Any senior leader will understand that not paying attention to financial data will have dire consequences eventually. I would argue that marketing data deserves the same attention.

Why pay attention to marketing KPIs?

There are three reasons why marketing data deserves your attention, even if you do not have a background in marketing.

1. It’s a leading indicator for financial and academic performance

Your enrolment may be OK this year, but if admissions is receiving fewer applications than last year, next year’s intake is at risk.

Look further ahead and the pattern becomes even clearer. If you are receiving fewer student enquiries, seeing web traffic drop or your school becomes less visible across the web, all else being equal, you may have an enrolment problem building.

Marketing performance can also affect academic reputation in a qualitative way by making your institution more visible and attractive to the students you most want to reach. For example, QS includes an indicator, which looks at both the share of international students and the diversity of their nationalities.

2. Earlier, smarter, and less drastic course corrections

Early warning gives you time to make measured changes and give them a chance to work. Marketing data enables you to see farther ahead and this can help to avoid drastic measures such as layoffs and budget cuts.

When you are falling behind, a marketing fix may be all that’s needed. For example, raising your advertising budget or shifting priorities.

At other times, you will need action across the institution, backed by active senior sponsorship. Think of changes in course portfolio, fee structure, target markets, or scholarships. Underlying IT issues can also greatly hamper marketing performance.

3. Proactively support (and challenge!) the marketing team

Like all professionals, marketers can get bogged down in business as usual. They may have learned to live with certain facts of life. But to achieve genuinely better marketing and recruitment results often requires challenging the status quo.

Some examples:

• IT: No one makes the time or investment needed for systems that could save substantial time and money within two or three years.

• Compliance: Data protection, and if you’re in the EU, GDPR compliance is important, but sometimes data protection policies overreach and hamper effective marketing.

• Message: If your institution’s positioning is unclear, your marketing will struggle to pursuade.

If you’re a marketing manager or director, you have a duty to highlight these challenges, time and time again, in language that non-marketers can understand.

If you’re a leader without a marketing background, your duty is to make every effort to understand the overall and long-term impact on your institution.

Each of these examples represents a deadlock that needs senior involvement to break. One party, or perhaps both, will need to go out of their comfort zone. That usually only happens with pressure and support from leadership.

Which KPIs to track?

If you agree that keeping an eye on marketing performance is important, the next question is, what to track, and how often? If you are not looking at marketing data yet, quarterly is a good place to start.

Below are the key metrics to keep an eye on, working outwards from enrolment to discovery.

Admitted students and offer take-up rate. You’ll never have more new enrolments than the number of students you admitted. But admitted students may have applied at multiple institutions or decide not to enrol for different reasons. The admission-to-enrolment ratio (offer take-up rate) will tell you how often this happens.

If offer take-up rate is low or dropping compared to previous years, it can point to a communications issue, such as not reassuring offer holders enough or a shift in the competitive landscape.

The best way to find out what drives a low offer take-up rate is to contact admitted students, or a sample of them, soon after their offer and ask for feedback.

Website visits and website conversion rate. Any applicant is highly likely to have visited your website at some point, probably multiple times. As I argue in my book , your website is therefore a crucial link in the student recruitment chain.

But it’s not just about how many prospective students visit your website, it matters just as much what they do there. The website conversion rate is the ratio of website users that take an action divided by total web traffic. Low conversion can point to poorly executed campaigns or structural website issues. A common cause is offering too few low-touch ways to engage, perhaps only an “apply now” button.

Pre-website visibility. It is increasingly important to pay attention to what prospective students see, and do not see, about your institution before they ever visit your website.

The media landscape is changing: AI is changing how students search and people are less likely to click out from social media platforms. There isn’t one single place or number that can capture your visibility across the web, but you can keep an eye on this through a composite of:

• (GSC) impressions: Google reports how many times your webpages were featured in its search result pages, even if people didn’t click through
• Social media visibility: Social platforms such as Instagram and YouTube report on visibility and impressions of what you post. Social listening tools can also track visibility and sentiment in posts by others.
• AI mentions: AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini don’t share stats on what people ask and what they mention in their answers. You can still identify the prompts that matter most, test them regularly and track whether and how your institution appears.

