FIX your RFI

How to stop killing conversions and sagging enrollments

Research from RNL confirms what we all know: Students don’t like to fill out long forms. In fact, nearly half of high school seniors and over one-third of juniors acknowledge stopping filling out a form because it was too long. Of course, we also know that students want engagement from colleges and universities to be personalized at every turn.

How are enrollment marketers supposed to personalize content for prospective students without asking too much?

Understand What You Need to Continue the Conversation

A lot of our standard inquiry flows are predicated on having basic contact information from our audience to send additional information. The tricky balance, of course, is getting what you need without asking for so much that the student decides it’s too much to fill out the form.

Unfortunately, “less is more” is easier said than done when communications scheduled within CRM systems have stringent requirements. 

Here’s what you need to communicate with a student:

• Name
• Email

Here’s what your CRM oftentimes thinks you need to communicate with a student:

• Name
• Email
• Mailing Address
• Phone Number
• Term of Entry
• Major of Interest
• High School Name (or worse, CEEB code)

Over 60% of students (and nearly three-quarters of Juniors) say an email is the best way to receive more information after submitting a form. In fact, here’s a rank order of the best online methods (i.e. methods for immediate response) that students say are best:

• Email with next steps (61%)
• Admissions officer email (56%)
• Text (46%)
• Call (17%)

If you only have one form of communication to use when reaching out to a student who submitted an RFI, the best one would be email. 

How Do You Fill in the Blanks?

If you are only collecting name and email, how can you fill in the blanks to keep your CRM admin happy while also ensuring personalized follow-up with your prospects? The easy answer is … talk to the student!

Campus Connect, Conduit’s live and embedded chat tool, allows you to ask for the basics while also quickly and easily capture more detailed information than any RFI form. The tool can be used to make on-demand video content on your Conduit platform more interactive while also allowing you to turn every page on your website into an opportunity for prospective students to submit an RFI.

Here’s a quick side-by-side comparison: