Since February 2014, we’ve been creating opportunities for professional development across international school admissions offices through our conferences and our magazine.
These opportunities help us to better understand the needs of school admissions offices and give us an inside look into the day-to-day concerns and challenges.
We were inspired by Linda Belonje’s session "OpenApply for the Marketing Team" at our OpenApply Conference in Phuket. Linda is the Director of Marketing and Development at KIS International School and her session examined how to fuel marketing efforts using OpenApply data. Coming to KIS with a strong marketing background, Linda has helped transition her school from a growing campus to now managing an extensive waitlist in 2017.
Linda's presentation walked us through how she identifies and creates the best marketing strategies for her school. She highlighted three main steps:
Collecting Data: Collecting data is widely considered the first place to start when evaluating or constructing marketing efforts. Linda strategically builds her enquiry, application, and supplemental forms to ensure she gathers the necessary data to drive KIS's marketing efforts.
Generating Reports: Linda and her colleagues use OpenApply’s analytics section to generate reports at KIS. A combination of OpenApply's preset analytics, custom analytics and ability to export specific data helps KIS in their efforts to identify trends.
Identifying Trends to Implement Strategies: Linda explains that once you have your reports generated, it is now time to identify trends in order to decide where to best focus your marketing efforts and develop a deeper understanding of your clientele. By asking the right questions, Linda is able to optimise marketing efforts for the best results.
Our Inspiration
How could you use OpenApply to develop new marketing strategies and identify unique trends? Once you have reviewed your forms and included the fields needed to capture useful data, OpenApply can present the information in multiple ways to identify trends and support effective marketing practices. First, OpenApply assists in generating reports through its Analytics section located along the lower left side of your screen when viewing the dashboard. You can use the built-in analytics tabs to access useful information at the click of a button. Reports like Enrolment, Nationality, and Conversion Funnel analytics are automatically calculated here to easily access in real-time.
The Custom analytics tab above allows you to pull additional reports on the fields in your forms. For example, if you add a Referral Source field to your application form, you can access the analytics data regarding that field by selecting the form and field under the Custom tab.
Don't forget that you are able to access even more specific data across applicants by filtering in the list view and exporting to excel or CSV. Check out the tutorials on exporting data from OpenApply to learn more.
If you want to optimize your OpenApply account to capture useful market data and generate informative reports, schedule a time to chat with us here!