Taken together, online visibility level is often your earliest signal. Improving visibility will carry over to website visits, enquiries, applications, and enrolments.

What if you’re not capturing these KPIs?

It is not uncommon for education institutions to struggle with reporting marketing KPIs. But if this is the case, you are flying blind. The first order of the day should be to establish a basic way of measuring marketing performance – so you can benchmark performance year over year.

In short

Paying attention to these marketing KPIs can help you spot enrolment risk early. You will buy yourself valuable extra time and options to act, and by addressing inefficiencies such as low offer take-up rate or website conversion, you may improve recruitment outcomes without increasing your marketing spend.

For additional background, please see:

• “91ɬ��Podcast: Are you using the right digital channels to reach international students?”
• “Survey highlights a growing ‘engagement gap’ between international student expectations and institutional response”
• “AI is changing how students search: What it means for marketing and recruitment”

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Our hosts are then joined by Nicolas Chu, CEO & Founder of , and Jennifer Parsons, Executive Director of Partnerships with , for a featured discussion on how we can harness the power of people, process, and platforms in order to better engage with prospective students.

The context for this discussion is that international student recruitment has entered a new phase, one marked by changing student preferences and also by much more intense competition. The result is a widening gap between student expectations and institutional performance, especially in terms of responsiveness to student enquiries and the channels that institutions and schools use to engage prospective students.

As recruitment professionals, we must now consider even more carefully than ever: how can we best meet students where they are, with timely responses on the channels they prefer?

You can listen right now in the player below, and we encourage you to subscribe via your favourite podcast app in order to receive future episodes automatically.

For additional background, please see:

• “91ɬ��Podcast: Students are switching to AI for search. Are you ready?“
• “Survey highlights a growing ‘engagement gap’ between international student expectations and institutional response“

The post 91ɬ��Podcast: Are you using the right digital channels to reach international students? appeared first on 91ɬ��Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment.

AI is not arriving into a clean, joined-up recruitment function. It is landing in environments where systems do not talk to each other, ownership is fragmented, and key information lives in a mix of CRM notes, web pages, PDFs, team inboxes and locally managed spreadsheets. That matters, because AI does not solve complexity. It scales it.

The sector is at risk of repeating a familiar pattern: investing in new tools while leaving the foundations untouched. AI then becomes another layer sitting on top of the same friction points – just with quicker outputs and higher expectations.

AI in recruitment is less “wow” than it sounds – and that’s a good thing

The public conversation often gravitates towards chatbots. They are visible, easy to demo and appealing for 24/7 coverage. But the most valuable AI use cases in recruitment are rarely headline-grabbing. They are operational.

AI earns its place when it does one of three things:

• reduces response time without losing quality
• improves relevance by matching students to the right information faster
• removes admin drag so staff spend more time on high-value conversations

That can mean intelligent enquiry triage, appointment scheduling, follow-up prompts, application workflow support, and content personalisation based on what a prospect has actually engaged with. In a competitive international environment, these are not “nice to haves”. They directly influence whether a student stays in the funnel.

And it is worth saying explicitly: the goal is not to replace people. The best-performing model is “human + machine” – AI provides speed and consistency; staff provide judgement, reassurance and nuance.

The uncomfortable truth: AI exposes what institutions have tolerated for years

Where AI is introduced, it tends to shine a light on issues that were previously manageable because humans quietly compensated for them.

• Inconsistent information: entry requirements differ by page; fees are updated in one place but not another; scholarship details live on in a PDF long after the policy has changed.
• Fragmented journeys: marketing owns one part, admissions owns another, faculties own programme content, student services owns “experience” messaging – and the student experiences it as one journey anyway.
• Siloed data: multiple CRMs, multiple lead sources, inconsistent definitions of “enquiry” and “qualified”, and limited integration between systems.

AI can help, but only if the institution is prepared to treat these issues as structural – not cosmetic.

This is where many implementations falter. AI tools are purchased as point solutions, deployed by one team, and expected to perform magic in an ecosystem that is not ready to support them. The result is predictable: patchy adoption, uneven quality, and a lingering sense that “AI didn’t work for us”.

Often, the tool is not the problem. The conditions are.

