An Education CRM System is the Secret to Next Generation Education Marketing: Here’s How

Businesses prosper or fail based on how good their relationships are with their customers. It’s become critical for organizations to be more customer-centric to be successful. The education industry is no exception.

The speed at which the market for education is growing, students have a lot of options to choose from and competition has become fierce between institutions. So, for you to ensure that students pick you over others, establishing a great brand presence & recall is absolutely vital.

What’s more, during the admission’s period, it’s important to have regular & relevant communication with the prospects. But, you have got your work cut out for you if you are using traditional tools for admissions management. All the lead data is stored on legacy close-ended ERP’s or are filled manually on excel sheets making it absolutely impossible to nurture, analyze & timely communicate.

The good news is, you can overcome this quandary through an education CRM system.

Why should you invest in an education CRM system?

According to a report by IBEF, the education sector has shown tremendous growth:

• The education sector in India is expected to reach US$ 180 billion in FY20
• India’s higher education segment is expected to increase to Rs. 2,44,824 crore (US$ 35.03 billion) by 2025
• The number of colleges in India reached 39,931 in FY19
• The number of universities in India reached 967 in FY21
• Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education reached 26.3% in FY19
• The edtech market is expected to reach ~US$ 3.5 billion by 2022
• Indian edtech startups have received a total investment of US$ 2.22 billion in 2020, up from US$ 553 million in 2019

All-in-all, there is high demand for education in India and more and more students are applying to education institutions. You need a solution to match this growing demand! An education CRM system ensures you stay ahead of the competition and are the focus of your prospective students by helping you engage with a larger number of students at different touchpoints effectively on time.

In this blog, we will tell you how CRM software and automation helps education institutions achieve the following key benefit in their admission’s strategy:

• Increase the counsellor’s productivity
• Timely follow-ups
• Decrease lead leakage
• Optimized marketing cost
• Ease in decision making

How can an Education CRM System help you?

A good CRM and automation software plays a crucial role in the marketing and recruitment of students. With a CRM, your manual work gets automated and you can focus more on students who are serious about their interest in your institute. Here are some of the benefits of an education CRM system:

Increases your Admission Teams Productivity

Google Ads, Facebook ads, YouTube ads & 3rd party student platforms, etc are the primary sources for educational institutes to generate leads. Assessing leads manually is a pain as there is no single source to rely on for analysis.

An education CRM system helps in integrating all these sources into one single platform. Additionally, tasks like sending SMSs and Emails which would take hours to send manually are automated by the CRM so you can complete these tasks with just a few clicks.

A CRM enhances prospect engagement so that institutes can increase their top of the funnel. As the conversion of prospects increases so does the revenue.

Ensures Timely Follow-ups to Accelerate Admissions

To convert a prospective student to take admissions, timely follow-ups is key. Sending the right information at the right time get difficult if your counsellors are managing this process manually.

What’s more, due to these manual and tedious processes, your counsellor can miss out on that important follow-up causing you to miss out on the opportunity.

But, with an education CRM system you don’t have to worry about missing out on prospects, you could set up notification alerts across devices i.e. admission powered on smartphones in the calendar through the tool. This way you can set up your campaigns with your prospects for a week or more without the need for excel sheets.

Decreases Lead Leakages

It is a given that as the number of prospects increase at the start of the admission process the number of admissions increase. But, during the peak admission period, the counsellor needs to deal with a huge number of enquiries. No matter how aware the counsellor is they can miss out on some leads.

There is a chance of human error where the counsellor may miss some enquiries at the top of the funnel. An education CRM system helps you avoid this and makes sure that all of your leads are going directly in the system, decreasing the chances of lead leakage.

Proper integration of all marketing channels plays a crucial role in the admission process. If all the marketing channels are well integrated with the CRM software it will increase the number of prospects to the top of the funnel.

Also, CRM helps in prioritizing the prospects according to their seriousness and interest level. You can focus on the prospect according to the stage they are in the sales funnel and approach them accordingly. This will help decrease your lead leakage drastically which increases your overall conversion rate.

Decreases Marketing Cost that leads to true ROI

All of your marketing efforts and channels can be tracked from one place i.e your education CRM system. Since you have all the data at your disposal, you can make strategic decisions for a better ROI.

The CRM basically tells you what are your most successful campaigns when it comes to enrolments, helping you invest money in the right marketing channel to get maximum output.

As you learn where to invest and how much to invest according to the data you have, marketing cost decreases substantially. As marketing cost decreases your per student admission cost also decreases.

Makes decision making easy with actionable insights

When you are dealing with thousands of prospects, using tools like excel sheets can make it difficult to analyze and gain actionable data. But with a CRM system, you can analyze a large number of data with just a click of a button and generate lots of actionable insights.

This information helps you to make decisions, plan your future strategies, predict outcomes that will directly impact your ROI. The CRM creates different reports like the year on year growth reports, Email & SMS reports, Drip campaign reports, counsellor performance reports, and many more.

These detailed individual reports help you understand what marketing campaign did better, how many prospects opened your emails, how many emails bounced. In the case of a counsellor, it gives you insight about which counsellor needs training and which one is doing better.

Conclusion

“The future of communicating with customers rests in engaging with them through every possible channel: phone, e-mail, chat, Web, and social networks. Customers are discussing a company’s products and brand in real-time. Companies need to join the conversation.” – Marc Benioff, CEO Salesforce

The Indian education sector is growing rapidly. The competition is growing and students have many options to choose from. It is impossible for your counsellor to track all of these enquiries manually as it is a very hard and tedious job. It consumes money, time as well as human resources to a large extent. But in today’s competitive world you cannot afford to not engage with every potential candidate.

Therefore having an education CRM system in place can help you avoid the manual labour involved and take quick student actions, ensuring higher admission rates.