Technolutions’ Slate is the holy grail of higher ed CRMs. It helps enrollment managers analyze student behavior which in turn can correspond to timely, personalized messaging.
Specifically, Slate’s behavioral Ping data gives enrollment managers the ability to see what college or university web pages students visit and how much time they’re spending on each page.
How Ping Works
Let’s say Student A received an interesting email about financial aid opportunities at Parish Group University via the CRM. By opening and interacting with that email, Slate now has Student A’s information to create a student profile.
Based on that financial aid email, Student A wants to do some more digging. So they visit Parish Group University’s website, and after some browsing, they land on the financial aid subpage. A scholarship opportunity that matches their intended major piques their interest — they click on that hyperlink for more information.
Parish Group University was smart enough to enable Ping data on each of its web pages; and they now see that Student A spent fifteen minutes reading about their major-specific scholarship.
Because of this behavior tracking, Parish Group University can send the student a personalized email detailing more information about this specific scholarship and other scholarships that match the student’s profile.
The Mechanics of Ping
Ping captures the profile information of a user visiting an institution’s page. It then matches that profile data to the corresponding student within a school’s Slate instance.
If this prospect does not have a user profile matched within Slate, the program will maintain the behavioral data and match upon the record once it is created via another action.
Ping script is active on all Slate pages with a simple setting, but must be embedded into each page on a school’s website for this tracking to occur and isn’t triggered until a student interacts with a page.
What Ping Data Tells Enrollment Managers
Slate Ping data is extremely helpful for target analysis.
Like the above example, it can provide a prompt to engage the student via communication.
Enrollment managers can utilize profile data within Slate on a student and correlate web crawl habits to gain insight into a student’s thought process.
Are they interested in specific majors based on their page browsing? Are they looking to live in dorms based on their visit to the Housing subpage?
Ping data can also tell EMs how effective their webpages are at answering students’ questions.
A student spending very little time on a certain subpage could mean two things:
Did they exit quickly because the answer to their question was easy to find and understand? Or did they close out the tab because they couldn’t find the right answer relatively fast? (We all know how… long lasting…. Gen Z’s attention spans can be).
This will require some self-reflection on the UX and UI of each page to answer, but gives EMs data to extrapolate on and partner with their web designers to fine-tune pages for optimal engagement.
Enhance Your Slate Instance with The Parish Group
Whether your school is a Slate newbie or a seasoned professional, proficiency in Slate will set your enrollment team up for success.
The Parish Group is a Slate Preferred Partner. This reflects our abiding commitment to providing the highest quality Slate services to our partner institutions.
If you’re interested in learning more about Slate, its strategy, market segmentation, communications, or implementation practices, reach out at success@parishgroup.com or call our office at 828-505-3000.