Readiness is not a slogan

Before investing further, institutions benefit from stepping back and asking four simple questions. They are simple to ask, harder to answer honestly:

• Will this improve outcomes that matter?
Response time, conversion, quality of guidance, staff workload – and how those will be measured.
• Is it easy enough to use in the real world?
During peak cycle, with staff turnover, shifting priorities, and competing demands.
• Is there clear support and ownership?
Not just “buy-in”, but named accountability across marketing, admissions, IT/data and governance.
• Are the foundations in place?
Clean data, accurate content, integration capability, and governance that is operational, not theoretical.

When AI adoption stalls, it is usually because the last question is answered with a quiet “not really”.

What changes when universities use AI (and students still use it too)

Two things happen at once.

First, student expectations rise. If AI can answer instantly, waiting two days for a response feels outdated. Prospects still want humans – but they want humans at the right moment, with continuity and context.

Second, measurement becomes harder. As more decisions happen inside AI tools, fewer people follow a neat trail from ad to website to enquiry form. That does not mean marketing is failing. It means the web is no longer the only (or even primary) interface between student and institution.

In this environment, accuracy becomes strategic. AI will surface what it can find, whether it is current or not. The institutions that win attention will often be those with fewer contradictions, clearer ownership of content, and consistent signals across the web – not necessarily those with the biggest budgets.

A pragmatic way forward: start small, fix foundations, scale carefully

A full “AI transformation” is not required to make progress. But a full commitment to foundations is.

Three moves tend to deliver genuine momentum:

1) Treat the data layer as recruitment infrastructure
Integration and data hygiene are not “IT projects”. They are recruitment capability. In practice, this means ensuring that core recruitment and admissions information — prospect records, programme data, entry requirements, fees, communications history, and application status — is accurate, up to date, and connected across systems. Where this is weak, staff compensate manually, and AI tools inherit and scale the same inconsistencies. Where it is strong, institutions can respond faster, personalise more effectively, reduce duplication, improve measurement, and give students more consistent guidance. Modest progress here often unlocks disproportionate benefits elsewhere.

2) Choose one high-impact journey point.
Enquiry response, programme matching, international applicant support during peak periods – pick one, do it properly, and learn fast. For example, Georgia State University’s “Pounce” chatbot focused on a single high-friction point – the pre-enrolment period between admission and arrival – helping admitted students complete required tasks and get answers quickly; Georgia State reports this contributed to a significant reduction in “”. A non-chatbot example can be seen in European qualification recognition workflows, where ENIC-NARIC centres in France and Norway have explored AI/RPA (Artificial Intelligence/Robotic Process Automation) ) for rather than broad front-end deployment. The common lesson is the same: define the bottleneck, improve it step by step and use the learning to build up capability.

3) Put governance in writing and into practice.
Define what AI can and cannot do, when humans must review, how escalation works, and how bias and data protection risks are handled. Governance should enable adoption – not suffocate it.

In short

Students using AI for search is only half the story. The other half is whether universities are ready to use AI to recruit responsibly and effectively.

The competitive advantage will not come from buying the newest tool. It will come from doing the basics exceptionally well: accurate content, joined-up data, clear ownership, and an operating model built around the student journey – with AI used to scale what already works.

For additional background, please see:

• “AI tools in action for international student recruitment“
• “AI is changing how students search: What it means for marketing and recruitment“
• “The ChatGPT Generation: How AI Is quietly rewriting the global student search experience”��
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The findings rely in part on a recent Sinorbis survey of a small sample of international students at Australian institutions, but they are backed by a wider field of evidence from the latest edition of Edified’s ongoing Enquiry Experience Tracker study.

One in three students responding to the survey said they abandoned an application to a prospective university because of communication issues.

The challenge begins with responsiveness. Seven in ten students said they expect a response from an institution within a couple of days, but only about a third (34%) actually received a reply within that window.

That gap alone carries a significant cost. Nearly six in ten respondents (59%) reported disengaging from a university because communication felt “slow or difficult.”

An even greater proportion (71%) said the quality of communication played either a major or moderate role in their final decision on where to study, and 66% said that “response speed genuinely matters when choosing a university.”

