In its 2024-25 trendbook analyzing major private K-12 issues, the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) notes, “schools need to determine how AI can enhance rather than inhibit their educational mission…leaders need to shape policies from a place of understanding rather than fear.”
As industry leaders look for ways to increase efficiency through Artificial Intelligence (AI), schools have begun to look for applications beyond the classroom. For private schools, AI can enhance marketing plans, streamline processes, and drive better recruiting results without the need for an expansive team.
Whether you’re looking to improve email campaigns, fine-tune your copy, or plan for future growth, AI can make all the difference. Let’s explore how AI can help market your private school effectively.
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Overview of AI in Marketing: The Possibilities
AI is transforming how organizations, including independent schools, approach marketing. With data-driven insights and generative content, AI has the power to provide personalized experiences for prospective families, improve deliverables, and optimize campaigns.
AI also gives marketers the ability to better analyze past trends, predict future behaviors, and become more resonant with your target audience—whether you’re looking to increase enrollment, improve engagement, or simply raise awareness about your institution.
Private schools, especially smaller ones with limited marketing resources, can particularly benefit from AI-powered marketing solutions. With AI, schools can automate many marketing processes while gaining detailed insights into what works best for their specific demographics.
Email Marketing
Email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to engage with prospective families. But managing multiple campaigns, optimizing send times, and ensuring content resonates with recipients can be time-consuming and hard to pin down. Like before, these strategies ultimately rely on human intelligence, but now AI can play a complimentary, more efficient role.
AI-powered email marketing tools can help:
- Personalize content: AI can analyze user data (such as past interactions or demographics) to create personalized email content that appeals to individual families. For example, AI can generate tailored subject lines and body copy based on the interests of the recipient, increasing the likelihood of them opening and engaging with your email.
- Optimize send times: AI can analyze when your audience is most likely to open emails and automatically schedule sends at those optimal times. This takes the guesswork out of timing and ensures messages receive maximum visibility.
- Segment audiences: AI can also help identify the most promising audience segments by analyzing past behaviors and demographic data. By segmenting your email lists more effectively, you ensure your messages are targeted to those most likely to engage with your school.
Copywriting
Compelling copy is a cornerstone of any successful marketing campaign. While many private schools may not have the resources for a dedicated copywriting team, those that do need to be able to juggle myriad content requests. Fortunately, AI can help produce high-quality, engaging copy at efficient scale.
Generative AI tools, like Chat-GPT, can create blog posts, social media updates, and even web page content that resonates with your target audiences. This helps schools maintain a steady flow of content with minimal effort.
Finetuning Existing Copy for High Conversion
For teams who still prefer full control of creative content, AI tools can help refine messaging to get the most conversions possible. Analyzing past and current content to determine what language works best for your audience, the right program ensures your messaging fully aligns with the values and interests of prospective families.
- Historical performance: AI assesses which elements of your past content have led to the most conversions. By identifying high-performing copy, teams then replicate those strategies and improve conversion rates.
- A/B testing: AI can automate A/B testing, allowing teams to test different variations of copy to see which resonates best with audiences. By continually refining copy based on real-time results, you increase the chances of converting recipients into website visitors, and from there into applicants.
Optimize Send Times and Audience Types
AI excels at optimizing the timing and targeting of your campaigns. With traditional marketing, figuring out when and to whom to send messages often involves trial and error. However, AI tools can predict the best times to send communications based on your audience’s behavior and previous interactions.
- Tailored timing: By analyzing past email open rates, AI can determine the best times for your school to engage with prospects, ensuring emails have the highest chance of being opened and read.
- Targeting the right audience: AI can identify different audience segments based on behavior, preferences, and past interactions. By targeting these specific groups with tailored messaging, you can ensure that your marketing efforts are highly relevant to each family.
Schools with Limited Marketing Resources
For smaller schools without a dedicated marketing team or copywriters, AI gives these schools the possibility to generate professional-quality content, even on a limited budget. AI-powered tools can:
- Create blog posts, social media content, and email campaigns with minimal input.
- Ensure that all content aligns with your school’s tone, mission, and values.
- Free up valuable time for school staff to focus on other priorities, such as student engagement or community-building activities.
Strategizing: The Role of AI in Long-Term Private School Marketing Plans
More than just operational, AI can also play a crucial role in your private school’s long-term marketing plan. By analyzing trends and predicting future outcomes, AI helps admissions teams set realistic growth goals and adjust their strategies accordingly.
