Can Hyper-Personalization Work in University Recruiting?

0:00:10.8 Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. Today we look at new research into how students feel about the information universities sent them during the recruiting process. More specifically, our researchers wanted to find out how students feel when universities use personal information they collect, or that’s provided by the students themselves, to tailor a specific set of messages that is more relevant to a given student’s interests. It’s a simple idea, but new technologies are allowing schools to test the limits of hyper-personalization that gives them the ability to create bespoke messages to thousands of prospective students. So give these folks a listen and enjoy.

0:01:00.4 Michael Koppenheffer: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. My name is Michael Koppenheffer, and I lead a team of EAB marketers who help universities differentiate their institutions to appeal to prospective students and families. As with all kinds of marketing, it requires a blend of art and science to be successful. Now, fortunately for EAB and the schools we work with, EAB employs some of the best researchers, strategists, and creatives in the business. So people who are exceptionally skilled at asking the right questions to uncover what matters to students, families, and other stakeholders. One of the very best practitioners of this art and science is a former university professor who is also trained as a consumer behaviorist and statistician. I am, of course, talking about the head of EAB’s enrollment services research group, my friend and colleague, Dr. Pam Royall. Pam, welcome back to Office Hours.

0:02:05.0 Pam Royall: Thanks, Michael. It’s great to be with you, and I’m especially excited about this opportunity to talk about a topic that’s of special interest to both of us.

0:02:14.7 MK: Yeah, likewise. Very excited about the research that we’re gonna share. Before we do that, though, Pam, you have been at the center in many ways of the evolution of modern higher education marketing across really the past several decades. Do you mind sharing briefly how you got into this line of work?

0:02:35.4 PR: Well, you’ve already exposed me as a former university professor. That’s really where it started. So I have an undergraduate degree in religion with an emphasis in Asian studies, so really, marketing was not part of what I did until I got into my MBA and PhD studies. But as a faculty member and a former department chair at a number of different large public universities, I was often called upon by my university colleagues to weigh in on questions of marketing strategy. I mean, I was a marketing professor, head of the marketing department, and I was also very interested in communications. I spent a little bit of time in advertising, so that was always in my background. But on campuses, people wanted to know what I was thinking about in terms of strategy for student recruitment, for advancement, for alumni relations, and also general institutional branding. So my PhD is in business administration. I concentrated on marketing, and within marketing, consumer behavior.

0:03:46.6 PR: I’ve often said that my first almost 20 years, I was thinking about consumers in the marketplace, and now I’m thinking about students as they make college choice and all of the social and psychological and environmental factors. And you’ve already mentioned, we’re always thinking about the other influencers, so families and other stakeholders. My dissertation research was on survey method, data collection using surveys, and really explored some of the psychological and social determinants of data quality. Now, that sounds really academic, and I realize that, but as a business professor, I was always focused on the implications of academic research for business practice. I was always thinking about what it means for practitioners and for the audiences that they serve, the consumers and their behaviors. Accordingly, the transition from university professor to my work at EAB as head of research was virtually seamless, and that was over 20 years ago already.

0:05:05.7 MK: Wow, thank you for sharing. I actually did not know what your dissertation was on, even though we’ve worked together for so long. So I’m delighted to get to share it, not just today, but with our audience. I want to transition to one of the newest surveys that your team has done on behalf of EAB and our partners and higher education as a whole. And that is the survey that focuses on how students feel about personalized communications. So the idea of colleges using the information that they might gather or intuit about a student to tailor messages in a way that hopefully makes those communications, that information, more relevant and useful.

0:05:52.0 MK: I was thinking about what you just said about students as consumers. As consumers, we expect this in today’s modern hyper data-aware economy. We expect the communications are gonna be personalized, relevant, timely, targeted. And it was very interesting and a great opportunity to be able to use an instrument like this survey to figure out the ways in which students also have these expectations and the ways that they might differ from other consumers. Can you tell us a little bit more about this survey that you conducted about how students feel about the practice of personalization?

