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Gregg:
Welcome, everybody. This is Greg Meiklejohn from Enrollment Resources, and welcome to our talk today on how to stretch marketing dollars given our pandemic situation that we’re dealing with.
Gregg:
This is Christie Burns’, our communication manager’s, idea. She spoke about how if we focused on what’s relevant for our schools versus what comes easy, we can unleash another level of results. And so, we ran with that, and our panel came together with some interesting tips on just how to stretch your marketing dollars. Not everything has to be a big purchase of media or getting a $30,000 website.
Gregg:
And so I’d like to introduce our panel today. We have with us Jen Flood, who’s the CEO and founder of the National Compliance Group. Jen is a lawyer, but she’s also a really good pundit. So, Jen, welcome to our talk today.
Jennifer:
Hey, thanks for having me, guys.
Gregg:
Okay. And we have John Assunto. And he’s the founder and a senior partner with World Bridge Partners. John’s into several cool projects, but, really, John, I’d say your superpower is that of connecting employees to schools. Would that be fair?
John:
Just one of several superpowers. Thank you.
Gregg:
Excellent. A lot of superpowers, [inaudible 00:01:44]. And then the third person on the panel today is co-founder and COO Shane Sparks of Enrollment Resources. Shane, welcome aboard, man.
Shane:
Hey, Gregg. Thanks.
Gregg:
Yeah, you’re welcome. Now, we can be cute and try to be cutesy, but my humor is uneven, so we’re going to dive in in this call today, everybody, and just get right to work, and leave you with tips. You might find the odd analogy I’m using, but we’re going to focus on content. So, we’re going to work broadly into specifics.
Gregg:
The first thing that I want to talk about is training. Admissions training cannot overcome lead quality issues. So, John, there’s the old ad agency saying that nothing could destroy a mediocre business like a great ad campaign. Admissions people, admissions leaders, they’re only as good as what’s being offered. You’ve had a lot of experience dealing with schools and employees. What’s your thoughts on that?
John:
Yeah. I think the follow-up on that ad campaign is probably going to be your best asset, and you mentioned training. So, my perspective has always been that when you have that great trainer that will lead by example with staff in doing scheduled follow-up accordingly, having that same senior manager, if you will, do the lead by example, get down in the trenches, maybe make a few phone calls to show those that are a little on the green side how it’s done. That’s the big piece that I like to go and done, as opposed to just delegating directly to the team. Let’s show them the way. It just carries that much more team pride at the end of the day.
Gregg:
Yeah, absolutely. The challenge that a number of schools have is if the poor admissions team had to sell some mediocre rock with some beautiful paint on it, it’s like … Shane, you can only offer quality admissions work if the product is there, which [crosstalk 00:04:27]. Would you not agree?
Shane:
I do, and it’s like trying to cook a gourmet meal with lousy ingredients. You just can’t. I can think of dozens of examples of clients over the years we’ve had that came to us that were heavily reliant on third party leads, purchased leads, and were desperately trying to get out of it, but at the same time afraid of moving away from that, because it was an easy way for them to get the volume they felt they needed.
Shane:
But once they were able to convert to primarily a self-generated lead magnet, they realized they needed way less leads to meet start goals, and it had massive improvements in culture and morale, because the admissions staff wasn’t having to wade through a bunch of garbage to attract students.
Gregg:
The third layer, right? The third layer, Shane, is you can be self-generating leads of garbage. There are some programs, some offerings that are just crap. You and I used the polishing the turd analogy on occasion, but I guess, really, you have to work like there has to be an exceptional world-class offering who lead flow ideally needs to be held close to the vest at the school. And then the admissions people, as John said, need to be trained by example and through persistence.
Gregg:
But, man, if there’s just a really crummy product, and I think that the one thing schools can do in a pandemic where there’s some downtime is to have a look inward and use the Toyota way. How can we, through iterative improvements, create a world class offering?
Shane:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, I had this conversation literally yesterday with a client who was expressing frustration about a new program they were struggling to market. And they came out that this is the sixth program in the market, they’re the last in the market with something that was well established with others. And really there’s no way to make that work without some unique differentiation. And I think that’s an excellent point. Marketing doesn’t solve product problems. You need to be either unique or a market leader for it to be successful.
