What Personalization At Scale Actually Requires

October stretches every admissions office. The pressure to be present, personal, and productive is at its peak—and so is the volume. In the last few weeks, many teams have tried to stay close to students while also covering their territory, managing inboxes, reviewing applications, and launching second-wave campaigns. That tension reveals a lot.

Some teams respond by doing more. Some shift to automation. The ones that stay effective do something simpler: they focus.

In this month’s video podcast, we talked with Reggie Hill from the University of Missouri–St. Louis about what that looks like in practice. Reggie didn’t describe a dramatic overhaul or a high-stakes technology rollout. He talked about structure. About helping counselors know which students to focus on each day. About building an environment where personalization wasn’t a goal—it was a workflow.

That’s the idea worth carrying forward.

When personalization is framed as a campaign, it becomes a sprint. Teams try to find new ways to sound human at scale. Emails reference events or majors. Names are dynamically inserted. Subject lines are softened to feel more conversational. And while none of that is wrong, it rarely creates the kind of momentum that leads to actual conversion.

Personalization isn’t about tone. It’s about timing. And scale doesn’t dilute it—it reveals whether you’ve built for it.

What Reggie and his team have done well is define personalization as something measurable. Not in terms of open rates or volume, but in terms of relevance. They ask: who is engaging right now? Who needs a touchpoint because their behavior changed? Who just stalled, despite showing interest earlier?

When counselors have that visibility, they don’t need to chase students. They connect with the right ones, at the right time, with enough context to make the conversation matter. That’s what personalization looks like when it works. And that’s what scaling it requires.

October showed us that again.

You can’t outwork the cycle. You can’t guess your way through it. You need a system that brings focus to the surface each morning—so your counselors can move through the noise without losing the thread of connection that students still expect.

For many institutions, October is framed as a campaign window. But what it really offers is a stress test. If your outreach felt scattered, if your team spent more time checking boxes than building trust, that wasn’t a failure of effort. It was a failure of structure.

The systems that helped you focus this month should now become the baseline. Not the exception. What worked under pressure should carry into November, into winter planning, and into your next cycle.

The future of enrollment won’t be won by more messages. It will be shaped by timing, behavior, and counselor capacity to act when it counts. Personalization isn’t the cherry on top. It’s the test of whether your enrollment strategy is built to respond.

Miss the podcast with Reggie Hill? Watch the full conversation here: crowdcast.io/c/vpreggie