Marketing and sales professionals have worked for years developing their relationships with prospects and potential clients by personalizing the way they find out about them and address their particular needs, concerns and goals.
Universities face unique challenges developing an insightful relationship that promotes student engagement in order to deal with the increasing amount of students dropping studies at higher education.
Academics Nubia Murcia & Pedro Ramírez Angulo, from Politécnico Gran Colombiano, explain that “day by day, students want a personalized contact from education institutions, where they can bond in a bidirectional communication, to get customized answers to questions, doubts and problems. Regarding education and relationship marketing, this is a fundamental tool to get students retention.”
Robert Ackerman and John Schibrowsky, from the University of Nevada have studied marketing in higher education. They claim that relationship marketing can be an important component for institutions to nurture a personalized relation with students and focus on their pain-points that might lead to leaving their studies. This is a “different way of viewing student retention, provides a different perspective on retention strategies.”
Marketing executives nurture customers whose profile deserves more attention in building a relationship. Students require the same level of care. “If a firm wants to add value for their customers and build lasting relationships with them, they need to know who the customers are, what they want, and what is important to them. The same is true for campuses,” they say. “The relationship marketing paradigm is built on the premise of learning everything relevant about the customer and then using that information to service them.”
Aníbal Bur, from the University of Palermo, in Argentina, states that colleges "could benefit by the efficient use of principles and procedures of marketing.” Bur quotes J.M. Manes emphasizing the value of educational marketing, as “the research process of the social needs to develop and undertake educational projects that satisfy them.” The goal is to “produce an integral development in educational services based on quality and continuous improvement of an educational institution."
However, for an effective marketing-based student management system, schools must collect:
When engaging potential students, it is not only important to enroll them and retain them, but to boost loyalty. Higher education institutions must develop “stable long lasting relationships with them, identifying their changing needs and satisfying effectively to accomplish their loyalty.”
For Professor Ackerman and Schibrowsky, “it seems odd that customers who have online accounts with Amazon, a business, are greeted by name each time they access the site, but students who use the college library, campus food service, financial aid office, the dean’s office or are in a lecture class are seldom greeted by name. This lack of connection communicates an impression that the administration, faculty and staff simply don’t know and may not care about them, hardly a foundation on which relationships and loyalty are built.”
Relationship marketing model for student retention
Source: designed by U-Planner with data from Ackerman & Schibrowsky, 2007
For this reason, instead of customer relationship management (CRM), used to describe programs to deal with customer retention, they coined the term “student relationship management” (SRM) “for those programs designed to build relationships with students to increase retention and loyalty to the school.”
“In theory, the job of collecting this information in academic settings is easier”, they claim. “There should be a database with contact information even for students who do not persist. However, very few campuses attempt to document reasons for attrition and even fewer analyze this data to inform student retention initiatives." This can help gain understanding of the main reasons for students abandoning their studies.
Retention strategies should be the role of the entire institution and not just a specific department: “while front line employees at colleges and universities such as administrative assistants, office receptionists, advisors and classroom instructors are often the key to the successful implementation of SRM programs, the efforts of all are needed”, Ackerman and Schibrowsky say.
John Kuh noted in the paper “Organizational Culture and Student Persistence: Prospects and Puzzles that “only a web of interlocking initiatives can over time shape an institutional culture that promotes student success.”
In higher education, this means developing a relationship between all parties, based on trust. Ackerman and Schibrowsky state that “students who perceive a mutual and strong commitment between themselves and the college are more likely to remain enrolled and are more likely to recommend the school to friends. In higher education, trust can be viewed as an integral factor in increasing students’ likelihood to persist. ”
For the same reason, given a long-term nature of this relationship, universities must engage in a way similar to inbound marketing’s buyer’s journey, with a relationship lifecycle that begins with a student recruitment, graduation and then engaging as an alumni.
Source: Ackerman & Schibrowsky, 2007
What do you think about marketing tools to better bond with students and engage in retention strategies? Do you have any concerns with the use of these techniques in higher education? We appreciate your comments and suggestions.