Whether you work for a charter school, university, or even a specific program within a larger school, one thing remains true in almost every single situation - you don't have the resources to keep up with all of your school marketing for student recruitment. Resources are at a premium and in order to scale and increase the number of enrolled students, the primary focus has to be on eliminating time intensive manual processes within your marketing and student recruitment campaigns.
Let's look at an example. Say you're part of a charter school organization's marketing team. As you're working to generate and nurture leads for your schools for the upcoming school year, what do you do with new leads? How are they followed up with? How frequently? Through which medium? As you get closer to a choice period or enrollment period, how do you know who to spend the majority of your time on?
We've seen that many education organizations are still using a very manual process. When a lead comes in, it's emailed to a single person. That person is responsible for emailing, texting, and/or calling that lead. It's easy to see how this can quickly become a problem, especially during a big recruitment period.
Let's look at how marketing automation for your school marketing can improve your process.
In the earlier example, that single person is responsible for the initial touch (through phone, text, and/or email) and they're likely responsible for all future engagements with each contact. By adding marketing automation, you would never have to think twice about a lead being engaged.
Setting up workflows (or commonly referred to as drip campaigns), you can ensure that every single contact that your organization has is engaged and reached out to on a set schedule. Staying front of mind is a big part of the school marketing battle, especially during recruiting sprints.
Using that same example, what happens if that person that is responsible for the first and future contacts gets sick, goes on vacation, or even is gone on maternity or paternity leave? You likely have someone that fills in for that person, but with so many moving parts and so many contacts to engage with, are you 100% certain that leads aren't slipping through the cracks? Setting up marketing automation eliminates that issue. No need to rely on that one person to handle it, your software will do it for you.
During your student recruitment times, it's not only important to reach out and engage every single lead that comes in, but if you're a medium or large education organization, you likely have a person or a team of people that are responsible for personally engaging prospects to help get them to the enrollment finish line.
But, with so many contacts, how do you know who to reach out to or which ones to prioritize? It's probably not realistic to reach out to every single contact (unless that's all you're going to do for a month straight!). That's where lead scoring has to come in. You have to understand WHO those bottom of the funnel contacts are and which of them are most likely (through data) to enroll at your school or in your program.
Lead scoring assigns values (positive and negative) to each contact based on actions that each contact makes such as opening emails, revisiting your website, or even engaging with a social media post.
By understanding who these contacts are, you can guarantee that you and your team are spending time at the end of your school choice or enrollment period on contacts that are ready to become students instead of wasting time on students that aren't going to enroll this year (or ever). How many seats can you fill at the end of your enrollment period by prioritizing through lead scoring?
No education organization (or organization in any industry) can be successful marketing online without great software and tools to spur growth.
That's why we believe in HubSpot. We've used it to help many businesses, nonprofits, and education organizations reach and surpass their goals using HubSpot. That includes a high performing charter school organization including 13 schools achieve over 110% of their enrollment goals for this upcoming school year!!