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How to Attract, Engage, and Retain Students with Marketing Automation http://ift.tt/2rFZa1A For students, attending a higher education institution is about many things. Getting to know your own self, meeting interesting people, pursuing new hobbies, acquiring new skills, changing your career or even your entire life. For those involved in managing a higher education institution, apart from helping to shape the next generation to achieve great things and conducting ground-breaking research, it’s just like any other business. To grow, it needs to attract, engage, and retain its customers, i.e. the students. It’s not an easy task, especially at times of high economic uncertainty, when even graduating from a top school doesn’t guarantee you landing a profitable job. But it’s not necessarily a losing game. Higher education institutions, e-learning platforms, and other businesses involved in personal development, can still meet their objective and attract, engage, and retain students long after they’ve graduated. They just need to get more creative in their marketing efforts. Let’s take a look at how adding marketing automation to the mix can help you meet your marketing department’s goals.
Step 1. AttractOne of the key business objectives for any higher education institution is to attract as many quality prospects as possible. By quality prospects, I mean potential students who are genuinely interested in acquiring new skills and developing their career, and who are ready to make the effort to achieve their goals. So how can you find such quality prospects online? Here are several tactics you should start with:
Of course, there’s plenty more you should be doing. Attending offline events, organizing open days at your school, presenting your school to students across the globe, partnering up with businesses to start scholarship and internship programs, offline display advertising, and much, much more. When doing so, consider the way your future students are going through the decision-making process. Look at how your competitors present their offer to students. Perhaps instead of simply listing all the courses, you should draw up a career path they can follow, showing them exactly what it takes to e.g. become a developer.
At the same time, make registration as easy as possible. Unclutter your pages, speed up the load time, and improve the accessibility on mobile phones. Be on the social media platforms your future students are using and follow the latest trends – not just in terms of how you promote your institution, but also what you’re teaching. Having an up-to-date, relevant syllabus is key in most industries, especially IT and digital marketing.
Step 2. EngageOnce you’ve managed to get students to sign up – be it for a specific course or just to receive communication about your offer – you need to engage them. Of course, engaging current and prospective students won’t be the same – after all, the goal you’ll want to achieve for those audiences is different – so I’ll split these two situations up.
How to engage prospective studentsBefore prospects enroll in your course, they first need to be convinced that the value they’ll receive is worth their time and money. They need to be sold on the idea of studying – which isn’t only about the fun of learning new things, but also about doing the actual work. Getting someone to enroll, often pay, and then do the hard work – that’s the tricky part. So what can you do to engage prospects who’ve made the first step towards pursuing higher education? Here are a few ideas:
When employing the above-mentioned tactics, always remember to use tagging and scoring. With the information gathered through this process, you should be able to split your prospects into segments (e.g. based on the course, department, field of interest, or level of engagement in communication) and personalize your communication to deliver more relevant and valuable content. This way your conversion rates and consequently your sign-up rates will be higher! How to engage current studentsYour current students are the ones who’ve successfully enrolled to the course and have stayed that way for some time. It’s a good situation to be in, but it’s not the end of the race. You’ll want to keep them engaged and active, i.e. so that they’ll return to you, they’ll study, develop, and maybe eventually become advocates for your brand.
Here’s what you can do to achieve this goal:
Send announcements and invitations. Organizing a meet-up, workshops, or launching a new course? Let your students know and show them how to enroll. Send an email invitation and guide them to your landing page, or the area in the dashboard that lets them sign up for the event.
Start engaging your students right at the beginning and until the very end. If you do it right, the next point, i.e. retention, won’t be much of a challenge.
Step 3. RetainLast but not least, your goal should be to retain your students. You want them to stay with you for as long as possible, whether as students enrolling for new courses, or alumni who keep visiting your site, join the conversation, and maybe even help fund the studies for future students.
Here’s how you can retain your students better:
Send announcements and updates. Plenty of things are happening each day, some of them more remarkable than others. Share updates with your audience – about a new course that just started, a newly-opened department, or a breakthrough in an important research that your students and faculty have been conducting.
Summing upAs you can see there are many, many ways to attract, engage, and retain students. Which tactics you’ll use will depend on the type of school you’re running – whether it’s a traditional university or an e-learning platform. Although the methods you’ll use will vary, the end goal and the rationale behind your strategy will remain the same. You’ll want your students to develop, achieve their goals, and while doing so – build a lasting relationship with your school.
The post How to Attract, Engage, and Retain Students with Marketing Automation appeared first on GetResponse Blog - Online Marketing Tips. Printing via GetResponse Blog – Online Marketing Tips http://ift.tt/1Qs2QKR May 31, 2017 at 07:34AM
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