Recent articles from the business world may very well help improve efforts to enroll more international students. While social media certainly has its place in communicating with prospective students around the world, eCorrespondence seems more important at that critical moment when a student decides where to apply to study abroad.

Wired.com reports that eMail crushes Twitter and Facebook at the purchase point. Data from 72 million customers over the course of two years reveals that customers who came to retailers from search (as in Google or Bing) were more than 50 percent more valuable than average. In other words, they were more likely to shop more and spend more. eMail customers were nearly 11 percent more valuable than average. Twitter and Facebook data fell far short of those figures.

Other research, this time from Harvard Business Review, documents that operating a relatively large device inspires more assertive behavior than working on a small one -- which bodes well for prospective international students who are at a desktop or laptop when submitting college applications.

Bottom line: Continue to engage prospective students in social media, via online promotions that scale well to handheld devices. But when the proverbial enrollment funnel narrows to the application stage, we can expect students to be seated and checking their inboxes.

• How to use USjournal.com in Mandarin
• What's your I.N.D.I.A. strategy?
• Three Biggest Lies Told in Business
• Marketing in the New Economy

The PIE News features top-notch business analysis for Professionals in International Education. Based in London, PIE has quickly become one of the most valuable resources in the industry through their suite of services:

• The PIE News, for daily or weekly news bits
• The PIE Jobs, a solid recruitment resource
• The PIE Review, an essential print publication
• The PIE Talent, for outsourcing talent requirements