Gregg:
Yeah, exactly. Product is the most important piece of marketing, yet it’s mostly ignored.
Gregg:
Let’s pivot. Jen, hi.
Jennifer:
Hi. How are you?
Gregg:
I’m good. See, there’s this whole process around ADA compliance with digital marketing products, and schools are pivoting to online, and this is where ADA compliance is more important than ever. But I think, really, what we speak to with your National Compliance Group is not to lie to people. And so, the way to stretch your marketing quality, to Shane’s earlier point, is don’t lie to people.
Jennifer:
Well, that’s a good start. And I really like your analogy of let’s look at what we have and what we’re doing now and turn around and see what can we take that we have right now and make it better. And we talked about this even before this webinar started; sometimes the answer isn’t, “Okay. We have downtime. Let’s build a $50,000 website.” That might not be the best thing to do. But what might be the best thing to do since we have so many people going online rather than direct to the classroom, is to evaluate whether we have a system, I say “we” as in the school, that is accessible to everyone who is trying to look up information, go to a class online. Does your entire program, does your entire system work for visual hearing and motor impaired?
Jennifer:
Number one, it’s legally required, but often we don’t know that we’re missing the mark until you’re sued and then it’s a little too late, and then you’re forced to do it, instead of really the other side to this. So I always try to look at things two different ways. There’s one, yeah, you legally have to do this. So there’s the one way to look at it. The second side is how does it help you from a marketing standpoint?
Jennifer:
And the way I look at it is Google sees two websites offering the same service. One of them is accessible to people with disabilities, which they can tell by crawling your site. And the other one is not so accessible. They’re going to rank the other one better. It’s just how the world works. If your site’s easier to use, if it’s more accessible in general, those are going to rank better. So it’s always better to do the right thing, but there’s several reasons for that. Rather than just looking at it, “Oh, we have this one more compliance thing we have to deal with,” actually, it’s one more tool that really could help move you up in general rankings.
Jennifer:
So it’s something to think about, and we’ll help people look at all kinds of ways to do that. And you guys do a great job, because I work with enrollment resources to help our clients achieve accessibility through their websites. So they already do a great job. But, yeah, I mean, if you want some assessment or some reflection during some downtime, especially some people are going online that had never done it before, people who might have regionally closed campuses, so they don’t have many online courses, and they’re creating them all online now. And they have no concept of who has to be able to see this. And then we have to bring up cases, like I was at Berkeley, that had to take down all of their online content because it was going to cost them something $20 million to get it all to accessible so that everyone could consume it. So, a long answer to a short topic, but, yeah, I did want to touch on that [crosstalk 00:11:08] for self reflection purposes.
Gregg:
So, within having things compliant, it’s the government forcing private sector to do what they’re supposed to do but won’t. And so the best way to get the regulators off your back is to simply re top shelf and have a great product and don’t lie in terms of the marketing.
Gregg:
Shane, it seems just so silly to have to say, “I think we’re the best marketing company because we don’t lie.” But, sadly it’s not so [crosstalk 00:11:54]-
Shane:
Well, okay. I think that this partly relates to corporate values or their mission, which is esoteric, but I’ve come around to believing that it’s really powerful. And so when you have an organization that is clear on your mission and your values, and the clear on what you do well, what you don’t do well, you’re more likely to attract kindred people who are likely to thrive with whatever your product or service is. And really, studies of exceptional organizations, they most are always grounded in a core operating philosophy, whatever you call that, whether it’s a mission statement or value statement or whatever. Having something that they can point to and say, “This is how we operate.” And it becomes a core part of the positioning or the uniqueness of the organization. Right?
Shane:
And so for schools, everyone is always looking for a way to differentiate from competitors. That’s a forever problem we all have, regardless of the business you’re in. And that is one of the things that’s a tool in that toolkit to differentiate from others. And the byproduct of values is that it gets you away from having to BS your way through a sales pitch, because there’s nothing really interesting about you.
