What can a school do to keep the attention of current and potential students? Between the initial interest and actual enrollment, communication in education is a must to engage, nurture and educate students.
How do you continue to increase your online student retention rates? By implementing marketing automation strategies focusing on nurturing students who may not be ready to make a decision.
Marketing can focus on choosing a school or choosing a major. Either way, students are always looking for that extra piece of information to finalize their choice. Therefore, if you are the one providing that information, you can control the communication they read.
Nurture prospective students through the research process with desirable content via a marketing automation platform that is sure to reach any student on their preferred mode of communication.
4 ways to include communication in education
1. Lead Scoring
Score leads and students based on their demographics and online behavior to prioritize messaging and follow-up. Are they local or out of town? This information will help you target your content and make it more personal to those reading it. The more information you can gather, the better you can increase the chances of that lead choosing your school.
2. Automatic Messaging
Quickly respond to the behavior of leads and students in real-time. If they request information on your school, have a message ready to automatically reply. This could be an email, text message or survey to help provide the information requested as well as collect further data. Once they connect with you the first time, they enter your nurturing campaign where they will be contacted at various times based on certain actions. The goal is to continue warming them towards enrolling at your school.
3. Dynamic Content
Convert more leads and students by tracking behavior and tailoring messaging content for an ever-changing audience. With marketing automation, you can engage students using several forms of communication. Each medium uses a different type of messaging. This can include tone, length and design of the message. An email newsletter, for example, can be much longer and full of details than an SMS message. Use personalized merge tags where possible to make each message unique to each person. You can include many different variables to show each lead that you are focused on them and not a mass audience.
4. CRM Integration
Inform admissions and recruitment support of on-page and email behavior for every lead and student in your database. This ties in to the lead scoring mentioned above. As students add more personal information and connect with different content, those doing the recruiting will have a better idea on who to contact and who to leave alone. Without this vital information, you are just marketing blindly and that is not the way to do marketing automation.
By including communication in education using marketing automation, you will be able to nurture large numbers of prospective students and streamline your whole recruitment process.
Ready to add customer flow communication to your school's strategy? Use SimplyCast's 360 automation manager for free for 14 days to get started.