Those expectations loom even larger given the increasingly competitive marketplace for student recruitment. Nearly all survey respondents (94%) said that their shortlist included five or fewer universities, and the findings make it clear otherwise that a delayed or ineffective response can be enough to shift a student’s attention to another institution.

“The enquiry stage is an incredibly influential moment in a student’s journey,” notes Elissa Newall, senior partner at Edified. “When a prospective student reaches out for the first time, it gives them a glimpse of what it might feel like to be part of an institution’s community. A clear, responsive experience builds trust; a poor experience simply pushes them away”.

The study report adds, “Student expectations are changing at a much faster rate than many institutional processes. While universities have expanded their recruitment activity and added some new communication channels, students are now judging their experiences against a much higher standard…For university marketing and recruitment teams, this creates some very real pressure. Students are engaging across more channels, expecting faster responses, and comparing experiences more closely than ever before. Yet many institutions are still operating with engagement models that were designed for a different era.

Although email remains central, as student preferences shift toward messaging, new channels are added, but systems, resourcing, and processes often struggle to keep pace. The result is a growing disconnect. Enquiries go unanswered or are answered too late. Conversations break across channels. Students are asked to repeat information, and what should feel like guidance instead ends up feeling transactional.”

Introducing the omnichannel

In part, those findings reflect a growing student preference to communicate outside of email, and especially via messaging apps such as WhatsApp or WeChat. The issue for recruiters is not only managing communications with students across a widening array of channels, but that that ideal channel mix varies by market as well.

Even so, there is no mistaking the shift. As the study report explains, “Email once the default channel for formal interaction, is no longer the main reference point for many prospective students. Instead, expectations are now increasingly shaped by the messaging platforms that students are using every day. These more modern environments have the benefits of being immediate, conversational, and perhaps most importantly, highly familiar. They set a standard for how quickly and easily information should flow.”

That standard, however, collides with the reality that many recruiters face today of large and growing volumes of enquiries from prospective students. Edified reports that two in five institutions now receive more than 25,000 enquiries from prospective international students each year, yet, four in five say they lack “a single view of the customer” – that is, a way to effectively manage communications with prospective students at scale.

The authors argue for an “omnichannel” approach that allows recruiters to meet students where they are at, in terms of communications channel, but where all channels are strongly linked to and owned by the institution, where the use of that wider range of channels is properly resourced, where all are integrated into recruitment systems (especially CRMs), and where those aligned workflows and systems can support more effective and meaningful student communications at scale.

“Automation supports this process by enabling both speed and structure, especially during peak enquiry periods,” adds the report. “Beyond simple acknowledgements, segmentation and automation allow institutions to prioritise leads based on factors such as level of intent, programme interest, country, or stage in the journey. High intent enquiries can be surfaced quickly, while earlier stage prospects can be nurtured over time without manual intervention. This ensures that the attention is focused where it is going to have the greatest impact, even when teams are under pressure.”

As the students engagement with the institution continues – as they progress along the enrolment funnel – that alignment between channels, workflows, and systems can equally support a more targeted engagement with well-qualified prospects. In other words, this is the stage at which automation gives way to more one-to-one communication. The study report adds that, “By prioritising personalised dialogue at the bottom of the funnel, institutions create space for meaningful reassurance rather than transactional exchanges. This human connection often becomes the final factor that turns intent into action, helping students feel confident in their decision and supported in taking the next step.”

For additional background, please see:

• “Mystery shopping study finds broad improvement in student enquiry handling this year“
• “Three international education trends for 2025: Revenue optimisation, marketing personalisation, and on-the-ground local intelligence“
• “In a time of shifting student demand, a speedy response to enquiries is a must“

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Prospective students are increasingly using ChatGPT and other AI models to help them make decisions – including to which schools to apply. A recent survey by INTO University Partnerships found that that 17% of recently admitted students reported to have used AI tools for researching study options.

Another stat: Cues.ai, based on web analytics data from around 20 UK universities, saw web visits referred by ChatGPT .

And all of this proof is likely understating how prospective students make decisions right now, for several reasons: People mostly read answers within the tool, and even when they click through to your website, it is notoriously hard to track. And even a traditional search in Google can bring up an AI overview as an answer.

