Enrollment Resources
#216-611 Brookside Road
Victoria, British Columbia
Canada V9C 0C3
Tel: 250-391-9494
Fax: 250-391-9455
Office Hours: Mon to Fri, 8:00 – 4:00 PST
#216-611 Brookside Road
Victoria, British Columbia
Canada V9C 0C3
Tel: 250-391-9494
Fax: 250-391-9455
Office Hours: Mon to Fri, 8:00 – 4:00 PST
An online lead generation and qualification tool that helps prospective customers understand their personal strengths, explore their motivations and match with your school. It is delivered through a simple and fun online questionnaire that guides prospects to request a meeting with your sales team. The comprehensive Career Training Readiness Report generated by the pathway gives your sales teams deep insights about your prospects. In addition to creating high-quality leads, sales staff gain valuable information on each prospect’s perceived strengths, support network, perception of key features of your business, and much more.
This is a survey delivered to your enrolled students to determine their marketing habits. Learn marketing demographic and psychographic information including their content delivery preferences and habits (TV, internet, radio, etc.) to aid your school in determining marketing direction and opportunities.
This is a key tool for capturing those highly interested website visitors who want more than just “Requesting Information”, they are ready for the next step… a virtual or in-person appointment. Use this tool to engage more appointments for your admissions team that will convert higher than your standard organic website leads.
Truth be told, this isn’t a true application, but is very useful for pulling out your highest intent website visitors (typically about 7% of inquiries). Use it to high-grade your top prospects and put these at the top of your contact list.
So much more than a typical “Request Info” form, our website form is a conversion powerhouse that has been tested and perfected with numerous clients. It features a number of subtle but important conversion magnets and “in-the-code” enhancements. Widely copied by competitors, they never capture the beauty and conversion-power of our original.
As young people near the end of high school they face an enormous amount of change and what to do after high school can become a looming question. This 2-part pathway starts with providing a lead gen interface for gathering leads from presentations, then helps high school students and parents to identify goals, articulate strengths and explore their options in a low-pressure survey. Utilizing a variety of question types including sliders, multiple choice and open-ended, the High School Recruitment Pathway allows students to feel empowered and gets parents involved.
Provides an entry point to re-engage old “stale” leads and a reason to reach out to those prospects who may have dropped off of the radar, but who are potentially still interested in going to school. Not only will you increase your ROI by re-engaging existing leads, you’ll also have the opportunity to potentially improve your admissions process by identifying possible barriers that may have held prospects back from initially enrolling.
How A/B Testing Failures Reveal Bigger Opportunities
/in ER Announcements & News, ER Case Studies, Marketing CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization), Marketing Management, Marketing on the Internet, Marketing Strategy, Virtual Adviser /by Tammy MilesFailing Forward: Unlock Hidden Insights
As marketers we are always pushing to grow, break new ground, and stay ahead of our competition. We may test a new advertising approach, a different angle on a value proposition, build channel partnerships, or realign our marketing for performance and growth.
An area perhaps less explored is when bright ideas fail to live up to expectations. Testing is a science but mostly it’s trial and error where breakthroughs come by being curious around the why-of-things, especially when results flop.
In a recent landing page test for Google Ads, we started to notice some common trends for expensive to market programs that had commonality among competition. Most schools were running these programs, Google search advertising was expensive and cost per leads were higher than we wanted for our clients. We were having some breakthrough success across other program landing page tests, improving conversion rates by 30% on average, so we adopted a similar approach to what we’ve called our “problem programs.” Think teenage angst.
Pages were built with a new design, rewritten, and expectations were high. To our surprise and disappointment, the tests dropped performance and increased cost per lead so we stopped the test to protect ROI.
You can go two ways with a situation like this:
In many ways, conversion rate optimization analysts will forgo the failure and move on to something new. The tendency is to seek the win, which is great, but often that win or insight can be hidden in the failure.
We tend to lean in on curiosity.
Since Virtual Advisor encapsulates the stories behind a prospects’ journey, we started to dig into the data we had on those programs. We also questioned if the program value proposition wasn’t aligned with where the prospect was in their journey.
In most instances, our prospects had been thinking about the career for some time, in many cases years. The pandemic has been an interesting catalyst for many folks looking to explore a different path in their lives. The knowledge that the career path is not new to them and they have done their research prompted us to reframe how we spoke to them in our copy.
We’re currently on iteration #3 for this test and will likely have results in the new year but the point is not necessarily about the end result in this case. It got our wheels turning around leveraging our form technology and aligning Virtual Advisor user data to improve your school’s conversion rates in other ways we hadn’t thought of before exploring why our tests had failed.
Understanding your prospects at their level and being able to communicate to their needs and aspirations is the foundation of all great breakthroughs.
Any insights you can attain to further your understanding and have more meaningful conversations, online and offline, is a recipe for great things. Combine that with seamless technology to foster a supportive user experience, it begins to get really interesting.
This will be one of the sessions at our 3rd Enrollment Builder Best-Practice Virtual Conference – we would love to see you there!
Tweaking Tiny Processes in Your Enrollment Management Funnel
/in Admissions Strategy, ER Announcements & News, ER Webinars, Podcasts and Workshops, Management & Leadership /by Jodie GastelIn this video, Gregg Meiklejohn and Sterling Simpson will demonstrate how tweaking a couple tiny processes in your Enrollment Management Funnel can make significant improvements to your school’s bottom line. They will take you through how our fictional “Gregg’s Beauty School” tweaked a couple of tiny processes and blew results out of the water.
See:
Watch this walkthrough, then go press the link and run some scenario planning for yourself!
To do your own Lost Revenue Finder click here!
