With more and more accredited schools and universities using various marketing tactics to attract students, YOUR job is getting increasingly difficult. How do you know which students might be interested in your school? Depending on historical statistics is helpful, but you have to know your potential students in REAL TIME. Where are they from? What do they want to study? How do you get your message across?
Tracking the right admission metrics will help you spot inefficiencies and identify 'room for improvement' in your offerings of program. If you aren't monitoring and following admission metrics, you need to start now in order to see a boost in revenues throughout the admission cycle over the next Academic Year.
Here are the important metrics you need to track:
Metric 1: New Probable Inquiry (NPI) over [time frame]
No matter how good your conversion rate is (more on that shortly), if you aren’t getting lots of new probable Inquiry into the pipeline, your fees collection targets are going to suffer. New Probable inquiry (NPI) are prospective student who are enquiring or looking forward to applying for the program you are offering.
Metric 2: Probable inquiry Response Time (PRT)
You have minutes to contact a New Probable Inquiry (NPI) before your chance of landing an admission drops precipitously. Once that inquirer fills out a form or sends you an email in response to an ad, the clock is ticking. By measuring Probable inquiry Response Time (PRT), you can determine how quickly you are typically getting back to Admission Conversion Rate (ACR).
"A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is – it is what consumers tell each other it is." – Scott Cook
Metric 3: Admission Conversion rate (ACR)
If your Admission team is struggling to achieve admission, one of the first places to look at the Admission Conversion Rate (ACR), and it's time to figure out why. If you have 100 New Probable Inquiry (NPI), coverts 20 of them into New Probable Admission (NPA) (either win or lose), and scores four Actual Admission (AA), that's a conversion rate of 4% (four admissions out of 100 NPI).
Metric 4: Opportunity Win Rate (OWR)
A lot of people confuse conversion rate with this metric, but there is a critical difference. The opportunity win rate (OWR), however, is more specific: it measures what your success rate was when you went for the kill, and doesn't include opportunities that are still open. So in the above case, the opportunity win rate would be 20% [four Actual Admission (AA) out of 20 New Probable Admission (NPA)].
Metric 5: Seat Acquisition Cost (SAC)
SAC helps you understand just how much money you spent trying to get that admission. Tracking SAC can be very eye opening, particularly if you find that, say, it costs almost as much to acquire a certain type of student, which might suggest that you should abandon that type of student and spend more time on other more profitable scenario.
Metric 6: Churn Rate (CR)
Your SAC stats can get hammered if you have a high Admission Churn Rate (ACR), which refers to the annual percentage rate at which students abandon your college due to poor academics, cancel admission, transfer admission or for whatever reason.
Metric 7: Student lifetime value (SLV)
While SAC is important, it should be understood in the context of student lifetime value, or SLV. For example, even if the SAC is low, if that student does not perform well in Academics or other activities or they cannot manage to get placed when they graduate then the SLV of that student is low which will surely have impact on your brand value.
Ideal admission scenario:
Ideal Probable inquiry Response Time (PRT) should be less than 25 Minutes for ensuring 30% Admission Conversion rate (ACR).
For filling 60 Seats with quality students i.e. Actual Admission (AA), you may need at least 400 New Probable Inquiry (NPI).
NPI can be collected using Digital Marketing and traditional offline methods.
For ensuring 100% seat capacity the ideal Churn Rate should be less than or equal to 8%.
Your Student Acquisition Cost (SAC) depends on cost you spend to acquire one NPI.
SLV is measured on the basis of Academic and placement performance as per attainment of Program Outcome you have devised for the program.
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