The educational sector struggles with many challenges. Some of them entail getting more students/participants while others, communicating with the target audience and distributing educational material effectively. In this post, we want to show you how marketing automation can streamline your work, whether you run a university, a language school, or a training company.
Nowadays, education is becoming more and more remote. There are many reasons for this, including, as Education Week put it, “chronic staffing shortages”, but also the convenience and efficiency of this solution. Whether you run a university or just a training company, you surely want to be effective at what you do, including:
- Recruiting new students and communicating with them
- Distributing educational materials
- Measuring satisfaction with the educational program provided
- Building long-term relations with students
Marketing automation can help you with all these elements! Let’s see how exactly.
Recruiting and communicating with students
It all starts with MA scenarios. With them, you can create almost any scenario that’s based on a specific action taken by someone from your target audience.
Let’s use a quick example: You run a university, and you want to interest more candidates in your latest offer. Every time someone opens your website, you can show them a pop-up ad informing them about it. Moreover, you can encourage people to sign up for your push notifications and, this way, keep them up to speed with what’s going on in your university. It’s a good way of promoting new courses and studies but also building long-lasting relations with your target audience. In the same way, you can send emails to your subscribers’ base.
Here’s a good example of how such MA scenarios work in this sector:
Of course, the list of possibilities doesn’t end here. With marketing automation, you can benefit from email marketing and other forms of communication, including the increasingly popular WhatsApp.
Distributing educational materials
Again, it’s all just a matter of setting the right automation scenario. You can create a scenario in which every person that signs up for your course gets a package of welcome materials enabling them to get acquainted with the school and the course. Similarly, the latter materials can be distributed once someone finishes the previous stage or passes the exam.
Such materials can be distributed via email or a specific educational platform that you use (iPresso can be integrated with many external tools via API). Thanks to this solution, you don’t have to worry about distributing new batches of materials to every student in your class or company. Everything happens on time and according to your expectations.
Measuring satisfaction
One of the keys to success in this challenging industry lies in verifying what students really think about your educational programs. Of course, you want them to be practical and easy to grasp, but the only way of finding out whether that’s the case in your situation is by asking for feedback.
Educational institutions frequently ask for feedback and ask about satisfaction with different aspects of education, including online classes, provided materials, the usefulness of the program, and communication with the teacher/instructor.
At iPresso, we equip you with everything you need to measure student satisfaction. Take a look at our feedback features:
- NPS surveys: This acronym stands for net promoter score, and such a survey is based on just one question: “How likely are you to recommend our company to your friends or colleagues?” It enables you to find out how loyal your students are.
- Standard surveys: Educational companies frequently need to ask very specific questions, e.g., “Are you satisfied with the last lesson?” or “In what form would you prefer to receive educational materials?” That’s where standard customer surveys come in handy.
Additionally, iPresso offers extensive analytics and reporting features, so you don’t need to worry about analyzing hundreds of received answers manually.
Knowing and segmenting your student base
It’s impossible to build a long-term relationship with someone you don’t really know. With marketing automation, you can effectively collect data about each and every student and use this knowledge in future communication. Again, here’s an example: If you know some students only attended marketing courses in the past, it is likely some of them would be interested in other upcoming marketing courses and training. This way, you can send them personalized course recommendations and increase the chances of them signing up for your new marketing class.
That’s what personalized communication and user segmentation are all about. They help you increase the effectiveness of your sales and marketing efforts, improve UX (or rather SX – student experience), and win the engagement of your current and future students.
On our blog, we frequently say that personalization and segmentation are indispensable to growing business (any business, not just educational one) in modern dynamic times.
Here’s how iPresso can help you with these questions:
- Scoring: This feature helps you decide who should be included in a given MA scenario (so that you don’t send information about a marketing course to people interested strictly in health and safety training).
- CDP: With a customer data platform, you can collect and organize all available information about your students in one place. Earlier this year, we made an extensive article about CDPs – we encourage you to read it!
- Recommendation frames: Yes, we’ve made them mostly with the e-commerce industry in mind, but there’s nothing stopping you from using these frames to send a personalized recommendation for courses and studies at your school or company. Our frames are based on available customer data so that every recommendation is tailored to the interests of a given person.
All these solutions will help you build more meaningful relations with students, encourage them to enroll in new courses, and keep them engaged in communication even after obtaining the diploma/certificate.
Do you want to know more? Take a look at our dedicated website for the education sector. At the bottom, you will find a contact form that constitutes the first step to testing our platform. Send it today, and let us take it from there!
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