How You Can Stand Out At The Beginning

As you start communicating more with this next group of prospective students, I’ve got some important advice if you want to stand out in their Inbox.

Get rid of any long and generic information filled messages that lack personalization and feel like a full-on sales pitch. If you don’t, you will increase the chances that they’ll ignore some or all of the future messages you send.

Remember, you’re always competing for attention, and Gen Z attention spans have not declined, they’ve just evolved to be more selective. That means following this advice in the first email you send or any early stage messages is absolutely essential.  

If your email doesn’t look or sound like it came from a real person, and it contains information they don’t feel is relevant, and it reads like a mass message, that’s three strikes.

The solution? Put a larger focus on creating an easy conversation during the early stages of a student's college search. Make it clear your goal is to be a guide and a resource for them, and hopefully make everything a little less overwhelming. Aim to learn something (hopefully a number of things) about the student, and find ways to take the feedback they share and help them figure out if your school is one they should consider visiting or applying to.

How you do that won’t be the exact same for every student, but as I’ve shared in previous articles, asking one easy question in an email as your call to action is a smart strategy. Whatever you ask it needs to be something they can answer without thinking too hard.

For existing inquiries it will be important to recognize things like whether the student has or has not visited campus. Utilizing any information you already know will help increase the level of personalization. You could focus on discovering what, if anything, the student or their family needs to figure out about your school before the student would consider starting their application. If they previously visited, how are they feeling about things like the location, size, and atmosphere of your school? Do they need tips on how to narrow down their list? 

For newer inquiries, focus on getting answers to key questions like where they’re at in their process and how they’re feeling about the college search. You might ask, as they’ve been learning more about different schools, what’s standing out to them the most? Or, what do they wish more schools would talk about when they send emails. You could even ask what kinds of schools probably won’t be a good fit for them.

The shorter and more direct your message is, and the more real and personal it feels, the more likely they are to reply.

I’ve got one final piece of advice to help make this strategy even more effective. Make sure your email subject line doesn’t sound like a marketing message. Two subject lines that have worked well for my college partners in a scenario like this are, “One question for you, that’s it” and “Helping you figure out your college applications”.

Again, the goal during the early stages of a student’s college search process should be to get their attention and start the process of building a relationship by asking/learning about their wants, needs, concerns, and fears.

After you’ve established some trust and had some dialogue, then bring up the idea of a campus visit or ask if they’ve thought about starting their application.

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