Inquiries Were Coming In. Students Were Not Staying.
Ball State was not struggling with brand recognition. As one of Indiana's flagship public universities, the institution had consistent inquiry volume and a broad geographic reach across the Midwest. The problem was what happened after the inquiry — and what happened after the deposit.
Inquiry-to-application conversion was underperforming relative to the institution's pipeline size. Admitted students were expressing intent and then going quiet. And deposited students — students who had already said yes — were melting at a rate that was quietly eroding the enrolled class before the semester began. Three separate pressure points, each compounding the others.
Signal-First. Stage-Specific. Structurally Coordinated.
EnrollForge designed a three-stage intervention system built around behavioral signal detection at each critical transition point in the enrollment funnel. Rather than deploying a single campaign across all prospect segments, we built stage-specific outreach sequences — each calibrated to the behavioral patterns, decision pressures, and risk indicators present at that stage.
At the inquiry stage, signal detection identified which inquiries were showing active research behavior and which had gone cold — enabling the admissions team to prioritize outreach based on real-time intent rather than first-contact date. At the yield stage, financial aid sensitivity signals and competitor engagement patterns triggered precision intervention sequences before students made their final decision elsewhere. At the melt stage, portal inactivity, missing document signals, and disengagement patterns triggered immediate counselor action — catching at-risk deposits three to four weeks before they would have been lost.
Three Stages. One Coordinated System.
The campaign was structured across three coordinated layers — each targeting a distinct stage of the enrollment funnel where student loss was occurring and intervention had measurable impact.
The Funnel Stopped Leaking. The Class Held.
The engagement produced measurable improvement across all three intervention stages. Inquiry-to-application conversion strengthened as prioritized outreach reached high-intent prospects faster and with greater relevance. Yield rates improved as financial aid and competitor risk signals triggered intervention before students made final decisions elsewhere.
Most significantly, melt intervention caught at-risk deposited students weeks earlier than the institution's prior process had allowed — protecting enrolled class size in a window where recovery was still possible. The infrastructure built during this engagement gave Ball State's enrollment team a repeatable, signal-driven system for protecting the class at every stage of the funnel.