How to Engage and Retain Nursing Students with a Winning Nurture Email

How to Engage and Retain Nursing Students with a Winning Nurture Email

Nursing school marketing is even more critical as competition between programs increases, so when developing your strategy, you’re probably assessing all the different channels — your website, social media, email marketing, text messaging, job fairs, in-person recruiting, direct mail, conferences, and more.

Email marketing is a cost-effective yet profitable channel, with businesses generating an incredibly high return of $36 for every $1 spent. One of the best ways to nurture and retain nursing students is through a dedicated, long-term nurture campaign.

Key Components of a Nurture Email

1. Address Their Challenges and Pain Points

Healthcare is an empathetic field, and students want to feel understood and heard. Also, it’s essential to draw a clear connection between your school’s unique offerings and what they want to accomplish. For example, do you have a one-of-a-kind mentoring program? What are your job acceptance rates? Are your program completion rates highly competitive? Ensure email nurture content addresses students’ worries and concerns and answers their questions about what sets your school apart. Then, when you can proactively solve their pain points by understanding their motivations and goals, you can create a genuine connection with your school.

2. Include a Strong Call-to-Action

Don’t let prospective students passively engage with your content. Every email should end with a call to action to keep them engaged and interested in your program. For example, towards the end of your email nurture sequence, tuition and scholarships might be top-of-mind. Include a button to download the pricing brochure or request a meeting with the scholarship and finance department.

3. Craft a Clear Buyer’s Journey

A nurture campaign aims to guide prospective students through the buying process. From awareness to consideration to purchase, you want to send them the right content at the right time. For example, in the beginning awareness stage, you can help students by providing information via blogs, white papers, webinars, or e-books. Highlight your benefits and advantages since they are most likely beginning their search and comparing multiple schools. As students progress to the final stage towards a purchase, it’s time to back up your claims. Use case studies or student testimonials to show how you’ve helped other students reach their goals. Maybe you have a one-pager on job placement highlights after your program or video testimonials of respected nursing alumni. Your nurture sequence should guide them through this entire process with tailored content for each stage of awareness, consideration, and purchase.

4. Add a “What’s Next?” Student Engagement Email Sequence

Now that you’ve sold them on your school and they’ve enrolled, it’s time to shift your focus to retention and engagement. At the end of the buyer’s journey, students are excited and ready to get started with your program. Don’t just leave them hanging. This is the opportunity to seal the deal and create engaged alums for life. Create multiple emails that provide students with onboarding info, tips and tricks, and a breakdown of what they can expect. Continue to reassure them they made the right decision as well with more student successes and testimonials.

Utilize Strong Email Nurture Campaigns Throughout the Entire Student Journey

No matter what stage they’re in — if a prospect is comparing your school to another or they’re several years into the program — email marketing is a highly effective way to communicate. The average person checks their email about 15 times a day, so rest assured you’re reaching them on a platform they will always be on. Nurture their needs from a prospective, hopeful student to qualified alums to increase your school’s acceptance rate, retention, and success post-graduation.

Contact Springer Publishing to learn how we can help you build a winning nurture email program for your prospective and current students.

Nurture Email 101: How to Retain Nursing Students

Nurture Email 101: How to Retain Nursing Students

With hundreds of thousands of nursing students entering school every year, your nursing program needs to stand out. This competitive, attractive industry offers ample opportunities, benefits, and a lifelong, impactful career for high-achieving nurses. And your nursing school wants to attract and retain the best nursing students. Over 2,600 colleges offer a nursing degree program, and nursing school marketing should be top-of-mind for all of them.

Attracting and retaining nursing students starts on day one with your first interaction. Whether they visit your website, talk to a recruiter, or hear information from a friend, lead nurturing emails step in to help you build a relationship with potential students. Lead nurturing for nursing students is incredibly important, as students have many choices. Warm up leads, stay top of mind, and radically increase the chances of students joining your program with a well-constructed nurture program.

What Is a Nurture Email?

Nurture emails help you warm up leads, stay top of mind, and increase students’ chances to join your program. They’re highly effective and easy to set up, but many nursing programs often don’t bother because it feels time-consuming. However, a simple way to create a strong lead nurturing program is to repurpose existing content. For example, take a website page, and turn it into three emails. Then, use the copy from a whitepaper or e-book on applying to nursing school and drip out the content over several weeks via nurture emails. You probably already have tons of content created to help nursing students, so it’s just a matter of repurposing them into email format.