What does AI search mean for education marketing?

Your first instinct may be to make drastic changes, but although there are definitely changes to make, my advice is to take it slow.

While AI search changes how prospective students get information, it doesn’t change the fundamentals of good marketing. You still need to get the right messages to the audience that matters to you and make sure they get the right information at an appropriate time in their decision making process.

All of the below influences how you show up in AI platforms. You’re likely already doing most of them:

• Your website is the only place on the web that is fully controlled by you. Making sure your website provides accurate information and is easy to nagivate helps prospective students directly and “feeds” the AI models at the same time.
• Ranking and comparison websites are especially important when prospective students ask questions around rankings, which they often do.
• Digital word of mouth – what your current students and alumni are saying about your institution across the web. This provides a more ‘impartial’ perspective from students’ point of view, and there are ways you can encourage this, such as working with student ambassadors as content creators.

A more important reason for not making abrupt changes: the “old” channels still work! Prospective students will continue to consult a mix of different sources, both offline and online. They will still visit student fairs and some will prefer to enlist an agent’s help. They’re still on TikTok and instagram. It’s just that AI answers are becoming an increasingly important part of the mix.

So if you’re running a digital campaign that works, keep going and make gradual changes as the need arises. And as I argue in my book , Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) best practices that help your website show up in Google are by and large the same practices that make your institution visible on AI platforms.

What will change

That is not to say that the shift to AI search is business as usual. In the 18 years that I’ve been active in online education marketing, I have seen lots of change, but this is the quickest and most significant shift I’ve seen so far.

Here is what will change:

Tracking and KPIs. Fewer people will visit your website. And tracking those who do will get harder. This means that you will need to get comfortable doing marketing with less data on what works. And at the same time, you need to start paying attention to AI visibility.

Tracking AI visibility is tough: the only way to see inside the black box is to ask each tool the same question repeatedly and see whether your school is mentioned and with what sentiment. There are tools which will automate this process and provide aggregated statistics that you can drill down on. I personally use peec.ai.

Before you start tracking, spend some time investigating which questions prospective students are likely to ask. You can find clues by checking popular search keywords, mining student enquiries and analysing forum discussions.

Accuracy. Another aspect to pay attention to: the content of AI answers. Do they represent your institution accurately? For example, you may have offered a scholarship that has since then been discontinued. If it is still mentioned on an abandoned page on your website, AI may pick up on it.

AI tracking tools will cite the sources that informed particular answers, so if you check the answers on a regular basis, it’s often easy to find the culprit. Once you know incorrect information is out there, you can move to correct it.

Influencing AI mentions. Once you start tracking your visibility, you’ll notice that you’re not always part of the answers you’d love to be mentioned in. Influence your visibility by publishing helpful content around the question’s topic on your website and elsewhere. Since AI tools like to draw on a variety of sources, this content should come in different shapes and forms: a blog post on your website, a helpful YouTube video, a student ambassador participating in Reddit conversations. Sounds a lot like common sense good marketing, doesn’t it?

In short

Prospective students are increasingly using AI tools to compare and evaluate their study options. While there’s no need for abrupt changes to what you’re doing (keep doing what works!), this change will impact online marketing success measures. So expect fewer website visits and conversions as more people get their answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity or inside Google AI Overviews.

Now is the time to start paying attention to whether your school is mentioned in AI tools at all, and what they say about you.

For additional background, please see:

• “The ChatGPT Generation: How AI Is quietly rewriting the global student search experience”
• “Growing use of AI for study abroad decisions highlights importance of multi-channel marketing strategies”
• “Students are switching to AI for search. Are you ready?”

The post AI is changing how students search: What it means for marketing and recruitment appeared first on 91ɬ��Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment.

The market is shifting

Somewhere in the middle of 2025, we started talking not just about the Big Four study destinations –��the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada –��but also about the Big 14. The latter term is admittedly not always carefully defined, but it certainly has gained currency as a way to describe one of the most important macro trends shaping student mobility this year.

The Big 14 is generally understood to include not only major English-speaking destinations, but also a number of additional countries in Europe and Asia that continue to attract greater numbers of international students. We’re talking here about destinations like Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Malaysia, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan –��and more.

