CRM for Private Schools: Reach Families with Tailored Marketing

With 63 percent of private schools growing admissions over the past five years, families are more open to the private school experience than ever before. However, this also means the competition for students has never been greater, so how does your school’s admissions department plan to reach relevant families with the most relevant offers?

Ninety-five percent of marketers have found success from tailored marketing campaigns that provide messages specific to each audience. So how do you create these personalized communications across vast family types, locations, and interest levels?

In this blog, we’ll go over the types of data to collect, how to use the customer relationship management (CRM) tool for your private school to create audiences from that data, and from there how to best deploy personalized marketing campaigns that inspire action.

Understand Your Data

Tailored marketing campaigns rely heavily on audience segmentation, which is the process of grouping groups of contacts together based on shared traits. For example, you may have the email addresses of every student, parent, and teacher within the CRM for your private school, but for a reminder to sign up for upcoming parent-teacher conferences, you will want to create an audience consisting of all the parents, since this message is most relevant to them.

In the private school admissions context, there are two major types of data you’ll want to collect. The first comes from application forms, questionnaires, and interest forms, called demographic data. This data includes information about the individuals themselves, such as student gender, age, number of children within a family, etc. Segmenting by location, income, and current school are typically the most useful for recruiting campaigns.

The other type of data comes through analytics sites and website plugins. Behavioral data reflects how contacts interact with your marketing efforts, including your emails, website, and communications. This data provides insights into contact interest, which when acted upon lets you to target those most likely to apply and enroll.

Each of these data types allows for more targeted groups, and in combination, these create even more granular audiences. In general, the more targeted an audience, the more resonant your messaging.

Common Demographic-Based Campaigns

Different audiences react differently to messaging and offers, as a variety of factors influence each person. Understanding these factors for as many target families as possible informs more effective campaigns, driving more interest forms and applications.

The following are common demographic-powered use cases you can consider for inspiration.

Location

Most private schools are limited to recruiting the communities around their physical campus, but microtargeting this wide area gives you a better understanding of where best to spend your resources. Use the CRM for your private school to reach more regional contacts based on zip code, allowing you to fine-tune messages based on county, city, and/or neighborhood.

Over time, engagement data provides insights into how different location-based audiences interact with your messaging. Here are some ways to apply these insights.

Experiment expanding campaigns to nearby regional neighborhood locations.
Redistribute resources to your best pipeline areas, focus your efforts on areas that are most likely to generate positive returns.
Exclude locations too far away or with too little interest, preventing wasted outreach efforts.

One final consideration – use location data to segment audiences according to the number of competing schools nearby. This can better inform tuition discounts, creating more enticing promotions, and ensuring additional offers to meet diverse applicant needs, including financial aid support.

Income

Another method of demographic-based segmentation revolves around family income. In one hypothetical scenario, a school may tailor messaging to higher-income households touting school prestige and academic success, highlight the lifetime value of education to middle-income brackets, and promote the abundance of scholarships available for students of working-class families.

The data within your private school CRM provides insights to enable schools to create more concise marketing and financial aid strategies. Check out these examples.

Better support diversity initiatives with campaigns that better promote scholarships and resources available to families historically discouraged by high tuition.
Use income information from applicants and targeted families to project the funds needed to meet financial aid demand.
Over time, review changing income trends in certain areas to inform competitive tuition pricing.

Crafting Effective Messaging for Different School Environments

Understand how to best speak to families’ expectations, values, and needs by speaking to their current school situation. Retention messaging aimed at convincing current families to re-enroll will differ from recruitment messaging for students at competing private schools, which will differ from students at public schools – and don’t forget the unique environment of homeschooling.

Messaging for each of these audiences will depend on numerous factors, and here are some to consider.

The right message to the right family. E.g., your school’s retention campaign would look very different from a new student campaign. By using family enrollment data in your student information system, you’ll be able to make sure re-enrollment audiences don’t receive campaigns with information they are already aware of.
Highlight your school’s unique advantages. E.g., a small, specialized school will offer a more intimate educational experience compared to the only high school in a mid-size suburb. This will not apply if you’re recruiting a student from a similar specialized private school.
Historical data. E.g., Use your private school’s CRM and demographic data to create two audiences of students who left your school for another, either one-to-two or three-to-four years prior. Many private school students experience a transition from elementary to middle school. During this time, there may be a decline in enrollment as some families choose to switch to public schools due to factors such as cost, curriculum differences, or a desire for a larger school environment. Reach out with relevant offers based on how much time has passed, and if these families provided information of what school type they left for, you can further target messaging using the above factors.

