Evaluating the ROI of Enrollment Efforts in Graduate Student Recruitment

In an environment where the costs associated with recruiting graduate students are escalating, the ability to accurately evaluate the return on investment (ROI) of enrollment efforts has become a must in strategic recruitment planning. The data informing this blog post is the very latest sourced from RNL’s 2023 Graduate Marketing and Recruitment Practices Report, which presents insights from a survey conducted among graduate marketing and recruitment leaders from more than 200 institutions.

How do enrollment leaders evaluate the effectiveness of their recruitment strategies?

Among many other noteworthy findings, the report sheds light on the practices and perceptions of recruitment leaders as they use data to inform the budget they need to thrive in today’s competitive graduate recruitment environment. More than three-quarters (76%) of recruitment leaders regularly employ Conversion Rate Analysis—tracking rates at various stages of the recruitment funnel—to assess the impact of their recruitment strategies. While helpful, solely focusing on such rates for planning rarely reveals why prospective students are continuing (or not continuing) through the funnel. To this end, the report highlights a significant oversight: merely half (53%) of recruitment operations actively seek student feedback to inform their processes.

Even fewer are leveraging Event Effectiveness Assessments (51%) and Social Media Analytics (48%), which are important ways of understanding the behavior essential for aligning recruitment efforts with student expectations. Beyond frequency, when asked about the most effective ways of measuring recruitment success, only 7 percent indicate that calculating ROI for recruitment channels and campaigns to determine cost-effectiveness is used to drive better planning.

Are institutions using dashboards to monitor and adjust their strategies?

The answers about evaluating the effectiveness of recruitment efforts highlights a common challenge: Accessibility to “good” data is hard to come by at too many institutions. Enrollment leaders need an accessible way to facilitate a more agile, informed, and strategic decision-making process by providing timely, relevant, and easily digestible data—namely, finely tuned dashboards.

However, nearly one-quarter (22%) of all institutional respondents report not having a single dashboard to reference. Moreover, only 30 percent of respondents have access to a Marketing Dashboard, likely demonstrating that the remaining survey-takers are actively trying to navigate a disconnect between dollars spent and the actual effectiveness of recruitment communication.

Given these insights in the RNL report, institutions must pivot towards a more dynamic approach to budgeting. The traditional static models no longer suffice in the dynamic field of graduate student recruitment, where specialized and agile resource allocation is essential. Frequent and data-driven collaboration between recruitment and marketing teams is imperative for crafting refined strategies that are responsive to emerging trends and prospective student behaviors. This necessity has given rise to comprehensive tracking mechanisms like RNL’s Envision, which unifies marketing and recruitment phases into a cohesive “full funnel” reporting system, allowing institutions to discern the ROI of every dollar invested.

See our report for more findings and insights

The findings from the 2023 Graduate Marketing and Recruitment Practices Report serve as a critical benchmark for institutions looking to optimize their investment and streamline their recruitment operations and strategic decision-making. I invite you to see our Executive Summary for eight key findings and find out how you can read the full report.

Finally, as you see these results from your marketing and recruitment colleagues, do you have the data you need to make the right decisions? We can help you assess your analytics and strategies for graduate enrollment so that you are maximizing your ROI. Reach out, and we’ll set up a time to talk and check what you currently have against what we know is possible.