There are a number of factors at work here, including of course the more restrictive policies put in place across the Big Four over the last couple of years. But that is only part of the story. This important market dynamic is also being driven by demand-side changes, including students’ interest in more affordable destinations, and by a more active recruitment effort on the part of many of the Big 14 countries.

All that to say: There is an excellent chance that we will look back on 2025 as a turning point in the history of our sector – the year in which the marketplace became more competitive and diverse in terms of global student flows.

The calculus of study abroad is different now

There is no question that there is now a greater emphasis across student markets on affordability and on the return on investment for study abroad.

Those factors – affordability and ROI – have come to the fore in recent years. This is not new, but rather a matter of degree – the extent to which this is a priority for students deciding where and how they will study abroad.

When we look back at all the large-scale student surveys from the year, we see the same findings coming through. Students talk about cost of study, cost of living, availability of scholarships, work opportunities, graduate outcomes. Underpinning those priorities are a need for affordability and return on investment.

The effects of these patterns are already wide-ranging. They have an impact on destination choice of course, but also a massive influence on student expectations for study abroad, especially as they pertain to graduate outcomes.

Public support comes from alignment

Speaking on our most recent edition of the 91ɬ��Podcast, immigration specialist Jeremy Neufeld made the point that immigration policy, as it relates to international students, has to deliver demonstrable, broad-based benefits for the host country. This is key if we are to encourage or maintain the support of the general public, and of policy makers as well, for international education.

Our expectation is that, going forward, we will see much more alignment between government policy, institutional recruiting, and the larger societal and economic goals of an individual study destination.

This time we really mean it

We have been talking about diversification of foreign enrolment for years. But 2025 might be the year where the importance of building a diverse student body has truly been driven home for a critical mass of international educators.

Major study destinations have historically been over-reliant on students from a relatively small number of countries, and from China and India in particular. But Chinese numbers have been softening since before the pandemic, and India is now showing signs of slowing as well. At the same time, many institutions are becoming more targeted in their recruitment efforts and more actively diversifying recruitment across a wider field of markets. We expect this to extend into 2026 and beyond.

AI is here

Everyone’s favourite acronym came into even greater prominence this year, and we began to see AI having more concrete impacts across the sector:

• Students searched much more on AI for study abroad options. Stakeholders across our sector are moving quickly to learn and adapt to a “zero-click” future and a very different landscape for online search.
• At the same time, international recruitment professionals are making greater use of AI tools to manage their recruitment pipelines and engage with prospective students more effectively and efficiently. Especially in a more competitive environment –��where timeliness and responsiveness are key –��we can expect this AI toolkit to expand and develop further in the year ahead.

Thank you

Last but not least, we want to take this opportunity to thank you for reading and learning along with us. We look forward to bringing you the latest insights on international recruitment all through 2026.

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Purpose-built design

Greg Holz, assistant director for global engagement, University of
Central Missouri (United States)

If we’re talking LLMs, I’d recommend , especially now with , their dedicated browser. It’s great for research, cutting through SEO junk and sponsored results. But for international recruitment, takes things a step further. It’s built on the Perplexity model but designed for our industry, so the data it pulls is current and from relevant IEM sources. AIDO has been crucial in helping me gather evidence and build a case for our ongoing recruitment strategies in Southeast Asia, giving me confidence that I’m working from the best information available when making important planning decisions.

The multi-tool

Rishab Malhotra, founder & CEO, AIDO (United States)

As an international ed-tech entrepreneur, the AI I consider indispensable is . I rely on it daily to power my work across multiple fronts: building custom GPTs tailored to different goals, managing complex tasks and projects, prototyping features, “vibe coding” quick interfaces for HTML emails, and developing proofs of concept at speed. What would normally take days of trial and error can be iterated in hours with ChatGPT as a creative and technical partner. For me, it’s less a single Q/A tool and more an always-on collaborator that makes rapid innovation in AI-driven education technology possible.

Better lead data

Priyank Mistri, manager, digital recruitment, Centennial College (Canada)

As a digital recruitment manager, I rely on , an AI-powered ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool that transforms how we manage prospective student information from multiple platforms before importing it into our CRM system.