As with all demographic data, you will need to ensure all interest, application, and current student forms include demographic fields with the information you wish to later base segments upon.

Capturing Behavioral Data in Your Private School CRM

Families dedicate many hours to researching and finding the right school for their children. This includes research of area schools, website visits, open-house visits, calls, and your school’s outreach messages to get the application submitted. With behavioral data, private K-12 schools are able to better engage those who have shown interest in your school across diverse marketing channels to encourage families to complete the school admission process.

Website Visits: Form Fills

Often a prospective family’s first point of interaction with your school is your website. To take advantage of these first interactions, schools need to have a data capture form that not only collects demographic information through form fills, but also a way to track visitor interactions to inform future audience creation perfect for drip campaigns and highly targeted communications.

Private schools have historically used websites primarily to persuade visitors to take the next step in their enrollment journey, but the potential also exists to further “nudge” uncommitted families based on how often and which pages they interact with on your site. Every page visit, every button click, every donation reflects interest but may need additional communication to prompt a family to start the admissions application process and complete it.

There are two options to capture this behavioral data. As touched on above, one way to capture site visitor data is to have forms on your website, which can also guide users to the next step of the recruitment process. For example, a parent on your website will have a general interest in your school, so providing a form to schedule a campus tour signals interest in further information. This form helps schools track new student interest and additionally captures contact information, location, availability, and any other key information you can reuse in future audience segmentations.

Schools can use different tools for additional lead capture including:

Newsletter signups for community events, school updates, and application deadlines.
Enrollment and financial aid applications.
Event-based signups, such as financial aid workshops and campus tours.
Chatbots on your site to troubleshoot application questions or concerns.

This information site users voluntarily submit is called zero-party data. To gather additional data, schools can also explore an integration or third-party app.

Website Visits: First, Second, and Third-Party Data

While zero-party data is the most convenient source of family information, most website visitors do not act on the first session. In these cases where visitors do not explicitly identify themselves, you need complementary strategies to fill the gap.

What data-capture strategies you employ depend on the most effective methods for your unique school environment. These include the following.

First-Party Data, which in private school recruitment refers to information collected via direct actions on the school website, such as pages visited, number of website visits over a timeframe, and online workshop sessions attended. Website tracking tools such as Google Analytics collect this data and provide analytics. First- and zero-party data is considered the most reliable to act upon, since it comes directly from the people you want to target.
Second-Party Data, which is data originating from a trusted partner, isn’t always paid based on the nature of the partnership. For example, a Catholic diocese may ask interested parishioners for contact information so they can forward it to their local schools. Another common example: a PreK-8 school may send student and family information to a partner high school to begin recruitment efforts.
Third-Party Data, which has come under fire from consumers and tech platforms alike, comes from another party, often completely unrelated to your organization. Most marketers are moving to minimize their reliance on third-party cookies amid increasing legal restrictions, and the lack of behavioral intent (often just a list of contact information without context into how or why this data was acquired) prevents reliable insights into user intent. Verify the origins of whatever data you acquire to ensure you don’t waste efforts on disinterested families.

When your team decides to collect behavioral data, it’s important to understand how to best use it once in the CRM for private school admissions and re-enrollment campaigns.

Where Cookies Fit In

Whether you operate in the United States or Canada, laws exist that subject your school to data management regulations. In America, these include the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which limits data collection of minors under the age of 13; the California Consumer Privacy Act, which gives consumers insight and control over how their data is collected and shared; and similar laws recently passed in Virginia, Utah, Colorado, and Connecticut. Contrary to popular belief, HIPPA does not apply to schools, but there are state laws regulating the use of student health information.

Canada has its own set of regulations, including the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, so if you also recruit Canadian students, be sure your school is aware of how these laws impact your ability to collect data in your private school’s CRM and use it to create audiences for recruitment campaigns.

Email Analytics

In email, engagement signals your best subscribers, and marketers have traditionally relied on open rates to determine audience engagement. Given increased privacy settings, however, you’ll need to dig deeper to best nurture potential applicants.

Roughly 75 percent of iOS users opted into Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, which reports every email as ‘opened,’ regardless of subscribers’ actual engagement. Having led to greatly inflated open and click-to-open rates, it’s important to monitor alternative metrics.

