Every student enrollment journey has two teams working hard behind the scenes, but when they’re not working together, your potential students feel it.
I’m talking about the admissions team and the marketing team.
These teams are two vital pieces of the same enrollment engine. Therefore, they shouldn’t operate in silos, as if they’re competing departments hoping to one-up each other. When this happens, so do enrollment funnel leaks. But when they operate in a strategic partnership, something different happens:
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- Everyone recognizes the importance of their unique role
- Data goes from being just numbers in a sheet to actionable insights
- More inquiries become applications
- More acceptances turn into enrollments
- Both teams win and thrive
Misalignment Between Marketing and Admissions
We’ve been doing this long enough to see first-hand that these two teams working and thriving as one effective enrollment engine, unfortunately, isn’t the case with many higher education teams.
It isn’t that neither team wants the other to fail, or that any one person wants to wear all of the hats (in most cases, anyway). It’s more often a lack of clear understanding around how each team operates and what is needed for each to thrive, a misconception that working together takes more time and effort than they want to give, or a fear that one team will be compared to the other and jobs might be at stake.
But when admissions and marketing teams work together, the results speak for themselves. Our client, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, is a good example of what that can look like.
For a better idea of what I mean, I’ll give you three good reasons marketing and admissions teams need to work together for the best results.
Reason 1: Shared Data Means Smarter Marketing
Want to reduce the burden on your admissions staff? Improve your lead quality.
But, you can’t optimize what you can’t measure, and some of the most important data lies with your admissions team. I’m talking about the data they gather from recruitment events, RFI phone calls, inquiry form submissions, questions applicants ask as they fill out their applications, and engagement metrics throughout the admissions process.
This data is vital to understanding what your ideal student profile looks like:
- What questions they have.
- What programs piqued their interest.
- What problems they’re hoping your institution can solve for them.
- What parts of the application process are confusing
- What follow-ups from admissions are getting engagement (and which aren’t)
- At what point they decide to either enroll or apply somewhere else
So, if improving lead quality lightens the load for admissions, how do you improve your lead quality? Optimize your targeting strategy and marketing message based on insights into and feedback from your target audience.
If marketing drives leads into the funnel without knowing what happens next, it’s guesswork. It might be educated guesswork, but it’s still a gamble. Your programs (and your marketing budget) deserve better than that. When admissions shares what’s working (which leads convert, which questions come up, and where prospects drop off), marketing can course-correct in real time. This means fewer cold leads, more conversions, and a better return on your investment.
Working with clients’ admissions teams, our team has been able to:
- Identity gaps in inquiry follow-up and provide support to keep leads moving down the funnel
- Optimize ads targeting based on form submission and call data to improve lead quality
- Create a framework for lead projections and set clear, realistic goals
- Craft supportive assets to provide better value to leads and position the institution as the guide (and best choice)
Better data doesn’t just improve marketing. It makes everyone’s job easier, because performance metrics improve, and the students showing up are already more informed and better-fit.
It’s a win-win-win.
Reason 2: Real Conversations Improve the Message
Admissions staff are on the frontlines of recruitment. They hear the objections, the words students use, the hesitations that almost cost an enrollment – the reality, not the assumptions. But in many cases, that intel rarely makes it back to the marketing team.
We touched on this a bit in Reason 1 above. It’s not only about numbers, it’s also about feedback. Both pieces of data working together to identify gaps, issues, and functional misalignment, as well as messaging misalignment and strategic opportunities for improvement. When student feedback informs website copy, ads, and even nurture emails, everything starts to resonate at a higher level.
→ This is how UX improvements get identified — if students keep asking something the website should be answering, that’s a signal.
→ This is how ad copy gets optimized — if wrong-fit leads are coming into the pipeline, that’s a signal.
→ This is how Info Session show up rates improve — if email click rates are low, or leads register and forget to show, that’s a signal.
Example of Cross-Team Alignment
SIUE had little historical data when its Surveying & Geomatics (BS) program launched. Part of the solution was a messaging workshop that aligned admissions, the advisory board, mentors, and other key players around a shared, student-centric messaging framework.
By maintaining alignment and close communication between marketing and admissions, our team was able to take their insights and pivot or double down when needed; tweaking ad creative, personalizing outreach, and guiding applicants into mentorship and tuition assistance. This partnership is what led to exponential enrollment growth for their new program.
Admissions isn’t just closing enrollments. They’re participating in the vital research that can make every future touchpoint work harder and better.
Reason 3: A Leaky Funnel Hurts Everyone
We used to tell our SEO clients, “marketers would bury a dead body on page two of Google search results”. Come on, when’s the last time you went beyond page one?
Do you know where enrollment goals go to die? Where prospective students fall off: the gap between marketing and admissions.
Joking aside, closing the gap between marketing and admissions is the key to fixing a leaky funnel and increasing enrollment. For an optimized and effective enrollment funnel, you need strategic, targeted content across all efforts. The best way to do that is to have admissions and marketing teams working together, sharing data and insights, and making decisions that help both teams succeed.
Here’s something to noodle on:
- Delayed follow-up after a marketing-generated inquiry erases the momentum that the ad or content built
- Inconsistent messaging between what marketing promises and what admissions delivers (or vice versa) creates confusion and distrust
- Missing admissions data leaves marketing to make their best guess, and budgets either go under-utilized or misspent
Without shared goals and visibility, it can easily become a blame game, and neither team deserves that. Thankfully, for SIUE’s Surveying & Geomatics program, it was a different story:
- 184 qualified leads generated
- 100%+ enrollment increase
- More than doubling enrollments and surpassing their enrollment growth goal
This happened because marketing, admissions, program leaders, and hiring partners were coordinated around a shared message and enrollment growth system.
How to Improve Your Enrollment Numbers
Enrollment friction isn’t always a marketing problem. And it’s not always an admissions problem. Most of the time, it lives in the gap between the two.
Greenstone’s role as an enrollment marketing agency isn’t to replace admissions or make anyone’s work harder. It’s to build the bridge and fill the gaps. When both teams share data, goals, and feedback, the whole system works better, and everyone’s job is easier.
Speaking of easier, want a simple way to identify the potential gaps in your enrollment funnel? Check out our free enrollment funnel checklist. Work through all 10 checkpoints to stop guessing and start building a system that captures, nurtures, and converts more prospective students.
Looking for a strategic enrollment growth partner? Start the conversation and see if we’re a good fit.