0:06:32.7 PR: I sure can. And I’ll begin with a thanks to you, Michael. Much of the work that my group at EAB takes on each year is determined by the work that you’re doing. So you tell us what you’re hearing or what you’re wondering about, and then we get to design studies in response to the requests that you receive. And in this case, you were a close collaborator. For studies like this one, our goal is always to pursue investigations that will net the most relevant results for our partners. So during the research design process, we’re focused on what we believe would be the most interesting and actionable topics related to personalization in student communications. The survey was fielded last month, and this is the first opportunity we have to talk about it, and that’s exciting to me.

0:07:30.4 PR: When I say what students told us, what we learned from students, I would be remiss in not noting 1,655 students responded to this survey on personalization. So we’re really thrilled by the amount of interest in the topic and also the participation that received. First, let me tell you, we learned that in terms of using data to customize messaging, almost half, and I mean 49.4% of the students said they like it or they love it. And that is when colleges use personal information to customize communications for them. And if our listeners are wondering, well, what did the other half think? 43% of them were basically neutral. So they didn’t love it, they didn’t hate it. They were what I interpret as okay with it, right? Only 6% indicated that they dislike it, and only 1.5% said they hate it.

0:08:36.2 PR: So they’re not frankly as sensitive to it as I thought they might be. The vast majority think that this is the way life is. So I think it’s safe to assume that students want and may even expect personal communications, personalized communications. One of the things that we did learn, however, is that the communications that students have been receiving from colleges made most students, and this is a quote, feel like they were just another name or another email address. More than half indicated that the communications they receive are basic, more than one in five indicated that the communications they receive feel out of touch, and 14% indicated that the communications feel old or outdated.

0:09:37.8 MK: For those of us who spend most of our working hours trying to craft and deploy those communications on behalf of colleges, that is a bit of a wake-up call, right?

0:09:46.8 PR: Absolutely. Yep. And my conclusion is these findings tell me that we can do better, right? And students are setting the bar for us. Almost 40% of the students indicated that colleges were sending them information that doesn’t really interest them.

0:10:04.6 MK: Wow. That is a sizable percentage. It does suggest that collectively as higher education marketers, we can do better.

0:10:13.1 PR: That’s right.

0:10:13.8 MK: To take the positive spin on it. And one of the things that did surprise me about the findings was not just what you shared about the fact that nearly a majority said that they liked or loved personalized communications, but how little concern there was about the privacy implications of personalizations, the idea that colleges and universities were collecting information about individual students and trying to use it in the communications that didn’t seem to trigger widespread concern on the part of these students, which is only interesting given the ongoing narratives in the wider society that we have about privacy, about the rights to not have your online and offline behaviors monitored and tracked and aggregated. So it seems like for today’s high school students, the notion of privacy is not an overwhelming concern for most.

0:11:15.3 PR: That’s right. And the expectation, the positive feelings they expressed about personalized messages came through in student responses. When asked what they liked most about personalized communications from colleges, more than half of the students indicated that personalized messages make things more relevant, useful, and more helpful. And almost one third indicated that personalized messages actually save them time, which is valuable to them. What I would say is that students do expect us to do our homework. They know that the information is available and as savvy as they are about how businesses are using personal information, the Netflixes and Amazons in their lives, it’s no surprise that they expect colleges and universities to be more sophisticated in their messaging than many have been to date.

0:12:19.4 MK: That message certainly is coming out loud and clear in the survey, which makes me wonder, and hopefully I’m not being defensive on behalf of all the colleges out there that have been doing marketing basically the same way for a long time, but what is wrong with just sending a view book, a college brochure in the mail to a prospective applicant that is not personalized and expecting them to do their homework because ultimately we’re expecting them to take on a greater degree of personal responsibility as a college student, why can’t they go the extra mile instead of having it to be colleges and universities doing this work?