Gregg:
Yeah. So, to that point, it’s a perfect segue for John. One of the things that we’ve noticed at the beginning of this pandemic is that people were kind of wild eyed and panicking and casting around, trying to improve and move things along. And we wonder if maybe the better thing to do is to just hyper focus on one meaningful KPI for key employees. Do you want to talk about hyper-focusing, and how it relates to key performance indicators. It’s kind of dry, but I think it’s not. Go ahead.
John:
I’m going to keep it old school. It’s quality of phone, phone time, quality connections, and I love the precursor with being upfront and honest, the expectations on what you can ultimately achieve. You certainly want to go ahead and highlight that and generate some excitement, if you will. But getting those good quality conversations, and it all comes back to training, recognizing when you have somebody on the line and you’re in admissions and they are answering yes to all those buying questions, if you will, then getting that neon sign to be flashing on that rep’s head again and again and again, where they’ve gone through enough of poor phone calls to really recognize when they want to continue to ask those buying questions, and then ultimately they can go towards more closing questions, but that quality and recognizing when you have that quality.
John:
And then, when you don’t have that quality, and it truly is not the best time, I hate to use the term “deadly,” but what I to use the term is “maybe not right nowly.” That seems to be a better way to look at it. But really zero in on where you’re getting those yes answers, and there really is that true interest.
Gregg:
That’s a very interesting point in a previous life when I was at the University of Phoenix, they insisted that the business development people went through a very full and thorough qualification process, which I think is what you’re speaking to.
John:
Yeah.
Gregg:
And they wouldn’t really start to talk about the school unless they were absolutely positive there was a fit. And it was really brutal in that if they started to proceed into other questions, the computer they were using somehow could pick it up. And after the call was done, the computer station would completely shut down. And then the manager would walk down the hall to the person’s spot and go and give them a primer on the need to be thorough in the qualification process, and then turn it back on. It was just humiliating way to do it, but it certainly got people focused on just being thorough in properly qualifying a prospective student before getting into the merits of the school.
Gregg:
And so that would be an example of a KPI, to thoroughly qualify somebody. And if one adopted that alone, Shane, it would lower the need for the number of leads, because the reps would do a better job of properly qualifying. In fact, Shane, we’ve gotten some research with Velocify, where, if the admissions process is done correctly, the optimum number of leads per rep per month is 40. Now, a lot of people go, “Oh, no, 80 to 100.” But that’s based on them just slapping at the leads. 40 leads a month seems very, very low, yet the research was done. Want to speak-
Shane:
Yeah. Yeah. I remember when that came out, and that was super interesting. And the conclusion we came to when we looked at conversion rate by the amount of leads per admissions person and factor in the cost of staff versus cost of marketing, we found that most schools are overspending on marketing, underspending on admissions, because it’s easy to spend on external things you can turn on and off. Spending on people is a harder sell because it’s harder to add people, it’s harder to subtract people, but it was eye-opening.
Shane:
On the previous point, we have, actually, empirical evidence that has come about in the last few months, regarding systemizing or the kind of questions and having a thorough and effective admissions process. And that came through this remote admissions pathway we launched. So when the pandemic hit, we were looking for ways to help our clients, and so we basically gave away a version of an admissions process, we have a virtual advisor, which forces the admissions person to ask the questions in the correct sequence and follow the system. And we had a lot of schools take us up on using it. A bunch of them are using it. And we’ve been able to now go back and say, “Okay, what was the conversion rate of the interview to start previous? What is it now?” And in almost all cases, the conversion rates have increased by 30 or 40% in most cases. And that speaks to, one, following systems, and, two, that we don’t need to overmarket to hit enrollment goals.
Gregg:
I think what’s interesting is when you don’t have the need to overmarket, you can unleash your marketing department to be honest and to be wholesome and thoughtful in the communication on, as an example, landing pages, so that you get fewer people who will fill out a lead form, but the people that do fill out the lead form do so with eyes wide open. And the expectation’s pre managed, so one can almost use marketing as a way to prequalify leads. Now, you’ll get fear of them, hey, but much higher quality. Sorry, go ahead.
