Episode 84: Jaime Hunt on How Marketing Moves the Needle on Retention
Listen On
What role can marketing play in student success? How can it can increase alignment within the institution, improve awareness among students, and destigmatize or normalize getting help? How can it bust silos and build a connection to the brand? We dive into these topics with Jaime Hunt, former CMO at higher ed institutions and now consulting with institutions at Solve Higher Ed, host of the "Confessions of a Higher Ed CMO," and the author of Heart Over Hype.
In the competitive landscape of higher education, the traditional "enrollment funnel" is being replaced by a more holistic student journey. For years, marketing departments focused their energy and budgets almost exclusively on recruitment—creating polished, high-production pieces to get students in the door. However, once those students arrived on campus, the experience often became fragmented, with disjointed communications from disparate offices like financial aid, housing, and advising.
Jaime Hunt, a veteran Chief Marketing Officer and author of Heart Over Hype, argues that the expertise found in marketing offices is the "unsung hero" of student retention. By breaking down institutional silos and applying marketing principles to the entire student lifecycle, colleges can foster a deeper sense of belonging and significantly improve graduation rates.
Redefining Higher Ed Student Success Beyond the Credential
When we discuss higher ed student success, we often default to graduation rates and credentials. While these are vital metrics, Jaime Hunt suggests a broader definition: success is when a student achieves the specific goal they set out to accomplish, wrapped in a deep sense of belonging.
Success isn't just the destination; it’s the journey. It involves the "whole person" growth that happens when a student feels part of a community. If a student feels they don’t belong, they are far more likely to "stop out" for reasons beyond just finances. Marketing plays a crucial role here by shifting the narrative from a transactional exchange (tuition for a degree) to a transformational experience (becoming part of a legacy).
Why Marketing is Vital for Student Retention Strategies
The tools used in enrollment marketing—segmentation, clear messaging, and journey mapping—are precisely what is needed to keep students on track once they are enrolled. When different offices send contradictory or uncoordinated messages, students experience "information overload."
A marketing team can bring these "fragmented" communications together, placing the student at the center of the journey. For example, at Winston-Salem State University, Hunt’s team helped implement an AI chatbot specifically for current students. By answering basic questions about immunizations, billing, and checklists, the bot reduced phone calls to administrative offices by 36% and helped overall enrollment grow by 8%. Marketing doesn't just make things look "pretty"; it removes the friction that causes students to give up.
Leveraging Parent Engagement in the Student Journey
One of the most effective, yet often overlooked, student retention strategies is engaging the parents. Unlike previous generations, today’s Gen Z and Gen Alpha parents are highly involved and "democratic" in their family decision-making.
By treating parents as allies rather than outsiders, institutions can provide them with the tools to coach their children through roommate conflicts, homesickness, or academic struggles. Parents are often more engaged with institutional content than the students themselves. When a college provides parent-focused newsletters or webinars, they aren't just communicating; they are building a support network that keeps the student anchored to the institution.
Busting Silos to Create a Connected Campus
The biggest barrier to student success is the internal silo. When departments like housing, the registrar, and the marketing office operate as independent territories, the student suffers. Jaime Hunt’s "dog sled" analogy is perfect: if every dog pulls in a different direction, the sled bounces around and stays in place. When everyone pulls in the same direction, you create unstoppable momentum.
To adapt to the "enrollment cliff," institutions must realize that retention is a form of enrollment growth. It is far more cost-effective to keep a current student than to recruit a new one. This requires an "inside the house" shift where leaders stop talking about "my department" and start talking about "our students."
Summary: The Path Forward
The future of higher education lies in the ability to bridge the gap between recruitment and retention. By leveraging the communication expertise of marketing teams, institutions can de-stigmatize support services, engage families as partners, and build a brand that fosters a lifelong sense of pride and belonging.
Episode 84 Transcript
-
Jaime Hunt: When you think about recruiting a student, you're putting marketing towards that. You're making these really polished pieces. And then when a student gets on campus, suddenly the comms get really fragmented. They are different things from different offices at different times with different levels of expertise in marketing and communications. And so the student gets these sort of fragmented overload of information sometimes that contradicts each other. Getting a marketing team involved can really help you kind of take that whole journey and bring it together in a way that makes the end user, the student, be at the center.