0:12:58.7 PR: Well, students know that we have the technology. They expect us to use it, but when we don’t, they miss out on the benefits that they derive from personalized messages. So they’ve told us you can make this more helpful, more useful, more relevant, and when you don’t, you’re basically signaling that I’m not as important as I think I should be. So as examples, we learned that almost three quarters of students reported that personalized messages make them feel desired as a prospective student. More than 60% indicated that personalized messages make them feel connected to the college.

0:13:45.5 PR: Simply mailing your standard brochure or inviting students to check out the website are not as helpful, useful, or relevant as these personalized messages can be, and students have now raised their hand and said, when you do this, I benefit. Instead of making the student do the work to find out if the college is a personal or potential fit, they are signaling to us, many of them are aware, you’ve got my data, use it. I’ve told you what I want, give me what I want. So I think we’re positioned to really respect the fact that this is stressful, it’s a difficult time for them, and anything that we as the potential institutional home for these students can do to help is going to be well received.

0:14:49.4 MK: Again, that just feels like such a strong message from these students to colleges and universities, and some of the words you used in those top-scoring responses like connected and desired, those are the emotions and the attributes that we are all trying so hard to foster in our communications with prospective students and families. You want to create that authentic connection, you want to convey the sense that these students are truly desired and encouraged and supported, and the fact that we are in essence given a roadmap to how to do that better, it’s hard to ignore, right?

0:15:27.8 PR: Exactly.

0:15:30.4 MK: So one of the many things I liked about the survey is you offered a few opportunities for students to provide free text responses. So we actually have verbatim quotes from the survey of what students are really thinking themselves. I wonder, are there any specific responses of this nature that you came across as you were reviewing the findings that you took particular notice of? Maybe you kind of sit up and think about it.

0:16:00.3 PR: Well, first, Michael, I wanna note for our listeners the sheer volume of verbatim comments that students provided. We designed the survey as you suggested with multiple opportunities for students to expand on ideas to suggest things that maybe we had not thought of ourselves, and when I see hundreds of students electing to write in these additional thoughts, I generally conclude that the topic is something that matters to them. They’ve thought about it and it is important to them, and that’s really exciting in the context of this research in particular. Well…

0:16:40.2 MK: And not something we see in every survey, right?

0:16:42.2 PR: That’s exactly right. Scant as a general rule, but hundreds of verbatims, and while many of those verbatims indicated that students were impressed when a school used their name in its messaging, what really enhanced their sense of personalization was a combination of using their name and their interests, something else we knew about them, and they were most impressed when the personalized messages felt personal, and that’s cool. As one of the students wrote, “It was like an actual person is talking to me and suggesting things to help me with my future success.” In similar ways, other verbatims indicated that students respond well to messages that demonstrate empathy and caring. “It was like I mattered.” “They acknowledged how stressful college prep is for seniors.” “The messages matched my hopes and aspirations.”

0:17:55.4 PR: I mean, you can just hear the passion that students are responding with when we treat them as if they truly matter and we want to do what we can to nurture and ensure their success. Student’s responses also indicated that personalized still means handwritten for some students, and I think that’s worth noting. While the majority of comments highlighted that email messages that were simply non-robotic were perceived as personalized, there are some students that are thinking that personalization is really a handwritten note or letter, like a coach may send a recruit, for example. Some of these students suggested that any email that feels like a personal handwritten note really impressed them. So one last example. One student wrote, “A school that took the time to write a message for each major shows dedication to applicants.”

0:19:09.0 MK: It’s well put.

0:19:10.2 PR: Yeah. So that’s some of what students are saying, and I know that your job, Michael, is to interpret the results, to think through what the real world implications of how universities might incorporate knowledge into their marketing efforts. How are you advising partner institutions on the issue of hyper-personalization, and what kinds of new approaches are you most keen to test with them?

