What Personalization At Scale Actually Looks Like

This is the month when personalization gets tested. Counselors are managing high volumes of inquiries and applications, events are still running, and inboxes fill faster than anyone can respond. Everyone wants to stay personal, but very few teams are equipped to do it when it matters most.

The word “personalization” gets used often in admissions, but rarely with precision. In many cases, it still means adding a name to a subject line or referencing a student’s intended major. Those gestures may be helpful, but they aren’t enough—not in October, and not at the scale most institutions are managing now.

What breaks down under pressure isn’t the desire to be personal. It’s the method.

When volume spikes, counselors don’t have the time to comb through each record before sending an email. They can’t reread every note from a past conversation before making a call. They want to be intentional—but the systems around them don’t always support that.

That’s when personalization starts to flatten. Outreach turns into broad check-ins. Emails begin to sound the same. Students receive messages that don’t reflect what they’ve actually done—or not done—recently. And while most will never say it directly, they can tell when the contact isn’t grounded in relevance.

Real personalization isn’t about remembering. It’s about recognizing.

It starts by knowing what a student has done—not weeks ago, but this week. A student who visited in September and hasn’t responded since isn’t the same as one who submitted an application this morning. Another student might be opening every email but hasn’t attended a single event. Someone else may have just spent ten minutes on the financial aid page without ever filling out a form.

Those are behavioral signals. And they tell a much clearer story than CRM status alone.

When personalization is built around these signals, it changes the way counselors work. They start their day with a list of students whose recent actions suggest readiness—or hesitation. They know who to call because the system has already sorted for engagement, timing, and momentum. They send targeted outreach that fits the moment, not just the milestone.

This isn’t automation. It’s enablement. It gives counselors the context they need to be personal without needing to remember everything themselves.

The teams that get this right are the ones that don’t expect counselors to carry the full burden of decision-making. They use systems that surface who’s most likely to respond today. They track behavioral drop-off before it becomes full disengagement. And they let real-time patterns—not outdated assumptions—shape outreach.

That’s how personalization scales.

It’s not about sending more emails or writing better subject lines. It’s about giving each team member the clarity to connect at the right time, with the right student, in a way that feels human—because it is.

Later this month, we’ll talk with Reggie Hill from the University of Missouri–St. Louis about how his team is executing this strategy. They’re not automating connection. They’re organizing it—around real behavior and clear counselor action. It’s a grounded, practical approach to solving a problem most offices are facing right now.

If your counselors are being told to “stay personal,” but don’t have a way to know who’s ready to engage, that’s not a personalization gap. It’s a prioritization gap. And this is the month to fix it.

Join us October 28 to hear how UMSL is using behavioral data to support personalization at scale: crowdcast.io/c/vpreggie