Distance education at Lehigh promotes personal connection with prospective students

In a world that is increasingly ruled by digital interactions, creating a personalized connection when marketing an online higher education can prove difficult. For one thing, lean marketing budgets and already packed daily schedules mean that marketing departments often don’t have the capital or bandwith to promote truly personal interactions with prospective students. Lisa Moughan, marketing and recruitment coordinator at the Office of Distance Education at Lehigh University, however, has found that creating a strategy around personal connections has been successful in converting leads, and even something prospective students expect. "Students are just like any other consumer," Moughan said. "They are very savvy. They want to feel engaged. They want to feel special."

We sat down with Lisa to discuss the steps her department took to incorporate personalized student outreach in their marketing strategy. Check out the video above or a text version of the Q&A below. Moughan will be speaking at our upcoming event, Effective Marketing for Online Education, which will be taking place December 9-11 in San Diego. For more information on Lisa, click here.

You'll be moderating a roundtable about building better student recruitment and retention processes. You say marketers should be focused on making this process personal and individualized. How have you done that at Lehigh?

As a marketer, I believe the more targeted and personal messaging that I can get to the prospective student, the better and quicker I will convert that prospect into a student. Our office has developed a set of processes and standards where we provide outreach and touch points to ensure students’ success from the point of them entering into the program to beyond graduation as an alumni champion of our program. I think that's important starting off right when they raise their hand and say they’re interested until the very end to continue on with that outreach as an alum.

The focus on personal connections makes sense from a marketers’ perspective—you want that direct connection, you want someone to be invested. Can you parse out for us what counts as this personalized and individualized attention?

Yes, students are just like any other consumer. They are very savvy. They want to feel engaged; they want to feel special. And today with the Internet, they can research and go on YouTube and find out rankings and everything they need to know as a savvy consumer. And what we want to know is we want to go ahead and direct the attention directly to them as a consumer. And I think from their perspective, they want to be trusted. They want to go ahead and have our trust that we have their best interest in mind. So, to me, as far as what counts is having that personal touch and trust between you and your client, your customer, and in our case, that would be a student prospect.

Personal touch points are something people aspire to as marketers, but maybe not something they have funding for or the time bandwidth for. Are there suggestions you would give to someone who has a lean marketing department and a lean budget but still wants to create personal relationships with prospective students?

As marketers, I think we all struggle at times with that lean support and resources. We have a very small office and a very limited budget. But the way we try to come over that hurdle is to engage and personalize that approach. We sometimes use graduate assistants who work part time, students that can help us make outbound and inbound calls. It's about developing a plan and a schedule. We have nine programs and six certificates, and roughly about 30 leads a month. So that's easy for us to manage. I know some institutions out there have anywhere between three to four hundred leads a week coming in through various channels. For us, we can manage that with the support in our office, and we're very selective with our marketing dollars and with our advertising.

We feel that a personal approach, campaigns that are targeted to a diverse audience and segmented help, and that's where we put our money versus this one approach effect, where we would go ahead and blast billboards and mass marketing. We do it with more of a minimal, simple, one-on-one approach, and that works for us. As far as suggestions with those challenges, again, working with TAs, graduate assistants, even alum to go ahead and help and do outreach and phone calls to prospective students.

Speaking of those marketing channels: Can you give us some examples of the ones you use for these personalized connections?

We use a variety. The way we handle that is through a series of social media with a personal approach. For instance, we have some alum who have become our champions. I look at it this way: They can tell the story of their experience better than I or anyone in our department. So, if we can go ahead, and ask them to go ahead and speak—whether it be at an information session or making some outbound phone calls to some students who are particularly interested in their major or curriculum—that has helped. Email campaigns, absolutely. But the key to that is targeted email campaigns to a segmented group. You want to make sure that person on the other end understands that you're talking directly to them, even though it may be a mail merge and even though it may be going out as a mass email, you want to make sure that they feel the personal touch.

For us, with graduate students, this is normally a life change for them. There's a reason why they're coming back to school — a most recent layoff, a mid-career change that they want to ahead and build that resume. There's a need out there and we want to go out and accommodate them and get to know them.

It sounds like you're using all of these different channels to reach prospective students: Have their behaviors and preferences changed as we move into a more digital environment and digital world?

Over time they have changed their preference. They are full time employees looking for part time graduate programs in a very niche market, so their time is valuable and they want to get an answer to their questions. Our role is to guide them along that journey, so when they feel they can raise their hand and they're ready to go ahead and register for a course or to apply to a program, they have everything that that positive outcome will happen. Their behaviors: they want their questions answered, and they want to make sure we go ahead and take them by the hand and provide that one-on-one approach to whether it be a faculty member they need to speak to, a financial person in the advisory council that they need to speak to and someone who can go ahead and help them have a positive outcome. Years ago I think it was this mass market approach that they didn't really know what was available to them and now they have a lot choices and there's a lot of competition and they want to make sure they're going to get the best education and value.