Incorporating peer-to-peer into your conversion strategy
Attention university content creators and storytellers:
Not all stories have to be told by you.
When prospective students are trying to make a decision about which offer of admission to accept, one of the most important influences is connecting with current students.
How can you make peer-to-peer an official pillar of your conversion (or yield) strategy?
Here are three ways:
Outbound: Texting/SMS
Peer-to-peer is key
Connecting with current students is an important influence that affects prospective student decisions to enrol.
Step 1. Find a platform.
You may already have SMS capabilities within your CRM. The ideal platform for this exercise is one where texting can go back and forth (not just mass outbound), where you can assign texters to textees based on your own criteria, and neither the texter nor the textee can see an individual’s contact information. I have used ThruText* very successfully in the past. I also recently came across Goodkind*, which allows you to include personalized video!
Step 2. Recruit student volunteers (texters).
Ask your campus partners to share a volunteer form with the students in their faculty or area. A request coming from a counsellor or professor they recognize will get more volunteers than a request coming from a central office.
Step 3. Decide who texts whom.
Peer-to-peer conversations will be more powerful if the current and prospective students have something in common.
Does a prospective student want to hear from someone in their program, someone from their town, or someone that plays their sport? It depends, of course.
Create a hierarchy of affinity that aligns with your strategic priorities. If you want more local students to accept their offer, partner them with local students. If you want more students to a liberal arts program, partner them with rockstars in that program. If you want athletes, partner them with fellow athletes. And so on.
Remember you can only text students who have given you explicit permission to do so.
Step 4. Train your texters.
Set up an on-demand training and resource for your texters to use the platform. Give them answers to basic FAQs and a person or office to refer hard questions to. Offer a few tips on how to best represent the institution. Then…
Step 5. Let them loose.
Deploy your campaign. Your first message should introduce your texter and be open-ended, something like:
“Hi, I’m Day, I’m a student in business at [Institution]. Congrats on your offer! Are you still figuring out where you might go?”
Watch the magic happen. The authentic conversations and advice exchanged between peers—without your intervention—have the potential to significantly increase your conversion rates. (Read: It did when I tried it).
Inbound: Chat/Messaging/Video
Step 1. Recruit student ambassadors.
Find students that want to engage with prospective students and offer them the same or similar training you would offer your recruitment/admissions/front line staff.
Step 2. Set up a channel for prospective students to reach them.
There is no single way to do this. Depending on your budget and access to technology, here are some options:
You can set up student profiles on your website and provide a non-personal email address or set up Zoom office hours.
You can set up chat hours that are staffed by current students.
You can run AMA’s (ask-me-anything) on reddit or Instagram for prospective students to submit questions to current students.
You can work with a service like Unibuddy* that makes the peer-to-peer connection very easy and ongoing throughout the entire enrollment funnel.
Bonus: Anonymous peer-to-peer
Personally, I am a big fan of reddit for recruitment. At HighedWeb 2021, Steve App and I delivered a talk on how to best recruit on reddit. The slides we used for that talk are publicly available on r/RecruitingOnReddit (sort by new!).
If you have a strong team of student ambassadors, ask them to answer student questions on the subreddits where prospective students are talking about you. It’s important on reddit that your students act as they would act normally, without your intervention and without “polishing” their messages. They should be honest, even if their answers are negative. Reddit is not the place for branded messages.
With any of these activities, it is crucially important that students never have to share their personal contact information and that you are able to intervene immediately if any student (current or prospective) is in an unsafe situation.
Peer-to-peer is where it’s at, and yield is the best season for it. Set it up and watch your conversion soar and your melt take a nose-dive.
And if you want to talks specifics about how to set this up, grab a time on my calendar and we’ll talk it through.
* None of these vendor mentions are sponsored. Pickle Jar is not affiliated with them in any way. I’m including to point you in a direction to kick-start your tech search.
