I ask it often when I’m in front of coaches when we’re leading a workshop on their campus…
“What do you want a letter or email to your prospect to do?” Or, to put it another way, “What do you want the result to be?”
Here are the answers I hear most often:
- “I want to see if they’re interested in us.”
- “I want to tell them what we have to offer here.”
- “I try to make them feel special and tell them how much we like them.”
All good answers. However, there’s an even better strategy that we’ve found to work great over the years. For those coaches who have signed on as clients, they see this strategy being used on a regular basis with great success.
It’s a strategy that is simple: When we create a message that will go to a recruit, we want them to reply to that message, and we want it to set up the next message.
Let’s breakdown each of those strategies, and why they are vital to your recruiting results when it comes to generating an effective recruiting campaign through the mail or electronically:
- Get the reply. The point of a letter and email should not be to sell your program, or convince a prospect to choose your school based on what’s written in one letter. The focus of each of your written communications should be to generate a reply from your prospect. Most likely, that will be in the form of an email or a phone call. Why is a reply so important as your primary goal? Simple: You aren’t going to be able to ”sell” your program until a prospect feels like he or she can be comfortable interacting with you.
- Set up the next message. One of the most stark facts we gathered in our research study on how today’s prospect makes their final decision was the importance of the prospect knowing what to do next in the process. When you send a prospect a letter or email, make sure that you let them know what’s coming next. In other words, a letter that goes out next week should set up an expectation that another message is following in the coming days after. They should be expecting the next step, not wondering when it will come…and the only way to do that is to very clearly spell out the steps that you are taking in the process.
It’s important to establish this system as early in the recruiting process as possible. As many of you get ready to begin written contact with a new Junior class, make sure your letters and emails include these two important elements.
If you include them, and they are structured correctly, you’ll get results and response that exceed your expectations.
Did you know that you can get expert assistance in creating a focused, results-oriented recruiting plan for this upcoming recruiting year? The pros here at Tudor Collegiate Strategies, lead by nationally recognized recruiting expert Dan Tudor, can revise your current recruiting messages, develop a new plan and messages, and assist you with your top prospects on an ongoing basis.
If you’d like to learn more, just email Dan Tudor at dan@sellingforcoaches.com with the subject line “Tell me more about becoming a client” and we’ll outline exactly how we work with a coach and their program, and why so many other programs choose to bring us in as a part of their program’s recruiting staff.