Shane:
Yeah. One way that manifests is Ian spending more than there’s really market for. So there’s this idea of a J curve, where at some point there’s there’s a point of diminishing returns. So an extra dollar spent isn’t going to have the same value as the previous dollar spent. And we see this a lot with Google ads, with paid search, that there’s, I don’t know, there’s a hundred leads in the market, typically on a given month, and we can achieve that at a reasonable cost per lead. But if we want to get 110 leads, that extra 10, because we’re having to advertise around the edges of really where there’s market, those extra 10, they cost five times as much. And if we want to get 120, the additional 10 beyond that, it’s costing 20 times as much. And it gets amortized over the cost per lead for the 120, but when you really break it down, let’s say your cost per lead is, I don’t know, 75 bucks for the first 100, and then it’s 125 for 110, and it’s 250 for the remainder, it becomes money poorly spent.
Shane:
And what drives that, “Let’s get every lead we can get, damn the torpedoes,” is usually a lack of effectiveness on the admissions end, which isn’t that our people are good, that the systems aren’t good.
Gregg:
Yeah. And so here’s a way to go and fracture that tactic to the damn the torpedos tactic is to really focus on leads that have a low cost for acquisition, organic inquiries, websites come to mind, hyper-focused paid search comes to mind. And then here’s where I would add in a little piece, is when the school hits the breakeven point and they have eight seats left and you’ve got three weeks before the intake begins, that’s when you can use burst campaigns within radio, as an example. “Hey, seven days left.” And you can have 30% or 40% of those seats that hit past your breakeven point, have 30%, 40% of that dedicated to getting them in the door and closing them.
Gregg:
John, it’s interesting. It’d be really cool if the school could somehow, in their P&L, in their budgeting have one marketing campaign to take you to the breakeven point of an intake, and then a kickstart one at the end to fill the empty seats, because once the airplane flies and there’s empty seats, those empty seats make you nothing. Right?
John:
Well, yeah. I mean, I don’t want to swear and say you get the asses in the classes any way you can, but it’s certainly a whole different ball game. If you’re not filling up those classes, well then, everything starts with admissions and just rolls uphill from there.
Gregg:
Yeah. But, Jen, there’s just so much left on the table. There’s so much slough. I remember you and I mystery shopped a number of years ago at a big education fair, there were 45 schools, and people streaming through, and you took half, I took half 43 schools, and we had, what was it? Three people.
Shane:
12% of them made an effort to generate a lead in the fair. I remember that vividly.
Gregg:
Yeah. So, if you were a school and you asked every single person if they’d like to fill out an information card, boy, that education fair would monetize, but most of the people would smile and nod their head, maybe give you a brochure. You see a lot of that. So within a pandemic, if one just starts to look and how to monetize by asking, we know that for instance, in mystery shopping, when a prospect and a rep are on the phone, we know that almost 40% of the time, the admissions rep does not advance the call.
Gregg:
And, Jen, that must drive people nuts, the marketing people, when they basically see that 38% of the lead gen that they create, or their employer gets fleshed. They get crapped on, using the toilet analogy, I guess, and yet it’s not their fault. It’s just sloppiness. And by the way, the fix for that, for the folks listening on this call, is to write a little sticky and say, “Ask for people to come in 100% of the time, put it on their computer screen,” and you will see, immediately, a lift and the number of appointments per week. So, Jen, I’m sorry. I’m rambling. Care to weigh in?
Jennifer:
Are you asking Jen Flood?
Gregg:
Jen Flood.
Jennifer:
Okay. I wasn’t sure if you said Jen or John. Yeah, I mean, from a compliance point of view, there’s always been sort of a struggle between good lead flow, saying the right stuff, and, I guess, “closing a deal.” We try to limit that terminology as much as we can, but it’s hard to do when a lot of us are salespeople by heart. And so we use that terminology. But we do need to be somewhat mindful of it.
Jennifer:
And I guess that’s a point that I’d like to get across to people, is have a standard script that you use for everyone, so that everyone’s on the same point of view. And then from that standpoint, then you don’t have to hope that someone’s asking for something to happen on every call. They have standard procedure for things that they’re supposed to say.