The Importance of Queries
Generative AI, such as ChatGPT, relies on queries, which are basically conversational questions or declarations, to create content. To form useful queries, start by being as specific and clear as possible with requests. The more context provided, the better the model can generate relevant and targeted responses. For example, instead of asking for “recruitment tips,” admissions professionals should clarify what they are focusing on and specify the target audience. This helps AI platforms tailor responses to a more precise context.
Additionally, it’s helpful to break down queries into smaller, more manageable components when tackling complex tasks. For instance, rather than asking for a full admissions strategy in one go, admissions professionals could ask for suggestions on specific aspects, like “How can I improve open rates when emailing young professionals?” or “What are some content ideas for engaging Gen X on Facebook and Instagram?” This incremental approach will help in obtaining detailed answers that can build on previous instructions for a more resonant result.
Finally, experimenting with different query formats, such as asking for pros and cons or step-by-step guides, can bring a variety of perspectives for more effective campaigns.
Analyze Year-Over-Year (YoY) Growth Trends
AI excels at analyzing large datasets, which is perfect when evaluating Year-over-Year (YoY) growth. By looking at trends from past years, AI can identify patterns, such as:
- Application increases or declines: How has your school’s enrollment changed over the past few years? What marketing strategies drove this growth or stagnation? What previous strategic actions correlate to spikes and regressions?
- Audience behavior: How has the behavior of your target audience evolved? What changes in your messaging or strategy might have caused shifts in application numbers?
With these insights, you can adjust your private school’s marketing plan to align with long-term growth goals.
Planning: What Would Targeted Growth Look Like?
Using AI-driven insights, schools can set realistic growth goals. For instance, if you’re aiming for a 10% increase in enrollment next year, AI can help you understand what that might look like in terms of audience reach, campaign efforts, and conversion rates on a cascading scale.
This helps planners reach a realistic picture of what campaigns and events to roll out, at a much faster rate than manual calculations, while at the same time projecting alternate scenarios to ensure the best possible outcomes. By projecting the potential impact of different strategies, AI helps departments allocate resources more effectively and set achievable targets.
Workflow Automation vs AI
While automation has been around for years, AI serves different purposes and has distinct functionality. It’s important to know these distinctions to best gauge how to use each.
Workflow automation is focused on streamlining repetitive tasks and processes through pre-defined rules and triggers. It typically follows a set sequence of actions, with minimal or no human intervention. For example, Ravenna’s workflow automation relieve administrative burden with functions that include automatically:
- Sending a welcome email when a parent fills out an inquiry form on a school’s website, then timing out a series of drip emails to nurture interest.
- Routing a document to the appropriate team member for approval, based on a preset protocol.
- Flagging student applications and scheduling open appointment slots with an interviewer based on the student’s specific needs.
The key here is that workflow automation relies on clear, established guidelines, ensuring consistency and efficiency in routine tasks while eliminating opportunities for human error but requires manual updates to adapt to new circumstances.
On the other hand, AI involves the simulation of human intelligence in machines that can learn, reason, and make decisions. AI is capable of analyzing complex datasets to recognize complex patterns and adapt its behavior over time. As you’ve seen, an AI-powered system goes beyond automation to predict audience behavior, provide personalized recommendations, or even generate content autonomously.
Unlike workflow automation, AI can handle tasks that require judgment, intuition, or decision-making in unpredictable scenarios. It can also learn from experience, improving its output over time without explicit reprogramming. While workflow automation follows predefined rules, AI can adapt and optimize based on real-time data.
In practice, the two can work hand-in-hand. Workflow automation might handle repetitive tasks like data entry or document routing, while AI could be used to analyze data and provide insights or make decisions that enhance those workflows.
To summarize, workflow automation best handles structured, especially routine tasks, while AI adds a layer of intelligence to deal with more complex problems. The amount of AI versus automation needed will vary from school to school. Schools with more traditional processes may benefit from first embracing workflow automation as a more efficient steppingstone than immediate AI adoption.
Strengthen School Admissions with Ravenna’s Workflow Automation
Incorporating AI into your private school’s marketing plan offers immense potential for efficiency, personalization, and growth. From fine-tuning your copy to optimizing email campaigns, AI empowers schools to better engage with prospective families, analyze trends, and plan for long-term enrollment success.
However, the foundation starts with strong process automation. What you get out of AI is only as good as what is put in, so streamlining the complex into the simple ensures an efficient use of both automated and human intelligence.
