In the past, job fairs, training catalogs, and employment guides were the preferred tools used by schools and training centers to recruit their students. With the rise of new technologies, becoming visible on search engines, being active on social media, attracting, convincing and converting your visitors into applicants or students has become the new rule of the game.
At every stage, you have increased your productivity and the quality of your databases and knowledge.
Your marketing also benefits from these developments with Marketing Automation, which will enable you to build a mass personalized relationship. Your students must remain at the center of your relationships; emotion and professionalism are the key to a lasting relationship of trust. A smooth recruitment phase will engage them with you. The ease of acquiring knowledge and organizing courses will turn them into loyal ambassadors. And if your program supports them sustainably throughout their career, your Alumni will allow you to benefit from their networks and may even become your new business clients.
Here are the 5 essential points to initiate the transformation of your institutions.
1. Use a single platform
Use a single platform to manage all your marketing actions and automate the most repetitive tasks, and you will inevitably save valuable time that you can devote to higher value-added tasks. The more scenarios you create, the more time you will save.
The other strength of marketing is the simplicity and quality of monitoring. Too often, as part of a digital marketing strategy, it is necessary to dive into numerous indicators (analytics, search console, database, etc.). These elements are scattered across many tools. In short, it is time-consuming and impractical for a team handling many projects. A marketing automation tool helps avoid this by bringing together, within the same platform, the key tracking indicators needed to achieve the objectives that have been set.
2. Work on your conversion rates
Building automated scenarios will allow you to interact more easily and more effectively with your prospects. In addition, you will find it much easier to implement an effective nurturing strategy, which consists of establishing a personalized relationship with your prospects until they are ready to become customers.
By creating personalized customer journeys, your communication will be more relevant and your contacts will be more likely to open and click on your emails.
For example, if one of your prospects visits page A on your websites and receives offers or advice related to that same page a few days later, the open rate will be much higher than for a general email including all your offers/services. This is in fact proven, since on average, we observe an open rate of +71% and a reactivity rate (number of people who click on a link in your email after opening it) of +152% thanks to the automation of personalized emails compared with sending traditional emails.
3. Learn from your contacts’ expectations
Marketing Automation gives you a lot of information about your audience, allowing you to better understand the tastes, preferences and needs of your contacts. Any information related to your contacts should be taken into account, because this information will enable you to adapt your communication strategy. Thanks to marketing automation, you can collect behavioral data that will allow you to identify the offers/services your contacts appreciate, as well as their level of interest in your site or your solution. You can determine who the most qualified prospects are by assigning them a dynamic score (lead scoring) based on their actions.
For example:
- If a contact subscribes to your Alumni newsletter, you can increase their score by +1 and place them in the Ambassador segment.
- If they download your Executive MBA brochure, you increase their score by +5 in an Executive Student Recruitment segment.
- And if they register for the application process, then their score will be increased by +30.
As a result, you will identify your most qualified prospects and customers. Thanks to “lead scoring,” you can implement much more targeted marketing strategies: for example, you can follow up with contacts at the exact moment when they are waiting for advice, or reward an Alumni member who has enabled a recruitment.
4. Interact with your contacts
Marketing Automation allows you to contact your prospects at the right moment in their journey with your institution. For example, contact your new prospects by email, then qualify them in order to interact with them when they are at their “hottest.” By definition, a “hot” prospect is a prospect who is ready to reach your goal (such as purchasing a product on an e-commerce site, or subscribing to a service). When you know that your prospect has shown interest in your offers/services, interact with them to help them make the final decision: the purchase. You can also personalize your emails to send the right content to the right person. For example, send your users the content about your programs that they prefer or more precise information about recruitment processes when they are at their “hottest.”
5. Improve the user experience
Marketing automation is a good way to build loyalty among your contacts. Quite simply, you can create personalized scenarios to help your new prospects with their first steps. By helping your customers, you improve your customer experience and increase the number of satisfied users who can become ambassadors for your website. Marketing Automation allows you to take your marketing and customer relationship even further. When every ROI point counts, it becomes essential to automate your actions and optimize them.
Scenario example – Student fairs
Marketing automation expertise
Marketing teams that combine their events with Marketing Automation perform better than others: they save time during registration phases and accurately qualify the level of interest and maturity thanks to centralized data and behavioral analysis of their prospects.
Attendance rates at events are increased thanks to automatic email reminders as the date approaches, but also by SMS on the big day.
Following the event, your contacts quickly progress in maturity thanks to an approach combining high-quality, targeted content based on their interests, sent to facilitate the adoption of your educational offers.
Professional contacts inform and guide your future students at the right time, and the conversion rate increases considerably. They support prospects who are actively searching and already informed. These 2.0 telesales representatives take on the role of advisors and consultants because they have less sales effort to make.
In summary, this scenario increases engagement by nurturing interest. You follow your leads as they evolve all the way to closing.
The scenario
Main objective:
- Increase engagement by nurturing interest,
- score the maturity level of future students,
- increase their level of interest,
- create targeted appointments for events,
- streamline the contracting of training programs.
Score
- Topics of interest,
- their recurrence.
Segment
- Marketing Qualified Leads (to be handled),
- Sales Qualified Leads (to be nurtured).
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Benefits
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Expected results
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