing enhancements, and innovative enrollment strategies.