Jennifer:
And I know you don’t want to make it sound robotic, or like you’re not being authentic on a call, but there are certain responses that you have to hand to every person. We’ve done mystery shops before where I’ve had a person say, “Let me call you right back.” And they call me from a personal cell phone and tell me that I can buy a car to get to class with [inaudible 00:27:57] grants. I mean, people will say crazy stuff just to get you to come into school. I mean, I was shocked when that happened.
Jennifer:
And we’re just lucky we caught the person doing that when we did, or else maybe they’d still be doing it. But, yeah, I mean, if you’ve got extra time, try out different scripts with people, since the heart of this discussion we’re having is looking within and how can we reevaluate some stuff, is check your scripts. Are they working? Maybe you could make little changes to that stuff that might change the numbers of the people that you’re getting in the door.
Gregg:
Okay. So that’s a good segue. At ER, we’re all about split testing. That’s our business. So what you think about is phone messages as an example, admissions reps leaving phone messages. And so what we do is we pivot. We reframe and say, “Well, this phone message is a radio ad with an audience of one person. It’s a 15 to 22 second radio ad with an audience of one person.” And so, if that is indeed the case, if you accept that notion, then you can split test it, direct response split testing, and you can, through trial and error, to your point there, Jennifer, is after about six or so renditions of trying different approaches, different scripts or talking points when you leave a phone message as an example, you will recreate a 5% to 10% lift, and the number of people that you actually connect with who return your phone calls.
Gregg:
And is there a magic way to do it? No, but through trial and error, six renditions, there will be an improvement, because that’s how split testing works. That’s the dynamic, Edward Deming’s dynamic of iterative improvement.
Gregg:
So, let me run the numbers super quick. And it’s this: If somebody leaves 20 messages a day, we’ll be conservative, that’s 440 messages a month. And if 5% more people will go and return the phone call that otherwise would not due to the iterative improvement, that’s two additional phone calls. We know 15% of phone calls turn into students. So that’s three extra students a month. That’s 36 extra students a year. That’s huge. So $600,000, $700,000 for a two-year program. That’s crazy. And that’s just off a stupid little split test hey, Shane?
Gregg:
I’m going to just lift out of the site and talk broad strategy, where Shane and I have a client, and they had an administrative certificate program, one-year program, and they were competing with a number of other schools that offered this administrative program. And then they looked internally at where they work, and golly, they’re in the middle of mining and fishing and forestry country. So they created, out of the, the client services department, a program that people could sign up for as part of their core education on how the fishing industry works, how unions work, driving for trucks and trailers and the [inaudible 00:32:11] and cranes, and the unions and the dynamic of the trade unions working in these heavy industry.
Gregg:
So they added in this heavy industry participation course. And so basically it’s they fractured the market, and they created a administrative program with a focus on heavy industry. And so what they’re saying is, “Come to work wearing blue jeans and a hard hat working in an AFCO trailer. You’re still doing the work that you would in a law office, but you’re working in an AFCO trailer with a hard hat on, and, oh, by the way, you make 10 bucks an hour more.”
Gregg:
So, John, that was one line item in their resume. And they would automatically get shortlisted with any employer who is in fishing, mining, forestry. What do you think of that? That’s crazy, yeah?
John:
Yeah, that’s the great challenge of the work that I do, is looking at that resume. I always recommend that we highlight things in the bullet point format when you are putting that resume together. And if there’s that one thing that does pop out, to me, it’s going to be something along the lines of conversion ratios or increases in enrollment and things that are showing where they made those increases. And you pointed out something interesting. One of my constituents just said a few minutes ago, maybe they did make that subtle change in a scripting or training for everybody. Those are those subtle little things that do tend to pop out a little bit more than just the normal stuff that you just see on somebody’s resume.
Gregg:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Tiny little changes, Shane. The IT school that’s based in Chicago land, and then you add in a participation program, like a digital badge in the area of dynamics of agribusiness, the jargon of the agriculture industry, and then that IT person, instead of having this vanilla IT training, they have the IT training with some understanding of the politics and the soft culture of the agriculture business. There’s hundreds and hundreds of agriculture companies that feed Cargill and Monsanto and what have you, and automatically, when you go to work, you create an advantage.