How Do Nurture Emails Help Retain Nursing Students?

1. Share Information

Students want to know why they should join your program. Use an email nurture sequence to highlight your unique differentiators, program details, testimonials, and more. You probably have tons of information you want to share, so a spaced-out nurture email sequence helps deliver large amounts of content over time.

2. Build Rapport

Nursing students are more likely to finish their education when they feel personally connected to a school or program. In your email nurture sequence, focus your language on empathizing with them and understanding their unique challenges and pain points. If potential students feel like you genuinely understand them, they will know, like, and trust your program, helping them stick it out when courses, exams, and labs get tough.

3. Encourage Application With Call-to-Actions

A good nurture email always ends with a call to action. Using a single call to action in an email increases clicks by 371%, helping potential students apply, talk to an administrator, or request tuition information. All emails should drive towards a specific action, getting prospective students used to doing more than passively reading your emails.

4. Guide Prospective Students to the Right Decision

Students have a variety of factors to consider when choosing a school, and a strong email nurture sequence helps guide them in the right direction. For prospective students, focus on 8 to 10 emails per sequence over several weeks. Towards the end, increase the spacing to help give students time to make their decision. This step-by-step guidance helps hold their hand through the process.

5. Move Prospective Students in and Out of the Email Nurture Sequence

Many prospective students will decide before the end of your email sequence. If they enroll, immediately move them to a new student nurture email campaign, which will help get them excited about school. If they get rejected or drop out, consider moving them to a long-term nurture sequence where you only email them every few months. They might change their mind and want to switch schools, and you want to still be considered.

Nursing School Marketing Must-Haves

Every nursing program should use nurture emails to attract and retain nursing students. Nurture emails for nursing schools help deliver information, build rapport, encourage application, and guide prospective students to make the right choice. Springer Publishing helps guide healthcare students into the right program by working with institutions to develop their email nurture campaigns. Contact us for more information.

Graduate Student Nurses Face Enrollment Concerns Over a Critical Shortage of Health Care Providers

Graduate Student Nurses Face Enrollment Concerns Over a Critical Shortage of Health Care Providers

The United States is facing a critical shortage in all health care professions. With the nation’s baby boomer population approaching retirement age, the issue is twofold: the aging population requires more care, and the nation’s physicians, nurses, and other health professionals are retiring.

Too Many Students, Not Enough Options

The solution to filling this gap is replacing the departing health care professionals with nursing graduates of all academic levels. However, many higher education institutions are turning away suitable candidates in droves. In 2016, nursing degree programs in the U.S. rejected 64,067 qualified applicants from baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs alike citing a lack of budget, faculty, clinical sites and preceptors, and classroom space.

Currently, there is a serious shortage of physicians, which continues to grow. By 2025, there will be a projected deficit of nearly 35,600 primary care doctors alone. Nursing schools are facing the struggle and strain to increase the capacity of existing nursing programs, and explore other avenues like online courses and accreditation.

Higher Education Means Higher Pay

Enrollment is increasing in nursing masters and doctoral programs across the country, and it’s no wonder that nurses are applying to graduate schools en masse. RNs realize there are significant perks to training and becoming an advanced practice registered nurse. Evidence shows that the quality of care by an advanced practice nurse is comparable to physicians, while often more affordable.

The full-time annual salary for a Nurse Practitioner (NP) averages $105,546. The high pay range of the NP may be partly to blame for the faculty shortage—higher compensation in the clinical setting is luring potential educators away from teaching.

Most vacant faculty positions require a terminal nursing degree. If more nurses pursue a doctoral degree, the faculty shortage will be alleviated. What will the outcomes of the nursing shortage be? Only time will tell.

Caitlin Goodwin MSN, RN, CNM is a Board Certified Nurse-Midwife and freelance writer. She has ten years of nursing experience and graduated with a MSN from Frontier Nursing University.    

OPM Recruitment Strategies for Graduate Student Nurses

OPM Recruitment Strategies for Graduate Student Nurses

Online Program Management companies (OPMs) are taking the online nursing education market by storm. As higher education institutions compete to meet student expectations in a digital world, OPMs create, manage, and market education programs for these schools at a cost. These corporations shoulder upfront costs of developing and setting up the virtual nursing degree programs so universities don’t have to.

