Educational institutions are adopting CRM systems such as Salesforce to manage relationships with their students more efficiently, which in turn helps enhance their loyalty and engagement. Schools, colleges, universities, and other organizations are among those who can leverage these and other benefits of Salesforce CRM implementation.
For example, Forrester’s report, The Total Economic Impact of Salesforce for Education, highlights that adopters of Salesforce Education Cloud note a 15% increase in first-year student retention, a 10% growth in fundraising contributions, and a 5.5% rise in student enrollment. Educational institutions can also leverage additional benefits in the case of multi-cloud Salesforce implementation. This article highlights three tangible benefits educational institutions can gain by adopting Salesforce CRM solutions.
1. Enhanced Student Recruitment
Salesforce’s Education Cloud enables educational institutions to manage relationships with multiple interested parties, including the most important one – their students. This starts with the very early engagement stage of recruitment.
To be more specific, CRM allows an organization to consolidate data that is required to create an effective student recruitment marketing campaign. For example, Salesforce can be integrated with third-party marketing data suppliers that provide information about prospective students, including their gender, age, and subjects that they study.
In addition, Salesforce offers marketing automation tools that allow professionals to run student outreach campaigns more efficiently. For example, recruiting team members can use ready-made Salesforce email templates to easily create marketing campaigns and attract new students faster. In addition, recruiters can set up automated emails that are sent based on specific triggers, such as filling out a form on the institution’s website.
Additionally, recruiting professionals can use Salesforce’s AI-powered tools to analyze their campaign performance. After the analysis, AI algorithms can provide recommendations on how to improve the campaigns. For example, they can suggest modifying marketing emails’ content or selecting a more suitable time for sending them, thus helping enhance the institution’s marketing efficiency ratio (MER).
2. Improved Student Enrollment
Student enrollment is another critical aspect of managing an educational institution, as it directly affects the number of students attending an institution and, consequently, largely determines its profits.
Fortunately, colleges, universities, and other educational organizations can revamp their traditional enrollment processes by implementing Salesforce. Salesforce can help a company automate and streamline its enrollment workflow end-to-end, including student application processing, verification, and payment processing.
In particular, Salesforce allows institutions to consolidate data gathered via enrolment application forms across multiple web and mobile channels. Therefore, student admissions specialists can view applicant data from a single CRM interface, which simplifies their work and reduces the time required to enroll students.
Moreover, Salesforce provides functionality for automated validation of applicant data, thus helping reduce manual checks and further enhancing admissions teams’ efficiency. For example, an admissions specialist can filter out all applications from students with a high GPA or those who provide letters of recommendation.
Applicants that meet these and other predefined criteria can be automatically routed to specialists that are responsible for the next steps in application evaluation, thus accelerating the entire admissions procedure.
Educational organizations can use Salesforce to centralize communication between applicants and student service centers. Student service reps can access all applicants’ complaints related to registration or enrollment through a unified CRM console, which helps resolve issues quickly and efficiently.
The implementation of Salesforce had brought multiple benefits to George Mason University for example, including enhanced support for applicants and existing students. The institution achieved record levels of student satisfaction due to the implementation of CRM. It also replaced four separate service centers with one central office, which can serve more students at lower costs.
3. Optimized Alumni Management
Salesforce also allows educational institutions to manage relationships with graduates. Improving alumni relationships and increasing engagement is critical, as engaged alumni are more likely to contribute financially to their institution. An institution can use these donations to pay for scholarships or improve campus housing conditions.
In practice, institutions can use CRM to form and manage a centralized database of all alumni. Employees can use this database as a source of diverse alumni data, including contacts, graduation years, or engagement histories, to personalize communications and create more effective engagement strategies.
In addition, Salesforce allows institutions to measure alumni engagement by tracking their interactions, such as email openings or virtual event attendances. Alumni managers can utilize this capability to measure the efficiency of engagement campaigns and generate insights on how to improve them.
One of Westmont College’s primary Salesforce implementation goals was improving alumni and donor relationship management. By implementing CRM to manage relationships with these parties, the institution received more than $200M in donations in seven years.
Final Thoughts
Salesforce CRM implementation can benefit organizations across many industries, and the educational sector is no exception. By adopting CRM, colleges, universities, and other educational institutions can streamline student recruiting, enrollment, and alumni management. These workflow improvements can result in increased student admission and donations.
However, Salesforce adoption can be challenging for an institution. Determining the right products and tools among Salesforce’s extensive offerings can be one of these challenges, not to mention technical implementation aspects, such as customization or integration.
Certified Salesforce consultants with expertise in education can help institutions mitigate these and other adoption challenges. In particular, third-party experts can help define suitable Salesforce solutions, customize the CRM platform to the institution’s unique needs, and set up necessary integrations to connect Salesforce with other systems used across the organization, including LMS, ERP, or document management software.