Lead data often arrives fragmented with inconsistent formats, duplicate entries, incomplete fields, or errors. Zoho DataPrep automatically cleans, validates, and standardises this information, then integrates it into our CRM, ensuring accurate reporting and enabling timely engagement campaigns. By eliminating these operational barriers, my team can focus on strategic digital recruitment, driving stronger student engagement and faster conversions, and saving countless hours otherwise lost to manual fixes.

24/7 support

Guus Goorts, higher education marketing consultant and author (the Netherlands)

’s AI chatbot replaced live WhatsApp support for a language school I work with. It answers routine programme questions in multiple languages, 24/7, and forwards tricky cases to staff. The switch accelerated response times, smoothed applicant journeys, and freed advisors for higher-value tasks. Caveat: Any AI chatbot is only as good as its training, and it took months of training to get the bot to not just answer questions correctly, but also to sell in a consultative way.

Streamlined admissions processes

Oana Lelcu, global sales and marketing director, SRH Universities (Germany)

dramatically reduces HR costs while scaling international student recruitment. It automates document validation (transcripts, diplomas, language certificates, passports) with 99% accuracy in seconds, eliminating expensive and time-consuming manual processing. Our admissions team escapes tedious admin work to focus on high-value activities: candidate advising, relationship building, and strategic recruitment. Students receive fast decisions with actionable feedback, accelerating enrolment cycles. This speed advantage directly drives higher conversion rates while our staffing costs remain flat at during rapid growth. Scale smart, not hard.

A new way to search

Kyle Campbell, founder and managing director, Education Marketer (United Kingdom)

As an education marketer, my go-to is , not for content creation or data analysis, but for how quickly it can build digital tools. Recently, I pretended I was going to uni for the first time and was interested in game development, with aspirations to run my own indie studio (a boy can dream). I asked ChatGPT-5 to build me a tool that “helps me discover the right choice for me.” And it did. Within 10 minutes, I had an app that indexed gaming institutions across the world, where I could customise my “fit” preferences and dynamically sort results. Tell me that doesn’t change the face of how students discover their university choices.

For additional background, please see:

• “Students are switching to AI for search. Are you ready?“
• “ChatGPT for international education marketing: What is ‘Prompt Engineering?’“

The post AI tools in action for international student recruitment appeared first on 91ɬ��Monitor - Market intelligence for international student recruitment.

This year, the report also does a nice job in setting the context for enquiry management by providing some important takeaways from a survey of 49 responding institutions. Those findings highlight, for example, that two out of five universities in the sample report receiving more than 25,000 international student enquiries every year.

Near nine in ten (85%) of the responding institutions report using either a standalone or fully integrated CRM system to help manage those enquiry volumes. A similar proportion (84%) say that they use marketing automation tools as well. Edified adds that while the use of such tools is widespread, it is “at varying levels of sophistication globally.”

The institution survey also provides an interesting window into the enquiry channels supported across universities. As we see in the figure below, email and phone remain the most commonly available options.

The 2025 Enquiry Experience Tracker

The average overall scores in the tracker study rose by 10% year-over-year to reach a four-year high point. The proportion of responses rated as “excellent” rose from one-third to 58%, and the share of interactions characterised as “negative” fell from 33% to 18%. This reflects, says Edified, “how intense global competition is driving universities to sharpen their interactions with prospects.”

The 2025 study is based on enquiries filed with 103 institutions in five countries, across six enquiry channels (e.g., email, web enquiry form, WhatsApp, or other) and using seven student personas. Roughly a third of the institutions in the study were in the UK, another 28% were in Australia and New Zealand, just over a quarter in Canada, and 7% in the United States (all in the state of New York).

The mystery shoppers’ interactions with each university were then evaluated against 51 criteria, including “findability, responsiveness, clarity, and personalisation.” The scores for each are weighted according to the following model and used to generate an overall Enquiry Experience Score (out of 100) for each institution in the study.

The results

Overall scoring improved this year to a global average of 61, which represents a six-point improvement from the 2024 study. As we see in the figure below, however, the scoring varied a fair bit by region, with institutions in Australia and New Zealand showing the strongest performance. Also of note: each region in the 2025 study either improved or equalled their ratings from 2024.

