What you need to know about hyper-personalization in enrollment marketing
October 4, 2024, By Michael Koppenheffer, Vice President, Enroll360 Marketing, Analytics and AI Strategy
Without a doubt, “hyper-personalization” is one of the buzziest marketing terms of the decade thus far. Even within higher education marketing and enrollment management, practitioners are hearing about “hyper-personalized” innovations at every turn.
As often is the case with high-profile technology trends, the urgency that leaders are feeling to adopt hyper-personal marketing approaches has far outpaced their understanding or maturity of the concept. “I am not sure exactly what hyper-personalization is,” one director of enrollment marketing at a university told me recently, “but I know it needs to be my biggest priority for the year.”
What is hyper-personalization?
“Hyper-personalization” describes the various ways that content providers, marketers, and merchants execute detailed and complex personalization and segmentation, often with the help of technologies like machine learning and generative AI.
Common examples of hyper-personalization in everyday life include experiences like the omnichannel purchase recommendations from Amazon, Spotify’s customized playlist feature called “daylist”, and the behaviorally-aware content promotions on the Netflix home page.
In enrollment marketing, we respond to what students and families expect, both now and in the future. Students themselves are telling us, in no uncertain terms, that personalization is important to them: in EAB’s 2024 Personalization Survey, 93% of students said that receiving a personalized message from a college would encourage them to explore a school further.
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Even if generative AI, machine learning, and massive data sets allow us to achieve this new level of personalization and specificity—will it actually become important for students, families, and institutions?
Immediate and Future Implications of the New Artificial Intelligence
A new expectation for college communications
EAB’s assessment of AI-enabled hyper-personalization is that it’s too soon to tell exactly how, but hyper-personalization will become an expected part of the college-search experience, just as it’s become part of so many other consumer experiences. While colleges and universities don’t aspire to be Amazon or Netflix, consumer-grade hyper-personalization is highly relevant to those of us trying to engage students and families in conversations around higher education.
For one thing, the ubiquity of hyper-personalization beyond education raises the expectations that prospective students and families have for how relevant, immediate, and engaging communications need to be. Gen Z has never known life without an iPhone, and Gen Alpha’s dominant metaphor for content consumption is the ever-relevant, ever-continuous scrolling feed.
To capture the attention of today’s generation, it is incumbent on higher education marketers to provide a high degree of relevance and personalization, albeit not in the same exact form as big consumer brands.
Colleges and universities also have a lot to gain by embracing hyper-personalized marketing; namely, sharing a diversity of college experiences with an equally diverse set of prospective students in a way that is authentic and compelling. Hyper-personalization offers the promise of moving beyond general claims and overall assertions to individualized value propositions based on the needs and desires of each student.
FAQs on Hyper-personalization
What is hyper-personalization in the context of enrollment marketing?
Because hyper-personalization is closely linked to advances in AI, I asked ChatGPT for its own brief definition of hyper-personalization, written for a higher education enrollment audience. According to ChatGPT:
Marketing Hyper-Personalization in the context of college enrollment refers to the use of advanced data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to deliver highly tailored and individualized messaging to prospective students. This approach goes beyond traditional segmentation by leveraging real-time behavioral data, personal preferences, and unique characteristics of each prospective student to create more relevant and compelling communications. The goal is to enhance engagement, increase application rates, and improve yield by providing each prospective student with a highly personalized experience that aligns closely with their interests, needs, and journey towards selecting a college.
What risks are associated with hyper-personalized marketing?
Adopting a hyper-personalized approach is not without its challenges. One of the main hurdles is ensuring that the increased relevance does not come off as intrusive. Sometimes, consumers think that a too-targeted approach is downright creepy. There is a line to walk between “yes, this is exactly what I need,” and, “how did you get inside my head?”
Moreover, there’s a level of risk tolerance required when allowing AI to take on more of the content creation and delivery processes. Enrollment leaders have to determine how comfortable they are with loosening the reigns on content approvals, especially when AI-powered content variations exponentially increase with more personalization options.
Another challenge is data availability. Not all student and family interactions are captured within existing systems, which means there may be gaps in available information. This is where the quality and integration of data become critical. Institutions need to focus on their underlying data infrastructure, ensuring that it’s robust enough to support hyper-personalized strategies.
How many schools are already using hyper-personalization in communications?
For all that enthusiasm, there are remarkably few real-world examples of hyper-personalization in the education sector to date. But even if the specifics remain to be developed, we believe that hyper-personalization has huge potential to improve the college-going journey for students, families, and institutions.
More AI Implications for Enrollment Leaders
A new genre of technologies are available to students and enrollment leaders, all powered by AI. Learn how to leverage helpful AI tools in your student recruitment processes and see how other schools are navigating these changes in our recent insight paper.
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