AI is changing the game for graduate and adult student recruitment—here’s how

How could AI transform the ways we reach and recruit students? How can AI make a meaningful impact on enrollments? How can AI make our team’s work more efficient and more effective?

These are just a few of the questions that have been top of mind for our team of AI experts—and for the graduate enrollment leaders we serve—as generative AI has become mainstream. It’s not news that personalization is one of the most effective ways to reach students and to differentiate a program or institution from competitors. And with generative AI, our ability to personalize content at scale has reached new heights.

I’m excited to share more about how we define hyper-personalization and how we’re using it to enhance graduate and adult programs marketing.

What is hyper-personalization?

Hyper-personalization is a marketing strategy that uses AI and machine learning to enable one-to-one marketing at scale. It relies on data to tailor marketing content to an individual’s needs and preferences, creating a unique experience for every customer. Accurate hyper-personalization requires an extensive amount of data about the consumer—or in this case, the student—you’re trying to reach. For example, our team connects disparate data systems together into one ecosystem, combining campaign marketing data, list source data, institutional data, behavioral data from across .edu pages, and Appily Advance data to inform personalization.

The result: each prospective student receives highly personalized content at the right moment in their journey, improving the student’s experience with your marketing and leading to higher conversion rates.

How we’re hyper-personalizing marketing campaigns—and early results

We’ve focused our hyper-personalization efforts on a few key areas:

Recruitment emails

One of the most exciting ways we’re using hyper-personalization is in email marketing. When I mention email marketing, I’m often met with: “But isn’t email dead?” As my colleague Mohammad often says, emails are like cats—they seem to have nine lives. And our annual surveys of prospective grad and adult students continue to show that students are increasingly relying on emails to learn more about their program options.

Using data points such as funnel stage, student’s location, and recent student-provided interest and engagement data, we’re able to completely customize email copy and subject lines. After months of rigorous testing and learning, 90% of EAB campaign emails can be hyper-personalized using AI, from the subject line to the email copy itself. We’ve seen a 4% increase in engagement with our first email to not previously engaged audiences. What’s more impressive: engagement with our second and third emails to these audiences has increased by 51% and 56%, respectively.

Virtual tours

Another area in which we’re using hyper-personalization to deliver a more meaningful experience for students is in virtual tours. When students click into one of our virtual tours, they receive a custom experience based on the many data points in our data ecosystem. For example, a student who has an indicated interest in MBA programs will first see a tour of the business school. This personalized experience increases student engagement by enabling the most direct path to the content relevant to them. And the data proves this; students are spending between three to four minutes longer on virtual tours with personalized content than those without personalization.

Coming soon: Smart forms, landing pages, content gives, SMS, and more

Hyper-personalization is most effective when it extends across the many channels graduate and adult students engage with during their enrollment journey. For this reason, we’re also experimenting with adding hyper-personalized elements to the smart forms, content gives, and SMS campaigns we execute in partnership with grad, online, adult, and professional programs.

• Smart forms and landing pages: AI has also enabled us to embed smarter forms on landing pages. These forms “remember” user info and prompt students with questions they have not yet answered. This prevents students from completing redundant steps and allows institutions to learn even more about their prospects, which can then inform additional personalization. Beyond the smart forms, we can also change the hierarchy of content on landing pages based on what we know is most important to the individual user.
• Content gives: Personalized content gives, such as digital brochures that speak directly to each student’s specific goals and concerns, can help encourage students to take the next step with your institution. We’re testing how hyper-personalization can allow us to customize content gives based on the variables I mentioned earlier, delivering dynamic content to each and every student.
• SMS: We’re exploring how AI can power back and forth conversation with students who prefer to engage over text message. We can also use SMS to auto-remind students about upcoming dates and events relevant to them, This, in turn, helps cut through the marketing noise from your competitors.

Hyper-personalized content is just one way we’re using generative AI to keep our Adult Learner Recruitment partners on the leading edge of marketing and recruitment and ultimately drive results throughout the enrollment funnel. We’ve also introduced AI-powered Google ads, enhanced chatbot personalization, and enhanced persona and behavioral modeling. And this is just the beginning. Stay tuned (and don’t hesitate to reach out) as we continue to test opportunities for AI to enhance students’ enrollment experience and ultimately, power enrollment growth for our Adult Learner Recruitment partners.