The four years of the Enquiry Experience Tracker study reflect a steady improvement in enquiry handling, with global ratings rising from 51 in 2022 to this year’s overall score of 61.

Key findings

Beyond those institutional, regional, and global scores, the Enquiry Experience Tracker model has some important insights to offer.

Channels are not always on. Some of the enquiry channels that students find most meaningful –��such as peer-to-peer, live chat and WhatsApp –��are not always available, meaning students are essentially asked to fall back to more traditional channels like email to reach the institution.

For example, only 70% of institutions provide options to chat with current students, and just over half have live chat or chatbots. WhatsApp is the channel least likely to be offered with two-thirds of this year’s mystery shoppers unable to locate WhatsApp details. The significant of this rests in part in the fact that students found WhatsApp the most satisfying enquiry channel in every region. It is an option that, when available, offers greater responsiveness (all students in the study received an answer to their queries via WhatsApp and 80% of those came within two business hours. “The experience was so good,” says the study report, that “6 in 7 students said they’d be likely to engage further.”

Responsiveness is improving generally. Across the 2025 study, response rates and speed in responding improved. Edified reports: “Half of replies met best practice timeframes, up from four in ten last year.”

The report adds, “Response rates improved slightly, indicating that institutions are paying closer attention to their lead pipelines amid shifting policies and growing competition. On average, ANZ institutions are the most responsive, answering more than 95% of enquiries placed with them, followed by UK institutions, who replied to 85%. Response rates in North America were less consistent. One in four students didn’t hear back after placing enquiries to Canadian and US institutions in the time allowed for this research (three weeks for email and 15 minutes for live channels).”

Enquiry responses are becoming more effective. This year’s study finds that most institutions improved their communications in the last year and delivered both the key information that students need but also an element of persuasion as well. “Nearly 80% of responses were tailored to students’ study interests or country and 60% went the extra mile to include bonus information to help students,” adds the report. “Globally, half of communications were rated as ‘excellent’ against our standard – a further improvement on previous years.”

Follow-up remains a big challenge. While the study reflects better performance in terms of the initial reply to a student enquiry, serious issues remain in terms of any further follow up activity. Only one in four mystery shoppers received follow-up communications in the 2025 study, although this was up from one in five last year.

The report notes an important variation in follow up practice in that, “Students who placed web form enquiries were followed up with the most often, with 45% receiving nurture emails. This indicates a growing capability in data integration and consent management globally. Follow-ups were lowest for phone enquiries, and less than one in ten students heard back from institutions after their call.”

The bottom line. Most students in the 2025 study felt positively about their interaction with the institution(s). But one in five still said they would be unlikely to continue engaging beyond the initial exchange with the institution, mainly because the responses they received were impersonal or lacked warmth or a more personal touch. Just over half of the students in the study reported a positive experience, and more than four in ten said they would be “very likely” to keep engaging with the institution.

“Getting the basics of enquiry management right is not always enough to win hearts,” says Edified. “Student feedback shows they most value the institutions that anticipate their needs, give personalised responses and make them feel genuinely welcome.”

Recommendations

Working off of those important findings, the study report offers a series of recommendations for enquiry management.

1. “Apply a conversion mindset.” Each enquiry is an opportunity to guide the student to choosing your institution. Put your unique sales points forward, offer value-added details that speak to the student’s concerns, and close with practical next steps in the process.
   
2. Open up mobile channels. Many students may prefer to interact on messaging apps, but relatively few institutions offer this option.
   
3. “Don’t send students on a scavenger hunt.” Rather than relying on links to provide information, answer the student’s questions directly and meaningfully in your reply. “A more thoughtful reply builds trust and shows students what they can expect if they choose to study with you,” says Edified.
   
4. Commit to ongoing improvement. Student concerns, expectations, and even channel preferences are changing all the time. “Stay connected with your recruitment and in-country teams to identify shifts or challenges early, and adjust your content and channels accordingly,” concludes the study report.

For additional background, please see:

• “How to improve your communications with prospective international students“
• “In a time of shifting student demand, a speedy response to enquiries is a must“
• “Mystery shopping study indicates many institutions are still losing international student leads“

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