Hey, student body president, we’re a little worried that your freshmen class could actually be a couple hundred under-enrolled, because we’re running out of time!

For those of you who don’t remember last year’s brave new world of open enrollment in which our kids could choose and apply to any college they liked, then meet with advisors during their first week on campus and enroll on a spot-on-target date with one of our top ten advisors, and you’ll have no idea where I’m going with this.

So we’re bringing in a little boy-o-bear, Marketing Automation, to save the day (will that be Seth? Scotty?) by persuading these pesky under-enrolled freshmen to convince their parents to consider us with a campaign that starts with one simple proposition:

Join us! We have amazing, motivated, talented students who love everything about college and want to share their love with your friends and family.

If you are like most of your fellow parents (even those of the under-enrolled), you wouldn’t dream of leaving college before completing four years. Right? Wrong. That stubborn streak of reticence is grounded in facts, and not just mom’s inability to see how much fun college really is.

Here’s the basic statistic that we’re testing out: What if we had 20% fewer low-attendance freshmen and actually ended up having a class filled with our all-stars? Would that make up for the under-enrolled class, or even reverse the trend?

To find out, we hired Sojern to bring marketing automation to the college campus. The results were… well, interesting. Below are the key findings that help us put all the dark clouds in focus.

Consensus was struck that higher-speed, automated campus marketing with a high cost per lead would make it harder for students to weed through so many nice-looking college options. We also found out that, on a positive note, our marketing automation could fill the majority of the under-enrolled class through a targeted marketing campaign focused on our high-value, top-notch students. Plus, our marketing automation customers tended to be found at higher tuition and loan costs than the average user. What we learned:

• Over half of our student body is willing to pay slightly more for their college education. The whole campaign simply added cost per lead, but will result in lower price per student.

• These students lead by spending years pouring their hearts and souls into their pursuits. They are confident about the value of their future employers and feel confident that they’ll flourish in their chosen fields. If their employer is ever unhappy with their performance, they will quickly jump ship – never to re-emerge as a high-attendance, tuition-priced student. By reducing the ambiguity of college and proving that college isn’t necessarily a waste of time (depending on which college you attend), our marketing automation customers found that they could add a couple hundred dollars to the many million they pay in college tuition. While high demand prices the whole exercise out of affordability, these customers are the standard of excellence, so to speak. The marketing automation can play the role of part-time job for them.

• These customers don’t see themselves as the starting point for their professional development but as a means to a destination – their lives after college. They want to learn more in order to prepare them for their next steps in life. To help them hit the ground running after college, they enjoy meeting with multiple advisors in one go and appreciate receiving a personalized, value-laden education. And they’re able to cut costs with lower marketing.

If the numbers continue to hold up, we can win over more incoming students, our tuition rate will drop, and we’ll look more like a college than a college networking platform. It’s our freshman class goal for the next 18 years to convince one more student from the under-enrolled class to join us. And we can do it by giving them this technology to keep our students happy (and yes, recruit more kids to join us), help our parents get more information on higher education, and sell a few more hundred dollars to the higher-demand company customers.

The rise of marketing automation, then, is not only about the silo-breaking power of unified automation technology to move into any part of an organization, but also about using the powerful data it provides to educate prospective customers on exactly what college truly is, and what students are exactly like.