What Makes People Click: Our Market/Our Students

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What Makes People Click:
Marketing an IEP Program on the Web
The following was prepared as part of a Demonstration held at TESOL 2003, Baltimore, MD, USA, in March. It is an ongoing project. Go to the Main page to see the rest or take a look at work that has already been done for previous presentations:
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Our Market/Our Students

One way to learn about what our students do, and how they think, is to ask the ones we know. Of course, this does not tell us about prospective students- those who chose not to come to our program, or didn't find out about it in time, or were unable to find it at all on the web. But certain generalizations can be made about the population of all international students in the US that still hold and are worth discussing.

First, they are diverse; students from Japan tend to have a lot of experience with technology; others have next to none. Some grew up with video games while others are experiencing them for the first time in the US. Finally, some chose to go abroad for personal reasons, perhaps related to adventure; others saw their experience as something for the benefit of the family or family business; still others are sponsored by a government or business.

Second, the population of international students, like the rest of the world, is changing rapidly with respect to its familiarity with the web and the internet. The percentage of students who already use e-mail upon arrival at our university has risen dramatically, from about 50% to almost 99% in 3-5 years; the occurrence of internet chat terminology in student writing has also shown a dramatic increase. Many of our students, however, still report having never seen our website before arriving (1)

Third, a difference in this generation, compared to, say, mine (I am 48), is that they expect interactivity in the computers they have contact with; they approach them differently than I do. The tendency toward interactivity in web design is one that excites the young and terrifies those of us who feel we are in shark-infested virtual waters. Nevertheless, the coming winds of change spell opportunity for those who are prepared to take advantage of it. I've already had a number of students, less than half my age, with more than double the web skill that I have, and found myself wishing to translate a little of what they knew.

Finally, when students are asked what was important to them when they chose a college or an intensive English program, they consistently rank some things highly and other things lowly; websites were not even on the list that I use (Schmidt & Simon 1995), but other variables have, to my knowledge, have remained consistent (2). Accreditation of your program is relatively low (though it may be important to the INS); whatever movie you or your college made, it also is ranked relatively low.

Ranked high are academic qualifications of teachers, location, safety of the city, IEP's relationship with its university or college, class size, and a host of other factors. I won't belabor these, as this list is already eight years old, but will only make a few points about them.

First, it is useful to point out that these aren't absolutes. For example, students may start out wanting a larger city, but when finding a smaller city that is made to appear lively and active, be willing to settle for that if they get what they want in another area. Their idea of an ideal environment is tempered somewhat by the fact that they may not know much about the US, or by the fact that what they know is skewed. They may infer things from movies about the US that aren't accurate (3); they may infer things from your text about your program that are not accurate; but we rarely know this until it is too late, and are often at a loss about how to prevent it from happening again. Marketing and advertising in general make a living by exploiting these inferences, but it is not always in our best interests to have our newest students bringing with them misconceptions about our town and our program.

Second, it would help all administrators to take running surveys about what was important to their students, as all students are different, and times are changing. For example, "uses technology effectively" was not included in the 1995 survey, as it probably didn't occur to anyone that it might be important for an international student to know this about a program he/she is about to enter; but consider this: students get this information, like much of what they know, through inference.

A question arises about what kind of machines our prospective students are using: do they have Flash? Shockwave? JavaScript? Exactly what percentage of the market do you cut out when you use these? Unfortunately, though the technology could probably answer this question, to my knowledge, it hasn't yet, and I certainly don't believe Flash's proclamation that, in essence, everyone has or is about to get Flash. Every professional web designer has or should have it, I'm sure. But our students are often using machines in a lab (locked up to prevent experimentation), their relatives' machines, or internet cafe machines. The conservative approach, for the designer, would be to make a page that everyone can use, and save the special effects for special purposes, inviting users to use them if able.

In general, academic programs are selling education, knowledge and authority; we don't really want to be associated with the Times-Square blink image, with flashing banners, enticements to gamble, pop-up windows, etc. so prevalent in the wider world of web marketing. But even in business, some of these are scorned as ineffective; why would they be more effective for us? I once heard someone say, and I agreed, that sure, we can use the computer to trick people onto our site, but do we really want our first interaction with a customer to be one of trickery and deception?

Finally, some age-old wisdom applies to this situation that we should consider: Word of mouth still rules in this industry; and, Bragging is about 1/100 as effective as being recommended. How can we use these maxims to increase our enrollment?

Footnotes:

1. This comes from an informal poll at our students' orientation at the beginning of each semester.

2. Here I have to claim that my notes have been eaten by the family dogs, but I have kept rough track of this over the years, in spite of being unable to pinpoint any more recent careful quantification of results.

3. More than one student arrived in a town in Kansas, where I once lived, looking for the dust and the cowboys. They could be found, but you had to know where.

Sources:

Schmidt & Simon (1995). Student recruitment from the perspective of current IEP students, Presentation at TESOL '95, Long Beach CA

Resources:

The Institute for International Education, Open Doors, statistics on international students in the US.

Copyright Thomas Leverett, 2003

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What Makes People Click:Marketing an IEP Program on the Web

Our Market/Our Students

What Makes People Click:
Marketing an IEP Program on the Web