Elliot Felix: Welcome Jamie to the Connected College podcast. I'm looking forward to having a great conversation and I think a great place to start is how you got started. Tell us a little bit about your journey in higher ed.
Jaime Hunt: Yeah, so I started out my career as a journalist and then I pivoted, accidentally, into higher education. In 2004, I started working at a small private school in Minneapolis and once I got into it, I realized I loved it. It fed that idealism that as a journalist I had, where it's like I need to feel like I'm doing something that is making the world a better place. And so for about 20 years, I worked in higher education, the last decade or so as a vice president and chief marketing officer at three different institutions. I see student success as when a student is achieving what the goal is that they're trying to accomplish by enrolling in college. So for most students, that's gonna be graduating, but I also think I see it also as having belonging wrapped into that and feeling like they have accomplished their academic goals too.
-
Elliot Felix: Given your expertise in marketing, I'd love to hear a little bit about the connection between marketing and student success. Like what role can marketing play in increasing student success?
Jaime Hunt: Yeah, so when I was at Winston-Salem State, my department actually decided to make retention and graduation and student success the pillars of the work that we did. And so part of that is doing things like communicating the offerings, the tutoring offerings, the student orientation, the student activities, all of that stuff. But I think even bigger than that is cultivating that sense of community and that sense of "we have your back and we're here to help you and support you throughout your journey." And then also doing things like de-stigmatizing accessing mental health resources, de-stigmatizing accessing tutoring, and working with the various student success offices to see what is the barrier to getting students to actually engage in some of these programs and how can marketing and communication help overcome those barriers?
Elliot Felix: So many great contributions. It starts with internal communication that leads to alignment and making those connections and busting the silos so everybody understands the students and what they need and what they're experiencing. But then once you do that, then you're helping students become more aware of what supports are there, what opportunities are there, and crucially, that it's for them, and that there's nothing wrong with seeking help.
-
Elliot Felix: What's on your list of things that are changing about marketing and how it can increase student success?
Jaime Hunt: We're certainly at a point in time when what students want and need has changed a lot. Student expectations have shifted, particularly since the pandemic. How students consume information has changed a lot. But in a lot of cases, we're playing in the same playbook as an institution. We're doing things the way we've always done them. We're not necessarily breaking any boundaries or doing anything unique.
Jaime Hunt: As marketers on the recruitment side spending millions of dollars, we have to stay aware of what is the best way to reach students. So let us apply that knowledge to student success as well. As students' needs change, they might want more video-based content. They're not opening and reading our emails. They don't want to go to events anymore; they want virtual events. We need to be applying that same knowledge, that same expertise about what students want, expect, and need to student success initiatives as well.
-
Jaime Hunt: I think that student success is existential. We cannot succeed if our students don't succeed. If our students drop out, if our students stop out, if they leave, that has a major impact on revenue. As we're in the midst of an enrollment cliff, we need to focus on keeping the students we get. We used to be able to just shovel students in like coal. But now we need to be really worried about the backend because every student that stays is a certain amount of dollars.
Jaime Hunt: Approaching a marketing office with "Hey, retention is about enrollment growth" is a good way to make the case. You can grow your overall enrollment by retaining students. And then, also convincing your chief marketing officer that it impacts your reputation and your rankings. Student success plays a role in reputation and rankings, and those are typically KPIs that marketers are looking at too. My biggest thing is, get away from those silos. Stop talking about "mine," start talking about "ours." Stop talking about "me," start talking about "we."
-
Jaime Hunt: I think parents are an untapped resource here. I recently worked with clients on building out a parent-focused persistence and retention campaign. How can we harness parents as our allies in helping their students be successful? Parents of Gen Z and Gen Alpha are much more engaged. Families are much more democratic. Why are we not leveraging them? Parents want their kids to be successful and they want to be involved. It gives parents a really good taste in their mouth for the school because they start to see the school as their partner.
Jaime Hunt: I also think brand is really unsung as a driver for belonging. I see brand as that emotion that somebody attaches to who you are. When I was at Winston-Salem State, only 42% of students said it was their first-choice school. If a student has that attitude coming into it, they're starting off behind. If they hit one moment of friction, they're much more likely to say "I'm done." But if they are jazzed, if they are pumped up, they're going to feel part of something bigger than who they are. That fosters that sense of belonging. Why would you be proud of a place you don't belong?