A school’s student portal should be a space that attracts prospects and naturally guides them through the admissions funnel. Schools looking to maximize this space and use it as a tool for nurturing leads can generate great results by applying industry best practices and prioritizing easy and quick communication. Lead nurturing in education marketing is developing relationships with prospects to guide them toward application and enrollment. Schools can use their student portal to improve lead nurturing.
Through a strong education-based CRM, curated content, good user experience, and easy accessibility, your team can begin motivating prospects to start and submit their application to study at your school. With the right technique, you can use your admissions software to boost enrollments and better reach your school’s recruitment goals. Here’s how!
Use Your School’s Student Portal to Facilitate Communication
An important feature of your school’s student portal is its ability to integrate different software and facilitate communication. Your communication with leads is essential as they begin considering your school more seriously, making it a big part of your school’s lead nurturing strategy. By understanding your leads’ interests and following their progress on your student portal, you can determine what messaging leads need to receive to push them further along the student enrollment journey.
Integrate Your CRM and Rely on Lead Scoring for Better Results
An education-driven CRM, or Customer Relationship Management software, is invaluable to schools seeking meaningful relationships with prospects and leads. It is also highly relevant in the student application process, making it a pivotal tool to integrate into your school’s existing student portal.
With a CRM setup, you can easily track prospects who become leads as they set up an account and use your student portal. You can then monitor, track, and follow up with them in one place—improving your team’s productivity while allowing you to focus your communication efforts on nurturing leads better.
Example: Using HEM’s proprietary Student Portal, you can integrate your CRM through some quick and easy steps. By navigating to “School Setting” then to “Integrations,” you’ll have the option to add in your CRM (Mautic) details and enable the connection:
Once you’ve integrated your CRM, your team can focus on high-quality leads, those who are most likely to convert and submit an application at your school. In this case, you can rely on lead scoring to identify the leads you want to nurture more effectively and send them well-targeted and curated content to push them into action.
Lead scoring is when your team assigns different prospects a value on a scale of 0 to 100 depending on how likely they are to convert. Specific browsing behaviours, triggered conversion events, level of email engagement, and other interactions with your school can all contribute to this lead score.
The score you assign will indicate the value of this lead in your student recruitment efforts, revealing their level of intent and ensuring that you target the right group of prospects to increase applications and enrollments. Once you identify these high-quality and high-value leads, you can begin communicating with them and developing calls to action that effectively guide them toward conversion.
Embrace Automated Email and Text Messaging when Nurturing Leads
Another benefit of using a CRM with your school’s student portal is the ability to follow up and communicate with high-quality and high-value leads quickly. You can utilize automated lead nurturing via automated email marketing and SMS marketing to generate notable results. In fact, statistics show that email marketing is the preferred marketing channel for 46% of users, producing an average open rate of 22%. Interestingly, SMS marketing is also rising, with a 98% average open rate.
These numbers show that email and text messages can work for marketing purposes and should be looked into more seriously by schools. Good communication is key in nurturing leads, and you can use your school’s CRM and student portal to establish a good relationship with your prospects. Be sure to use these tools to quickly and immediately respond to student queries and show interested leads that you’re ready to step in and provide support whenever necessary. The best way to nurture leads using a school’s student portal is through a strong education-based CRM, curated content, good user experience, and easy accessibility on the student portal platform.
Getting started with marketing automation allows you to do just that. You can promote fast and positive interactions between prospects and your admissions team while also motivating leads to continue or submit their application. It also enables you to keep your school top of mind, ensuring prospects have the information they need to succeed with their application.
Example: Bishop’s University sends an automated email to prospects interested in completing an application to the Williams School of Business. The email is written by the Dean and personalized with the prospect’s name. It’s a direct and instant interaction that promotes positive communication and relationship building, making it an effective lead-nurturing tactic.