AI-generated transcript here
The Key to Successful Enrollment Marketing is Understanding Student Intent
/in Marketing Strategy /by Shane SparksAll enrollment marketing, regardless of the type of school, is a response to prospective student intent.
Every prospective student is on a buying continuum: Some are very close to enrolling — they’ve done their research, view your brand favourable, or have some connection to your school. Others are at the very beginning of their journey — they are researching you, your competitors, different program paths, and even whether they want to go to school.
The job of enrollment marketing is to offer choices that are meaningful to where your prospect is in his or her journey.
Think of it as a concentric circle around intent to enroll. Inbound calls and application forms are high intent (but lower volume). An inquiry form is moderate intent — it represents someone sufficiently interested willing to reach out but not ready to apply. Quizzes, downloads, etc are lower intent (but higher volume). As the circle expands volume increases as there are more prospects on the outer edges, than in the middle.
Most schools are way too timid in how they market. They’ve got an inquiry form, which attracts a very specific person at a very specific point in their journey. And maybe some links to their social media accounts. But that’s it.
It’s much better offering too many ways to connect than not enough. Some of your colleagues may perceive it as too “pitchy” but what you are really doing is respecting where your prospect is at in their journey.
Here’s some examples, from high to low intent:
Our Saas tool Virtual Adviser features an awesome tool kit of lead boosting tools for your schools website.
Lead Generation Best-Practices for Schools: How Many Leads Does a School Really Need?
/in ER Announcements & News /by Shane SparksResearch has shown that an admission person only needs 60-80 leads per month max. Everything after that represents diminishing returns. The enrollment rate goes down, leads are poorly worked or ignored, and enrollments flat line. Basically you reach the mental capacity limits for your Admission people.
So to figure out your lead goal, just multiply admissions people x 60: If you have 3 admissions people, you need is 180 leads per month, which is usually totally achievable through your own efforts.
You most likely DO NOT need to buy 3rd party leads to increase student enrollment.
Now, the flip side of this, is that you are more likely to have an Admissions capacity issue and not a lead issue. Most of the schools we have analyzed are under-resourced in Admissions, and that’s the real bottleneck for them.
It’s understandable: Generating more higher education leads is easier and cheaper than hiring, training, managing Admissions people.
A client story comes to mind: They were buying a ton of garbage 3rd party leads for years, hundreds of them per month. They switched to a self-generated education lead generation campaign with us, and volume dropped 60% or more. They were understandably anxious. But within a month, enrollment increased as lead quality vastly improved, and the staff had the time and mind space to succeed.
Higher Education Lead Generation for Schools: Focus on Self-Generated Leads
/in ER Announcements & News /by Shane SparksWe’ve found the best-run, highest performing schools generally have a similar philosophy around education lead generation. They focus the majority of their effort on self-generated leads. Referrals, website, Google Ads, social (in that order of importance). Only then do they augment as needed with downstream sources. Downstream might be education portals, pay-per-lead vendors, general advertising.
The best-case scenario is for schools to self-generate all of their leads.
The challenge here is most school marketing takes a “more is better” approach, which results in an insatiable appetite for lead generation. The lead goal is either arbitrary or focused on maximum volume instead of maximum effectiveness.
But schools need way fewer leads than they think. And more is not always better.
Click here to learn how you can generate more self-generated leads with Virtual Adviser.
Meaningful Differentiation
/in ER Announcements & News /by Shane SparksIt’s all a little phoney, unfortunately.
Ghandi was a known bigot. Einstein a womanizer. Mother Teresa had a cruel streak. But human nature is to make people one thing or the other, their legacies do not reflect the shades of their characters. Everyone knows Ghandi was benevolant. Einstein a humanitarian genius. Mother Teresa the embodiment of loving kindness.
And that’s basically the nature of a brand — you are one thing, or another. But not both.
Good marketers understand this and as a result their product strategy is one of a “slice of slice”. They create narrower and narrower niches usually within vertical markets. It’s not good enough to be a CRM company, you need to have a CRM for cosmetic dentists to compete against Sales Force.
The big positions are taken, leaving only little ones.
And that also why there are are so many niche products and so many people pumping the next greatest, MUST-DO tactic. It’s a little marketing hill to differentiate from bigger competitors. But that’s all it is.
A more productive way to look at marketing your school (or business in general) is to focus on making your funnel as effortless for your prospect as possible. Make it easy to connect. Add value up front. Give them something.
We focus much of our product development and testing on the language that appeals to the deeply human needs driving a buying decision for a prospective student. That’s why Virtual Adviser comes with pre-written campaigns that we know work, because they’ve been tested and proven with many other schools.
And that’s why we can increase leads and enrollments for your school, year after year.
Click here to learn more about Virtual Adviser.
Or better yet, schedule a demo.
You deserve better leads.
Management: $4.5 Million Reasons You Should Care About Your Schools’ Website
/in ER Announcements & News /by Shane SparksRight now you could be generating 2-3x the organic leads you are currently getting from your website.
The typical career school converts about 3% of the unique visitors that come to their website into a legitimate inquiry. Our clients averaged 8.46% in Feb 2021. The gap between those figures is explained by a few things:
So for a school generating 5,000 unique visitors per month, that would be:
Assuming a 7% lead-enrollment rate & a $15,000 tuition, what would translate to:
That’s a $375,000 monthly increase or Annualized Revenue Gain of $4,500,000
I think any school would happily take a $4.5 Million revenue gain.
Now 8% is the average so roughly half our school clients are below that, half above. Programs offered, competition, your brand, the market you operate in, are all factors that influence conversion rate. But what all our clients share is that their leads went up after hiring us.
We offer a terrific add-on service to Virtual Adviser called WebsiteEDU — where we create conversion focused, lead generation websites for clients. It’s not for everyone, but it might be right for you. Click here to learn more.