Gregg:
I think, Shane, this is a really important thing, because this recession is not going to be a snappy little V. This will be a U kind of a recession, like in 2009 kind of thing and 2010, and I think creating a differentiation along these lines, it’s something that you can do for free, essentially, it’s pandemic-friendly. You can do this within the pandemic that you’re working within. That’s been my crazy idea.
Shane:
Well, no, it’s not. It’s a great idea. And as we’ve been talking, it strikes me there’s really two avenues of improvement, and given that this is a time of reflection and the ability to remake yourself in some ways, the two improvements are, one, improving your unique sales proposition, your positioning, your secret sauce, whatever words you want to use to describe it, tightening up the thing that makes you unique in the market and special is one. And that’s what you’re describing in aligning with certain industries or adding digital badges that are added value to otherwise generic programs. Those are wonderful ways to differentiate, particularly [crosstalk 00:36:27] the dominant industry in the market.
Shane:
And number two, [crosstalk 00:36:33] … go ahead.
Gregg:
Oh, sorry.
Shane:
Well, number two, relentless improvement throughout the organization.
Gregg:
Yes. So on the first point, to go and create a reposition in the market factoring in a subset of employment like elder care for healthcare administrators. That requires a shift of thinking in a school saying to themselves that the most important stakeholder group are not students. They are the employers of the students, because if the students go get employed, there’s no school by way of the regulations. That’s a big shift to make in terms of how you reset your business.
Shane:
Well, that is, and it’s the other edge of the double edged sword. As Jen said, during times of high unemployment, the school business generally does pretty good. And as we work our way through this pandemic, likely interest in enrollments are going to go up just as a consequence of an economy that’s struggling.
Shane:
The downside of that is that placement becomes an issue eight, 10, 12 months from now. So we get a bunch of students in and we got to place them, and we’ve been through these cycles where placement becomes a massive chore. And so what you’re describing, the little edge you try to give your students, or the service to the employers that you need to recognize is your core mission, that becomes really important, because if they’re not getting placed, all we’re doing is kicking the problem down the road 10 or 12 months from now.
Gregg:
Yes. And then there’s that guy who has the wife and kids and a mortgage, and he’s competing for a job that he shouldn’t be competing for, but he’s like, “Man, I need this work and I don’t care about you graduate of School. I’m going to kick your ass, and I’m taking that job.” And that’s what led to a bunch of the mess with Corinthian and then the other schools, is they didn’t really grasp that problem. They didn’t preemptively position themselves to give their students the opportunity to get hired, and then they kept loading in new students, and then their numbers got out of whack, and they got shut down.
Gregg:
John, you’ve been involved in that mess in previous years, weigh in, not that you were a part of the mess, the problem, you were trying to help people.
John:
Yeah, I mean, well before I started to do executive search, I came up through the ranks in admissions a million years ago, for lack of a better term. But I think now the big takeaway that I seem to be getting is predominantly with the … There’s a term out there in certain publications when we talk about education, and particularly on the for-profit side of predatory admissions practices and knowing that that’s something that you’re always conscious of in this day and age with a certain type of political environment that wants to rear their ugly head and be that much more vocal on what can be done as far as how institutions are run and how they’re managed, knowing that you’re staying in alignment and you’re not crossing those boundaries.
Gregg:
But, John, I would argue that some of the admissions process can be predatory with some schools that have garbage programs they’re offering: blacksmith programs, over saturated markets. Would that be a fair comment, or no?
John:
Oh, certainly. It’s certainly a fair comment. There’s bad players everywhere. Unfortunately, the challenge is when there are the bad players, that everybody else is not getting wrapped into that as well, just with the infamous guilt by association.
Gregg:
Yeah. Yeah, you hang out with pigs at the pig trough, you’re a pig [crosstalk 00:41:09] in the trough.
John:
I used an example, my very first job in admissions, I worked for a technical school and it was electricians, plumbers, HVAC people. And that I was so fortunate to get introduced to the world of admissions from a great director who literally gave us the Department of Labor statistics on what a contractor electrician earned on average and what a journeyman electrician earned on average. So in that world, it was inevitable that you were going to be asked, “How much money can I make when I complete this program?” And the emphasis was not so much on the money that you could make. It was more along the lines of, “Once you complete this program, you are on your path to becoming a member of a unique club, or a unique and exclusive club, that has the educational requirements to get you closer to this goal. And this should be your end goal, is to ultimately become a journeyman or maybe even a contractor in the trades.”
