Improving conversion at SLU - Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

The challenge

The International Marketing team at SLU were on the search for a platform to not only increase their leads, but to make their name well-known in the higher education space.

“The challenge in international student recruitment for SLU is partly to increase the proportion of students who register at the start of the semester, but also to make our university known in the world.

We’re a young university – but at the same time one of the best in the world within our focus areas and of course we want to get as many as possible to notice this.

We were looking for a mix between channels to reach prospective students in different ways – but we also want the students to be able to reach us in different ways.”

The solution

Unibuddy facilitated chats between SLU’s current student body and prospective new students in a virtual landscape. The platform’s reputation within higher education spheres, its user-friendly interface, and its ease of implementation are what swayed SLU to get onboard.

“The direct communication between our student ambassadors and prospective students is something that was previously lacking for us.

Along with a good reputation and many satisfied customers, Unibuddy offered what we had been looking for for a while – the opportunity for quick and easy communication between students.

Unibuddy’s strength lies above all in a simple design in combination with a platform with great possibilities. The platform is easy to understand and our skilled student ambassadors can easily manage their accounts wherever they are.”

SLU are recognized as number 3 in the world in the area of ‘Agriculture & Forestry’ by QS World University Ranking and number 1 for ‘Forestry’ by The Center of World University Ranking.

The results

The University have had some great tangible results through using Unibuddy so far, but the real impact will be seen later down the line, when the prospective students who have been engaging with SLU’s platform become enrolled students.

“Above all, Unibuddy presents an opportunity for the prospective student to become more confident in their choice. The opportunity to ask questions to another student can be what makes a student not only apply to a certain university, but it can also be crucial that he or she actually registers at that university at the start of the semester.

It’s too early to say for sure, we simply don’t know what the result at the start of the semester looks like yet. However, we already see now that a large proportion of students who chatted in Unibuddy have also applied to SLU, which is very positive.

What we can see is that 32.5 % of prospective students chatting on our Unibuddy platform went on to apply to SLU and that 18 % of the students who registered for Unibuddy before our application deadline in January were admitted.”

In conversation with Elin Helgsten, International Marketing Officer at SLU – Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences