By UNESCO’s estimate, in 2025 there will be nearly 100 million young people seeking seats at universities that currently do not exist.
The University of the People is tackling this problem head on as the world’s first non-profit, tuition-free, American, and accredited online university. Their unique growth strategy is a personalized and nearly entirely digital enrollment experience — one that earned them the 2022 Adobe Experience Maker Changemaker award.
I sat down with Asaf Wolff, senior vice president of Enrollment at University of the People, who joined the organization a decade ago when they served only 100 students. His bold vision for scalable expansion using Adobe Experience Cloud has doubled enrollment each year since. This fall the university predicts serving over 150,000 students.
Wolff, who spoke to me from his New Jersey home, shared a bit about his journey and advice:
Today, your acquisition costs are under $60 per student, one percent of the average acquisition cost at US colleges. How are you doing it?
If someone needs and wants higher education, we can create an automatic journey that will lead them all the way into the classroom.
99 percent of our students don’t engage with any humans until their first class.
We added Adobe Marketo Engage back in 2014 and built in a sustainable and scalable way that will enable us to serve 1 million students in the future. Eight years since we launched, it’s doing exactly what we expected and much more.
We have the ability to create a unique, segmented, personalized experience. This is important because we have students from over 200 countries and territories, various languages, cultures, and backgrounds. Automation enables us to scale it.
We are hoping to serve 200,000 students next year, and all the way to one million students in order to address a global issue that we believe can — and should — be solved.
What do you wish you knew starting out on this endeavor? What advice can you share for other experience makers?
Make sure you build the right infrastructure to measure things properly. It can be a struggle to understand the ROI per channel. That’s one reason we chose marketing automation, so with the limited resources we have, we can understand where to put them.
Early at a startup, there’s always limited resources. Our guiding question became, “what is the next most important thing we want to do?” The same goes for all marketing automation. Ask yourself first, “what is the most important thing that we need to do to improve results?”
Start small and simple with the first step, like for example a welcome email. Then, never aim for perfection. It needs to be good, but not perfect! Whether an email, SMS, landing page, or push notification, focus on the next step of the journey, because the impact on that next part of the experience that you create is much bigger than simply making sure the first step is perfect.