In higher education, lead nurturing is an essential aspect of the automated admissions office. Your college or university can use email and other digital marketing tools to create and deliver personalized communication that builds a relationship with prospective applicants. The same tools also enable you to track, qualify and segment prospects by their interest. This allows you to enhance the efficiency of your admissions or enrollment team.
Here are some tips for higher education lead management.
Respond Fast to New Leads
Most prospective applicants will do a lot of comparison shopping when they want to choose a college. That’s why you must set up an auto-response email system to capture and start nurturing your leads immediately.
Use the prospect’s name in all the email messages you send. Alert the admissions office to immediately call the prospect once you discover they’re spending more time on your website. Live chat should also be available to interact with visitors on a 24/7 basis.
Create Audience and Content Segments
After your initial interaction with a prospect, make efforts to score them. Effective tracking and education data management make it easier to score a lead while allowing you to create a persona or profile for your potential students. After scoring your leads, you can:
- Select many targeted topics that’ll be of interest to your prospective students
- Provide informational content on academics, arts, athletics, your campus community and any technological innovations your students will enjoy on campus
- Get to know your prospect better through email, phone calls and live chat
- Provide leads with more detailed content on academics that match their areas of interest
Organize and Schedule Your Content Streams
Once you have created profiles for your audience, set up a schedule of emails. These emails should simply provide a short introduction and a link to content you have on your website, videos, pdf documents or surveys.
Once a week, send a personal note to each person that has shown interest to help them keep you at the top of their mind. For this type of email, you simply need to set up an email sequence — you don’t need to create completely new content. In addition to email, which is the primary medium for nurturing education sales leads, you should also use tweets, text messages and social media posts.
Create Strong Interest With Special Content
In higher education, some types of content are more engaging than others. Here are some ways to engage your leads after you’ve started nurturing them through email:
- Show prospects your classrooms: Describe one very interesting class that relates to their main field of interest. Show them the learning material, making it relevant to recent trends in the news. Give your prospects a preview of one of the most interesting classes in the course.
- Tell student stories: Describe the field of study, explain how the student made the choice, what they love about it and how they intend to use their knowledge and degree after graduation.
- Share alumni stories: Alumni stories are a great tool for convincing interested students to enroll in a course. This gives them a strong sense of hope that they’ll be able to make the best of their investment when they complete their degree.
Nurturing leads in higher education marketing is easier and faster when you have the best marketing automation tools. At LeadMaster, we have the most effective lead management tools to meet your institution’s admission goals. Give us a call and start your free 30-day trial today.
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