Higher education enrollment is changing due to distance learning via the internet. It may be difficult to ascertain just how many people are choosing to study on-line rather than attend traditional universities, but at the Eduventures conference in Boston in mid-October, an interesting figure was cited: by 2008 1 in 10 college students will be an e-learner.

Aside from the experiential differences between brick-and-mortar and e-classrooms, many other issues are worth considering. For instance, in March of this year Congress passed a law that eliminated the requirement that colleges offer at least half their courses in a physical classroom in order to receive federal student aid. In addition, according to a study by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, approximately 65% of all universities that offer traditional graduate classes also offer online graduate classes. There are many trends in online education, and universities are approaching distance learning in a variety of ways. There is one constant though-it is cheaper to run an e-classroom than a brick-and-mortar classroom: universities looking to maximize profit margins now have a way to do so.
Some for-profit universities have begun to aggressively market their distance-learning services in a variety of ways, and they are finding that monitoring Return On Investment (ROI) in terms of enrollments is a difficult enterprise. Marketing a distance-learning program entails many elements, from creating a logo or brand, to effectively handling the call when the interested prospect enquires on how to enroll. This process has come to be known as Enrollment Management, or Enrollment Marketing.

How advances in advertising technology affect enrollment management .
Traditionally, ROI from marketing campaigns has only been quantifiable weeks or months after campaign launch. For-profit and not-for-profit universities that attempt to generate revenue by bolstering student enrollments often suffer because they are not able to determine which marketing strategies have been successful until mid-way through the admissions period. John Wanamaker said " I know that 50% of my advertising is wasted - the problem is that I don't know which 50%" Online advertising agencies have developed technologies that allow clients 24 hour access to their advertising campaigns, allowing them to monitor ROI on an up-to-the-minute basis. Advertisers want accountability, and the technology exists; why not put it to use? Cost Per Lead advertising (CPL) and Dynamic Campaign Optimization (DCO) are among the newest tools in the online advertising industry, and they are quite impressive. CPL allows advertisers to pay for ads according to the number of people that actually respond, rather than advertising space; and DCO is an automated process that eliminates media that generate unsuccessful leads and publishers, and optimizes the placement of successful media with publishers that generate the most successful leads.

These specialized tools may be impressive, but more advertisers-universities and businesses alike-are looking for a comprehensive advertising solution. Further, it seems that aggressive lead generation is maladapted for not-for-profit education institutions. Some public universities have spent 150 years building a reputation, and they don't want to be the poster child for the next form of "university spam".

Towards a solution: Create Marketing and Consulting Partnerships
How to increase enrollment, decrease cost-per-enrollment, and maintain the image of universities? The solution is simpler than the problem. Create a partnership with a marketing agency that listens. In an article that appeared in DMNEWS-a publication that monitors innovations in online advertising, Tom Hochstatter notes that:

"Advanced analytics practitioners are increasingly thinking about people, process and organization. They talk about multi-channel marketing being the norm, so process and organization that recognize the holistic marketing view is vital. The next step is building a team dedicated to the science of holistic analytics. Done right, their value pays off almost overnight."

As the author points out, a holistic approach to marketing is becoming the only logical solution. Monitoring and tracking technologies have become so sophisticated, advertising agencies have become so skilled in converting leads-not just generating them-that it is has become much cheaper to contract one agency to generate, convert, optimize, and provide feedback.

Not only is de-segmenting the enrollment process much cheaper than the alternatives-which include doing everything in-house, or contracting different agencies for every step of the process-but it also makes the marketing sub-contractor more accountable for the results. Now universities can see the process as a whole; one agency becomes responsible for everything; changes can be implemented faster; the distribution of advertising media can be better choreographed; and best of all its cheaper and the entire process can be optimized through one company. When this type of agility is combined with a tool to monitor ROI on a minute-to-minute basis, the benefits of Enrollment Management become obvious.

The bottom line is simple: the fact that most not-for-profit educational institutions have a reputation to maintain makes buying leads a tricky endeavor. On the one hand, universities need leads in order to increase enrollment. On the other hand, University Spam is an unacceptable marketing tactic. Enrollment Management services that are provided by marketing agencies with a large bandwidth can solve this problem-boosting enrollment, de-segmenting the marketing process, while simultaneously providing more accountability for less money.
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