We’d love to help you implement any or all of the five strategies we’ve outlined above, as it is never too late to have an impact. At the same time, we have many other solutions that can be implemented during this cycle—specifically, our personalized financial aid package, a great yield boost. Reach out when you’re ready to discuss strategies and tactics we can implement to support your enrollment goals.

While the GA4 interface may seem complex and overwhelming at first, it has become a powerhouse of a tool that requires much less manual work to get your analytics off the ground. Its increased automation gives you hours back to your day and allows you to use its pre-built components to start connecting your data and reporting it in one fluid stream.

You can slice and dice your data however you need to showcase it, because GA4 has the pre-built templates you want to get your data analysis started. It also has the customization options to allow you to start dreaming big. The Analysis Hub is where you’ll find a variety of reports to start out with. For example, GA4 includes a custom report for “Funnel Exploration,” which enables you to see a user’s interaction with steps they took before submitting an inquiry form or starting an application. “Path Exploration” is another report that will show you a user’s pathway through your website; where did they come from, and what path did they take to peruse your website?

“Free-form” and “Cohort Analysis” reports will help you answer other important questions, such as:

• What types of visitors are coming to your site—traditional high school students, adult degree completers, or graduate prospects?
• What pages are users looking at before taking an action?
• Is there a common thread in the customer journey between landing on your homepage to submitting an app?

You can start to answer all of these questions with the report customization options within GA4.

Bounce rate, the trusty, yet one-sided metric that tracked the number of visitors who navigated away from your website, has made its own exit from the new Analytics. Replacing it is “engagement rate,” a more useful measure of time spent on your site. Unlike bounce rate, this new metric doesn’t just show you how many users leave your site, but it dives deeper, considering one or more actions, such as being active on the website for 10 or more seconds, engaging in two or more page views, and/or a conversion event firing. This is a favorable update if you’re looking to squeeze out as much information about the user experience on your website as possible, since it exposes more than just the fact that some users leave, or bounce. Now, you can look at how they enter the site and better understand whether your website content is engaging for your targeted audiences.

Now that Google Analytics has upped its game, it’s time to leverage this tool as your (not-so) secret weapon to evaluate your website’s strengths and challenges. Having so much analytical power at your fingertips can be overwhelming as you start to explore the tool (it does, after all, have a completely new look), but it will be worth all of your marketing dollars to invest the time to learn the tool’s insights for your institution’s website. If you don’t know where to begin, we can help you get started. Reach out to learn more about how we can help you leverage the force behind GA4.

Spark451 partners with several elite graduate schools across the U.S. to design and execute robust, personalized marketing campaigns. One such school, a client since 2015, partners with us on managing their prospect nurturing campaigns. Through the use of a segmented prospect communication strategy, Spark451’s campaigns with this institution typically yield average email open rates of 40%+ and click-through rates of 5% or higher.

On their own, these results are impressive. Over the last year, however, Spark451 implemented a Behavioral Marketing email campaign targeting website visitors, which blew these results out of the water.

The team at Spark451 are experts at delivering the right message to the right person at the right time; Behavioral Marketing is a methodology of doing just that. Spark451 created and implemented an email series triggered to send to visitors (tracked via a pixel) to a select group of pages from the university website. After 24 hours, a communication was automatically sent to the website visitor sharing additional, personalized information from the pages viewed while visiting the institution’s website.

Implementing trigger-based web visit communications yielded:

What may surprise you is that many of the major factors impacting international student recruitment are not new. While the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the decline in the international market, several other factors have been fueling the fire for almost a decade.

1. Most widely known, the increased political and social unrest within the United States has painted us in a negative light for many students looking to pursue a degree here. This has also led to increased confusion around the rules and regulations within the United States, muddying the decisions for those considering to study here.
2. Many foreign countries have long provided their students’ government-funded scholarships through national scholarship programs. Recently, many countries, such as Brazil (through their Brazil Scientific Mobility Program) and Saudi Arabia, have defunded these scholarship programs, making an education in the United States largely unaffordable.
3. Over the past several years, the value of the U.S. dollar has increased substantially, again making it harder for international students to afford a non-funded education in the United States.
4. Large pathway programs are beginning to emerge, making it harder for many U.S. schools to compete in this arena. These programs create partnerships with select universities in the United States and encourage International Student Recruitment Agents to send their students to the finite set of U.S. schools with which they have agreements.
5. The competition within the international market has grown substantially and students are finding they have more options on where to pursue their degrees. Many countries, such as China, India, and Germany, which were once large exporters of students, are beginning to retain more of their own citizens. Additionally, countries such as Australia, Canada, and even the United Kingdom are enhancing their long-term visiting student options and making it easier for students to obtain a visa, placing additional strain on the international market for the United States.
6. Finally, rankings continue to have a heavy influence on the international market, leaving a heavier burden on the smaller, more regional institutions.

At first, it’s easy to be bearish on the short-term future of international student activity when you consider the points above. However, we believe there’s an international renaissance on the horizon. Allow us to point out a few important facts that may help sway your opinion:

According to an iie research study published in November of 2020 40,000 students deferred their enrollment from Fall 2020 to a future semester.

When you factor in a combination of these deferments with the traditional new-student application activity we’ve already seen for Fall 2021, as well as what you can expect for Spring 2022 and Fall 2022, signs of growth begin to show.

The U.S. is trending ahead of many other nations in its ability to administer vaccinations.

U.S. colleges can begin to work with the U.S. government and those in other countries to offer vaccinations for incoming international students who otherwise might not be able to get vaccinated in their home countries or even in other competing countries.

The idea that an incoming student can test negative prior to coming here, test again upon arrival, and then get vaccinated can prove to be both career and life changing.

Based on recent reports, many U.S. admissions officers are feeling more optimistic about their ability to attract students from abroad, now that the new Biden administration is setting a more welcoming tone for international students than we’ve seen in the last several years. For example, in one recent article, Xiaofeng Wan, Associate Dean of Admission and Coordinator of International Recruitment at Amherst College in Massachusetts, told Inside Higher Ed that he believed families are beginning to feel more comfortable sending their children to the U.S. again. Also, according to Forbes, a recent poll by Morning Consult found that global opinion of the U.S. in general has improved quite significantly in the months since President Biden took office.

Historically, domestic enrollment trends have always been a strong indicator of where the international recruitment market is headed—though you can expect roughly a year of lag time. As vaccinations take effect and further empower U.S. institutions to return to fully in-person and on-campus environments, Spark451 strategists are hearing overwhelmingly optimistic outlooks on domestic enrollment for Fall 2021 from enrollment managers across the country—at institutions of all sizes and types.

By and large, enrollment managers are satisfied with their Fall 2021 classes, and considering where they were just 12 months ago, they are bullish on the future for their schools as they re-engage domestic recruitment plans for Fall 2022.

In spite of some recent interruptions in the market, international students remain a critical component of the ecosystem at most U.S. colleges and universities, and we expect that to continue well into the future. As the pandemic continues to recede and our nation’s political leaders continue to reestablish a more welcoming tone for foreign students, the Spark451 enrollment strategy team can’t help but feel especially hopeful about all of the new and emerging opportunities in this arena. In fact, we’re already hearing positive rumblings from the institutional leaders from across the nation with whom we speak daily.