Source: Bishop’s University – Williams School of Business
Make Key Information Easily Accessible in Your Student Portal
To help further a student application, your school must provide prospects with the information they need to complete their submission. You don’t want your prospects to exit the student portal as they look for relevant information about their program. Instead, you want this information to be easily accessible on the same platform as their application—preventing them from pausing the application process and delaying their submission.
A good way to get started with lead nurturing content on a student portal is to take the time to consider recruiting questions and subjects that your admissions team uses to connect with prospects. This can help you quickly identify your prospect’s needs, interests, and concerns and provide answers in your student portal.
Example: HEM’s Student Portal software also features a Virtual Admissions Assistant (VAA) that makes valuable information easily accessible to prospects completing a school application. The VAA is customizable, allowing schools to tailor the experience depending on the needs of their students. Here’s how the University of the Commonwealth Caribbean uses it to highlight essential program information to leads during the application process:
Source: University of the Commonwealth Caribbean
You can also use your student portal as a space to share helpful links to relevant scholarships or co-op programs and student testimonials and program insights to delight prospects gearing up for their application. This is what Carleton University does in its student portal:
Source: Carleton University
Elevating your student portal this way and making important information readily available to severe and high-quality leads can positively impact your student recruitment efforts. Through this approach, your school can enhance its standing with prospects while simultaneously nurturing leads.
Prioritize a Good User Experience to Direct Leads Toward Application
A good student portal promotes a positive user experience, which can be key when streamlining your lead nurturing funnel. Good user experience prompts prospects to stay on the page longer, keeping them active throughout the application process. The bad user experience would motivate prospects to leave the student portal and quit the application altogether.
By ensuring a good booking experience for students online, you can direct prospects towards applications and make it even easier for them to submit. This goes beyond a visually clean and pleasing design. It can involve user-friendly application forms, page load speed, ease of navigation, and how elements behave with user interaction. It can also include mobile responsiveness—which is increasingly becoming important as more online users gravitate towards mobile browsing.
Wondering how you can elevate your school’s student booking experience? Contact our team to discover how a student application portal can help you reach your recruitment goals!
Allow Prospects to Easily Reach and Contact Your Team When Nurturing Leads
Nurturing leads hinges on communication and good relationship building, which starts by making your school and its admissions team as easily accessible and reachable as possible to prospects. This is especially the case when nurturing leads on a student portal.
You want your leads to be able to quickly reach you in case any questions or concerns arise while they fill up their application. Failure to do so can hold up their submission and even potentially instill doubts about your school’s commitment to supporting its students. By making it easy for leads to view your contact information and reach out, you can better maintain their trust and loyalty.
You can start by featuring your admission team’s email address or phone number in the student portal. Another option is to provide chatbot support. Interestingly, statistics show that 36% of companies use chatbots to boost lead generation and that this tool has increased sales by 67%. A chatbot service allows your school to quickly provide prospects with the help they need when they need it most.
Example: The International Institute for Management Development uses a chatbot feature to support leads during the application process. Here, leads can select the option that best applies to their circumstances and initiate communication with the school. Either they request a follow-up call or send a message. Allowing prospects to go through this process while staying on the application portal can help schools improve their lead nurturing efforts:
Source: International Institute for Management Development
Pro Tip: A live chat feature can also be helpful in a student portal. Facilitating direct contact with your team can help prospects go through the application process more efficiently—thus proceeding to the next stage of the admissions funnel.
Measure and Test Your Efforts to Improve Lead Nurturing on Your Student Portal
A strong student portal enables your school to track how many students are submitting applications to your programs, allowing you to monitor complete and incomplete applications, payments, and other key metrics. You can use this data to review your student recruitment efforts’ effectiveness and evaluate whether your school meets its student enrollment goals.
You can also cross-reference this data with data you’ve gathered in your CRM to identify areas for improvement and enhance your student recruitment strategy. This way, you can identify the stages where prospects convert or drop off and enhance the efforts involving nurturing leads. By going through this process, you can naturally guide prospects toward application and maximize the use of your school’s student portal to streamline recruitment.
