Marketing Automation for Education

Automation has made many processes in life easier and quicker, from automated medical equipment to auto focus on cameras, there are many different types and ways automation improves our lives in simplistic ways.  

When it comes to Marketing Automation, the general methodology is the same. Marketing Automation is designed to make processes simpler and quicker by removing the manual side of daily tasks. When set up correctly, automation has the power to work seamlessly and go almost unnoticed, improving the overall effectiveness of campaigns and marketing efforts.  

Using a simple definition, Marketing Automation “refers to the technology which helps marketers find, nurture, convert and engage with customers automated tasks and actions”. Automation has the power to guide a customer throughout their journey using tools such as email marketing, lead scoring and more until they are ready to be handed over to a Sales representative.  

But how exactly does Marketing Automation help the education sector, given that customer journeys can vary greatly from traditional buying centric ones? Let’s go through three different examples of the power of Marketing Automation for education!

Marketing Automation for Education Examples 

Automated Follow Ups 

One of the most powerful tools in the deck of Marketing Automation is email marketing. In the instance of education, when a potential student enquires about a specific course, email marketing can then send an automatic follow up message containing information about course details, open days and more to nurture that student and their interest. 

But email marketing is just the start of automated follow ups. 

As an educational institute, it’s important to know exactly how your potential students want to be communicated with. Email marketing is just one method of communication, but stats show that SMS marketing also shouldn’t be ignored, especially for younger generations.  

Did you know SMS marketing has an average open rate of 98%?

Using both forms of communication in unison, facilitated through the power of Marketing Automation, educational institutes have the ability to not only communicate in effective, audience appropriate ways but also to work to the strengths of each tool. 

“SMS messages create instant awareness where email is a great tool to do the follow-up work.” – Source 

Email marketing is perfect at nurturing contacts and spreading awareness about courses and events, whereas SMS marketing can be used to further provide more information instantly. For example, email marketing can be used to garner interest in an open day, collecting attendees’ information through follow up forms such as which courses they are interested in, while SMS marketing can be used on the day of the event to remind contacts of specific talks going on throughout the day that match their preferences and interests. 

This example is just one of the many ways automated follow ups can be used for educational institutions. There are so many more ways marketers can utilize these tools to facilitate positive, successful customer journeys.  

Free Recommended Resource: The Ultimate Guide to Customer Retention

Campaign Automation 

It would be accurate to say that Campaign Automation is the backbone of any Marketing Automation technology. Without it, tools such as email marketing, social marketing, lead scoring and more behave in a disconnected way, which can negatively affect your marketing efforts.  

Simply put, Campaign Automation “engages with consumers based on specific triggers”. Using the follow up example above, Campaign Automation is able to automatically put a student onto the right journey using the information provided and triggers. For example, when a student confirms that they are going to an open day then Campaign Automation provides the resources to link together with email and SMS marketing to send updates before, during and after the event. Without Campaign Automation, marketers would have to manually send updates throughout the customer journey, by researching data and looking at specific triggers.

Campaign Automation is also highly useful in the case of personalization. Not every potential student who fills in an enquiry is exactly the same. Some might be at the beginning of their journey and require more nurturing whereas others might have already decided what they want. Campaign Automation allows for personalization to occur in the form of segregated lists that provide the right time of content to the right person at the right time.  

Did you know 98% of marketers say personalization advances customer relationships?  

After all, some students might want to only be contacted once a week whereas others might want daily updates, and it’s important as a business to provide this level of personalization or risk losing potential students. After all, the last thing you want to do is become an annoyance to your customers. And remember, what works for other industries might not work for you! 

“An insurance company increased revenue by 45% by sending MORE emails whereas an ecommerce store’s revenue dropped 30% after adding a weekly email newsletter.” – Source

Collecting Data 

Data rules the world and this fact is true even for the educational sector. Having a perfect website with a loyal community raving about your school, college or institute is all well and good but absolutely useless if you cannot accurately collect data from existing and potential students in an effective way using web forms.  

Focusing solely on digital platforms, such as your website, you need to have the ability to not only collect data but also feed it into a CRM that can be used by tools such as email marketing and campaign automation to perform any type of marketing effort in a quick and effective manner. What you don’t want as an institute is for your marketers to spend hours or even days sifting through data to manually action tasks and put prospects in specific lists/segments. Marketing Automation web forms have the ability to do this for you when set up correctly and linked with an intelligent CRM.  

Take Dublin University for example, their “Student Recruitment team uses the ClickDimensions web forms feature to track registration data for campus visits during Open Day events, seamlessly capturing contact data that auto feeds into their CRM.” – Read the full Case Study here. 

This is just one of the many ways that web forms can be used to improve customer journeys and experiences while minimizing the amount of time required by marketing teams to manually perform data-based tasks. 

Final Thoughts 

Marketing Automation in education has the ability to improve customer relations, provide cleaner, better data and automate manual tasks that would traditionally waste marketers time and money, all through the use of powerful tools, including but not limited to email and SMS marketing, Campaign Automation and Web Forms. But we have only just touched the surface when it comes to Automation for the education sector.

Find out more by talking to one of our team members and booking a demo to experience the ClickDimensions Marketing Automation solution now.