Recruiting international students through closed borders

Introducing brand-new courses into the market is hard enough; reaching and connecting with prospective international students while the borders stayed closed made it harder. With in-person events off the table, digital channels had to open the conversation, and the campaign message had to answer the question on every prospect’s mind: students could commence online, and safely return to campus once borders reopened.

Course-level advertising built audiences from the landing page, website, course pages and previous enrolment data, driving prospects to a landing page that captured their course preferences and study intentions. A data capture process scored each lead on factors like country of origin and how they would fund their studies, feeding a live lead report that prioritised the prospects most likely to convert.

Leads scoring over 6 went straight to our in-house call centre, where agents qualified them further, working to a script provided by Flinders so the call centre acted as a seamless extension of the recruitment team, and handed the strongest prospects to Flinders International to convert. Missed calls triggered an automated SMS to a mobile-optimised callback booking page, so no interested student slipped through.

The campaign delivered 85 enrolments at a 20% application-to-enrolment conversion rate, alongside a clear lift in market awareness for the new courses: fast, demonstrable ROI on a course launch run entirely through closed borders.