0:19:44.0 MK: Great question, Pam. A couple of things come to mind spurred directly by the results that you just shared. One thing that I’m taking away from this survey and one that we have continued to advise our, the partners that we work with to do, is to make sure that you don’t forget the personal enroute to hyper-personalization. A lot of what students highlighted in their responses, just like you were saying, using their first name, having a personal tone, having a seemingly handwritten communication, that’s not actually about hyper-segmentation or interest-based targeting. That’s actually about writing like a human being and having a tone that authentically connects. And that doesn’t actually require any advanced technology at all. It requires knowledge of yourself, knowledge of your prospective applicant or your prospective students and it requires the ability to communicate authentically, and not to make it sound like those things are easy, but that’s nothing new.

0:20:50.2 MK: And we have seen for many years that colleges and universities that are able to forge a personal connection with students tend to do better in, across the enrollment funnel. And so that is a reinforcement of what we believe to be pretty much a perennial truth about the relationship between colleges and universities and the high school students and their families. So that is the first thing. And I don’t want dismiss that as we start to talk about things that are more gee whiz and high tech. Having said that, we do believe that the time is right for higher education to take advantage of some of the approaches and technologies that big consumer brands like Netflix and Amazon have been for a number of years now. And thanks to the advent of generative AI and machine learning and some of these related technologies, the progress we’ve seen is going to enable us to test and evaluate a whole lot of new, like you said, hyper-personalized approaches for trying to tailor messages specifically to students.

0:22:01.9 MK: So I love that example you gave and that verbatim response about the communications that are specific to every major, because that is a nice tactic to be able to respond to a student’s specific interest with a very specific communication about a major. Many institutions, probably most that we work with, they do not have the capacity to have accurate up-to-date compelling messages about every major and actually accurately target them to students or families with specific interests. And it’s just because of the limits of time in the day, expert copywriters, the ability to coordinate with deans and faculty members, it is when you try to figure out in ordinary life how to be truly deeply segmented and specifically personal, it is beyond the limits of manual intervention for nearly every team, if you really try to play it out. And that’s why we are really leaning into the idea of figuring out how we can use generative AI, but also all of the data that we collect and aggregate and synthesize and normalize to try to create enough variations that we can actually bring some of these ideas to life at scale for our partners.

0:23:30.0 MK: So for instance like it’s in some ways that might be seemingly familiar. So different communication for every major of interest or every career area of interest or so forth, but there’s some things that are possible that I don’t think we’ve necessarily really seen or thought of before. So for instance, many colleges will communicate to in-state or out-of-state students differently or in region or out of region. Thanks to the power of generative AI, you could actually not just have one, two, three, four variations, you could have hundreds of variations that are very specific to the value proposition of coming to your area based on where a student is coming from. If you’re in the mountains, you could have one message that is about students who live at the beach, one of the students that, about students who live in the plains, another student message about students who live by the river, you could literally, we actually have piloted this a couple of times. You could do a couple of hundred variations that are very different and very specific about articulating the differentiated value proposition, depending upon where a student is coming from.

0:24:39.8 MK: And you can do that based on the tasks a student has took, the subjects they’re focused on. Like the possibility is really endless about this, what I call super granular segmentation. It’s really only possible with the help of AI. But it is definitely an area of real potential. And that’s an example of the kind of things that we are right now beginning to pilot and test. And I use those terms actually very intentionally because for all this survey has told us that students want a deep level of personalization and for all that we believe that AI and other technologies are going to empower us to deliver some of that, that we don’t necessarily know what is truly going to improve the efficacy of our campaigns till we test and measure and iterate. And almost always, the first ideas out of the gate, some of them work, some of them don’t. And so we have a really robust testing agenda ahead of us for the next 18 months or so to try all of these different variations of how we might be hyper-personalizing, figure out what works and what doesn’t.