Building Out Both Traditional And Virtual Classrooms

While traditional colleges and universities are well-established contenders in the arena of in-person, face-to-face education, OPMs allow these institutions to branch out and offer nursing education online. Remote graduate nursing students have unique schedules and needs, so a different skill set is required to recruit them, as opposed to the conventional classroom student.

From a recruitment standpoint, OPMs provide a valuable service on the front-end. OPMs deliver innovative marketing to prospective and future students in this technological era with the return of a sizable applicant pool for their higher education clients.

A Conscionable Approach to Nursing Education?

But not everything is promising with this organizational model. Many professionals in higher education share the same concerns about the integrity of the Online Program Management model—that the conflicting goals of education for the greater good and business revenue by a corporation are incompatible.

By outsourcing their online nursing programs and subsequent marketing, traditional universities stand to lose authenticity in their brand and transparency in their recruitment efforts. Are OPMs merely filling desks or targeting students who fit the culture and philosophy of the institution?

While the moral ramifications of recruiting by OPM are unknown and will continue to be debated, the results are clear. The fact that the OPM market is a billion-dollar business implies that they are doing something right.

Caitlin Goodwin MSN, RN, CNM is a Board Certified Nurse-Midwife and freelance writer. She has ten years of nursing experience and graduated with a MSN from Frontier Nursing University.

 

Orbis Education and Mercer University Launch New ABSN Program in Atlanta

Orbis Education and Mercer University Launch New ABSN Program in Atlanta

Orbis Education and Mercer University recently partnered to launch an Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing (ABSN) program that offers qualified students in the Atlanta area a new, faster path into the high demand nursing profession.

Steve Hodownes, chief executive officer at Orbis Education, tells PRNewswire.com, “Mercer has a long history of educating nurses. We are very excited to be collaborating with this premier nursing school to help them expand their highly respected program.”

The first class of the new program is scheduled to start in May 2019 and Mercer will offer three start dates each year. Mercer’s ABSN program will enable students to leverage their existing non-nursing bachelor’s degrees to earn a BSN in as few as 12 months. Students enrolled in the program will learn through a combination of online coursework, onsite experience at a state-of-the-art lab facility to be developed and funded by Orbis, and clinical rotations at top area hospitals.

Orbis and Mercer partnered to create the new program in an effort to alleviate the nationwide nursing shortage, which is expected to hit critical levels in the next decade. Georgia is predicted to need an additional 13,510 registered nurses by 2026 in order to keep up with the demands of a rapidly growing population.

According to PRNewswire.com, Dr. Linda Streit, dean of nursing for Mercer University, says, “It is our duty to do everything we can as educators to keep up with the demand by providing excellent nursing education options like our new Accelerated BSN program in Atlanta. We are dedicated to developing knowledgeable, ethical, caring and compassionate nurses who are ready to become the next generation of highly qualified practicing nurse leaders in Georgia and across the nation.”

To learn more about Orbis Education and Mercer University’s new partnership to launch an ABSN program in Atlanta, visit here.

Orbis Education and Xavier University Celebrate Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing Students

Orbis Education and Xavier University Celebrate Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing Students

After launching a 16-month Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing (ABSN) program in January 2017 in partnership with Orbis Education , Xavier University recently celebrated the pinning of the first cohort of program graduates.

The ABSN program addresses the current and future nursing shortage in both the state of Ohio and nationwide. Offering college graduates with non-nursing degrees the opportunity to start a nursing career, the program delivers high-quality, clinically intensive nursing education in a short amount of time through online learning, simulation lab practicals, and clinical rotations in the greater Cincinnati area.

Dr. Lisa Long, associate director of nursing, online and hybrid program at Xavier University, tells PRNewswire.com, “We offer experienced and credentialed faculty and state-of-the-art labs and simulation experiences to our students. We put all of that, as well as an emphasis on Xavier’s Jesuit, Catholic mission of care for the person, into a package that prepares students for a successful transition into nursing.”

The ABSN program was developed in partnership with Orbis Education, a leading provider of pre-licensure healthcare programs for universities. Orbis funded the development of a high-tech learning facility which includes meeting rooms and simulation labs featuring high-fidelity manikins.
To learn more about the partnership between Orbis Education and Xavier University to create an accelerated BSN program, visit here.