We all put a lot of effort into reaching new audiences with our online marketing efforts, but how do we make sure that we are diligent with the enquiries we have while maximising contact with people who have not yet enrolled?
Automation is the answer! It’s an essential tool for every school because:
- marketing is expensive, and you want to ensure that you maximise every point of contact you have with your audience.
- reaching a ‘warm audience’ through automation is often much more cost-effective than marketing to a ‘cold audience’.
- you can save staff time and better filter enquiries so that they only spend time on people interested in enrolling in your school. It’s a tremendous self-filtering tool.
- automation helps you increase the consistency of follow-up and complements your enrolment team’s efforts.
In this article, we’ll look at three automation tools you can implement in your school’s online marketing so that you can maximise results.
1. Email Marketing
The first question you’ll get when mentioning email marketing to your school principal is, “Isn’t it impersonal? Email marketing is meant to complement your communications, not replace them.
How can you use email marketing?
- Send a warm and personal welcome email to people that subscribe to your ‘enquiries list’. Ensure that this is sent immediately using automation within your email software. The first email you send to enquiries is the most important and will have the highest open rate.
- Build your brand by sending subscribers videos and engaging content. You can also promote your Open Events to this list when the time comes.
- Send people emails based on their behaviour – if they are on your email list and visit specific pages on your website, you can send them targeted emails based on their interests. Segmenting your communication is proven to be much more effective than blanket promotions. For example, you can trigger an automation to send to people that visit your kindergarten page with specific content for kindy enrolments.
2. SMS
SMS is an excellent complement to your automation tools but should be used sparingly – always include an opt-out message. People don’t want to be SMSed if they are not expecting it, so be careful.
Here are a few ways you can use SMS:
- Send Open Morning invitations to your prospects list.
- Remind Open Event registrants and tour bookings to attend a few days before the event. This has a great impact on the attendance rate.
- Use SMS keywords to monitor traditional marketing mediums such as flyers and build opt-ins via SMS.
3. Remarketing
We’re well accustomed to building our email lists by now, but what if our prospects don’t even get that far? Remarketing is a potent tool that can be used to advertise to people on your email list and to people who have visited your website.
Use remarketing wisely and always consider how long you want to target people. Don’t just blanket target all people. Rather, group people into audiences based on the time frame. For example, people that visited your website 1-3 days ago can get served one version of an ad, while people that visited 3-10 days ago can get served a refreshed version of the ad. People that visited more than 30 days ago can be dropped out of your audience – if they haven’t responded to your efforts after 30 days, you can assume they are not interested at the moment, and you can rest your efforts.
Questions regarding this article? Please email me at mara@robertsdigital.com.au