0:25:57.5 PR: So exciting. I mean, to be in a position where we can do that, that rigorous testing and the very strategic piloting, it’s one of the advantages that we have that is unparalleled. I just think it’s so exciting. We work with so many dedicated counselors and others working at admissions and so many of them are having direct conversations with individual students and they’re using that to inform the kinds of communications that they do. And that might feel more natural to them, but we need to imagine scale. And I would ask you, what are the risks of relying too heavily on information that’s gained outside of those more traditional information gathering techniques to really attempt to create bespoke marketing pitches to individual students?

0:27:02.9 MK: I’m glad you brought up the concept of risks here because hyper-personalization exposes colleges and enrollment teams to a new level of risk that probably haven’t contended with before in terms of the accuracy of information and the accuracy of the inferences you’re making based on that information. Of course, there are many ways to screw up today without advanced technologies and anyone who has done this work for a long time has unfortunately seen all kinds of errors that can happen ’cause data is wrong or inconsistent across systems because things have been set up wrong. But when you think about a hyper-personalized world, you are potentially exposing your communications to a, like an exponential number of more data points.

0:27:57.2 MK: So instead of maybe I’m wrong about your first name, I’m gonna call you John instead, that’s a bad error. But what if I’m triggering off of seven different data points, each one of which could have accuracy or integrity issues? The possibility of getting things wrong is significantly higher. Likewise, as you may have heard about, today’s generative AI technologies, while they are magical in many ways, they also are not infallible. They make mistakes, they make things up and there are many ways to try to reduce those risks, but nobody seems to have found a way to eliminate those risks. And so the way that we are proceeding is, in short, with caution.

0:28:41.8 MK: And in particular, we are not proposing to have AI bots write emails on behalf of colleges and universities wholesale anytime in the foreseeable or projectable future. What we are thinking about is how can you have a human expert, content creator, copywriter, designer, create the communication and then identify zones of personalization, ways that we can interpolate what we know in a controlled way and swap those in or out because ultimately, like, we believe that the risks are manageable, the risks are real, and we’re gonna have to have new approaches for how we manage those.

0:29:26.4 PR: Yeah. Gosh, what a moment for us as kind of career marketers, right?

0:29:34.7 MK: Yeah, it really does feel like the most transformative moment that I can remember basically since like email came along or maybe the rise of social media and social ads. It feels like one of those moments that really is a inflection in the way that marketers and advertisers of all kinds connect with consumers, and it just happens as often does. I think higher education is one, two, three years behind where some of the really well-resourced mega brands are in the economy, but we are going to be taking the same journey they are. And so I think it is going to be an exciting time for those of us who work in marketing enrollment for higher education, but it’s also gonna be a time of quick change and a whole lot of market dynamism.

0:30:26.3 PR: Yep. Yep. It’s clear to me based on these findings and other work that we’re doing that we need to focus on the advantages of personalization. What it offers students, a greater sense of self, that who they are matters to the colleges that are recruiting them, that they’re being heard when they tell us what’s important to them. And what I take away from our results is that students indicate that personalized messages may actually abate some of the stress associated with the college search process. And that would be hugely beneficial to students and their families.

0:31:12.4 MK: I totally agree with that. And I’ll also say that some of what we saw in the survey suggests that we could actually see effectively executed personalization provide encouragement to students who might be on the fence as to whether they’re gonna attend college at all. As we all know, the last decade has seen a big drop in college going rate and we have all been searching for the silver bullet that might turn that trend around. I’m not saying that personalization or hyper-personalization is that strategy, but your survey suggests that personal approaches and personalized approaches to marketing communication could play an important role.

0:31:54.8 PR: Absolutely.

0:31:55.9 MK: It’s been such a fun conversation. I wish we could continue it for another hour or two, but I have to imagine that our listeners might have other things to do with their days or their commutes. So instead, maybe we should cut it off here and see if we get a future invite next time we have a great survey that comes out and some new findings to share with the Office Hours and EAB listeners.

0:32:19.4 PR: Sounds great. Thanks again, Michael. I really thought that our collaboration on this research was particularly fun and productive.

0:32:28.7 MK: Me too. Thank you, guys.