Clicks and Click-Through Rate: Contacts that interact with the calls-to-action (CTAs) in your emails find value in your communications and are primed for additional communications on a similar theme.
Conversions and Conversion Rate: These are very interested contacts who not only interact with your emails but find value in the events, workshops, and brochures on your website.
Unsubscribe Rate: These are contacts no longer interested in your school. This sentiment may come from either choosing another school or receiving too many communications from yours.

Common Behavioral-Based Campaigns

Now that we’ve discussed how to collect and monitor behavioral data, let’s review how to best deploy it in your marketing strategy. The following are common scenarios where behavioral data ensures more resonant campaigns.

Nurtures

Decisions as large as a child’s education aren’t made in a single day. Nurture campaigns, also called drip campaigns and lead nurturing, provide an opportunity to follow up on key events in the recruitment cycle, such as attending an event or hosting a free financial aid workshop for parents.

The key here is to automate these campaigns, prewriting a cadence of emails that will send out automatically when triggered by the key event, regardless of timeline. These emails are sent over a desired timeline to optimize for conversions that guide families to the next phase.

You can complement these with manual campaigns using behavioral data. For example, you may wish to customize a nurture cadence for those who complete the key event of signing up for a financial aid webinar. These emails can include information exclusively mentioned in the webinar for a personalized touch.

Most-Engaged Subscribers

Engagement scoring is the process used to sort subscribers in your private school’s CRM into tiers by how they engage with communications, websites, and online events. At the end of this process, each subscriber will have a score indicating how relevant their interaction with your content is for future campaigns. With this knowledge, your team can engage the highest-scoring families with additional content they are more likely to be receptive to.

To calculate the score, use a combination of both behavioral and demographic data. These are the steps to follow.

Determine what criteria will have either a positive or negative score. You will want behavioral data to reflect engagement, but you also want demographic data to ensure relevant subscribers. For example, a moderately engaged subscriber three miles from your campus is a better target than a highly engaged subscriber 300 miles away.
Defining the numeric value of how important each criterion is, based on impact. For example, a parent routinely attending events will have more impact on the final score than one who only signed up for your newsletter.
Calculating how the points each subscriber collects will turn into an overall engagement score. Separate the demographic from behavioral. E.g., a parent of low engagement is A (highly relevant person to target) + 3 (low engagement), combining for an easily sortable score of A3.
Based on each subscriber’s final engagement score, sorting into corresponding tiers and creating next steps for each.

From here, you can better determine which subscribers are better to add to additional campaigns and which are ready for pruning from the CRM for your private school.

Retargeting

You can get back in front of website visitors through retargeting ads, which reappear on their social media feeds and the websites/apps they use. Use retargeting to remind prospective families of the value your school provides based on the site pages they viewed, reinforcing their interest and guiding them back to complete the next step of the recruitment journey.

Know When to Disengage

While it’s important to understand your best subscribers to better target them, admissions teams can also work to keep a clean database – that means removing the least-interested contacts when the time is right.

By taking the time to periodically clean out your school’s CRM, your team can avoid the following:

Wasting outreach efforts on irrelevant leads. Especially after the admissions cycle resets, you may be talking to families that moved away from the area you serve or now have kids that recently graduated. You would continue to spend money on outreach to irrelevant families.
Unsubscribing. Sending too many emails to uninterested contacts can cause them to unsubscribe from all messages, preventing you from reaching them for any future communications. For families that had been on the fence and considered enrollment at a future date, there is now no way to contact them unless they re-subscribe.
Getting emails marked as Spam. A contact may mark your content as spam. If this happens too many times, email providers like Gmail will automatically send every email from your school’s domain straight to the spam inbox, without the option of your family contact seeing it.

So how do you prune these contacts? Using that same engagement scoring system mentioned above, now identify those most irrelevant or disengaged. With the reassurance of email and website engagement data, you can confidently remove these from your private school CRM.

Another strategy is to send out periodic opt-in emails to disengaged subscribers, ideally around the time enrollment season begins. This way you can verify interest and avoid removing relevant contacts.

Marketing Strategy Equals Strong Data Insights

Your marketing strategy is only as strong as the data behind it. Understanding how to best reach potential applicant families through different types of data empowers your admissions team to maximize marketing reach, achieve diversity initiatives, and build the best applicant pool possible.

And it all starts with having a CRM tailored to the unique needs of private schools and capable of handling whatever data you need to collect. Learn how TADS houses the information you need for all things admissions and enrollment under one umbrella.