John:
And that was something that, for many years, I’ve just always held very close to that. If you can look at the end game and you concentrate on that part, you are very factual with what the potential is, and specific numbers that you have that are real, so you’re not getting caught in that, dressing it up or sugarcoating it game. That little bit of credibility is going to have the confidence and the initially representative speaking to a potential enrollee, versus that person that gets really nervous when they’re faced with that question.
Gregg:
Okay, perfect. So that’s a perfect segue. So, within the pandemic, one can take a look at ways to create. big repositionings, tying in with employers, and becoming almost specialist subsets within vanilla type training. And, fortunately, there’s a bit of time to get that organized, getting people from industry coming in every couple of weeks to keep students excited and all sorts of things.
Gregg:
Now, the second piece that you can do within the pandemic, and we touched on this a little earlier, Shane, I’m going to get you to run with this for a little bit, is iterative testing process improvement, split testing, moving tiny little things. Like I’ll lead off folks in the call headlines. If you take the question mark at the off at the end of the headline, which is bad grammar, you’ll have 11% more people read your ad. So, Shane, that seems silly, but Ogilvy & Mather tested that years ago, found it to be true. So why don’t you run from that and add in three or four more tips for the folks on the call? Tiny little things they can do right now.
Shane:
Well, yeah, relentless improvement in the organization. So, here’s a recent example from some tests we ran on Virtual Advisor. We found that when we changed the background image of the signup page, when somebody clicked on this little career readiness quiz on the school’s website, the little page pops up, when we changed the image to more align with the program page that they were on, so it was a school with multiple programs in different disciplines, if they clicked off a healthcare page, it would be a healthcarey kind of image. If there’s a business page, a business kind of image, nothing else was different, but when we changed that one little thing that we increased the conversion rate to a registrants and somebody filled out the form on average by 25%.
Shane:
That is a super easy thing to change, and it makes logical sense, because the experience the prospect’s getting, I’m thinking about being a nursing assistant, I’m on the new system page, I click through, there’s a nurse assistant kind of image, is congruent and they’re more likely to take action. So there’s lots of little things like that that exist all over the place in your current marketing. Our belief is that the best time and money spent is on anything that is a self generated lead. That’s where you start. And the website’s really the first plane.
Gregg:
So, Shane, let me jump in quickly. There are all kinds of people that want to do a new website because they’re just sick of looking at it. But I guess our argument is, “Dude [crosstalk 00:46:09] the person sick of looking at it.”
Shane:
Well, yeah, don’t do it. We’ve not really found a great correlation between aesthetics and conversion rate. That’s not to say that if things don’t look good it’s not better for you, but if it’s minor aesthetic differences, “This looked a little bit better,” that stuff doesn’t really tend to move the needle very much. And there’s certainly been lots of websites people spend a ton of money and effort on that have made things worse that look better to somebody, but have generated way fewer leads.
Shane:
So, here’s another example. And you’ll see this version of this form all over the place now. It’s been widely copied. So we found, years ago now, that when you added little checkboxes to the form and the check boxes were like, “I want to learn about tuition and costs,” “I want to get information on placement rates,” “I want to learn about employers,” the basic questions prospects have, when we added little check box at the top of the form, so somebody would click that box, they were more likely to complete filling out the form because they’re now invested, because they’re asking for specific things. It’s not just a generic request information form. And that in and of itself improved conversion rate on the website, super easy to do, a whole lot of schools do that now, we were the origin of that.
Shane:
Another one would be, as you said, headlines and subheads. This is a great example. So, again, this is a Virtual Advisor example. We found that when we promote the career readiness quiz on a client website, which is just a, “It’s a good idea for you to become a medical office assistant, take the quiz.” That’s the version we offer. We tested lots of different ways to implement it. What we found works best, which gets the most clicks, is when we just added it into the body copy on the program page. So there’s no fancy graphics, it’s not made to look special, it’s not some call out box or an ad. It’s literally a subhead, “Take the quiz,” and two or three lines of copy, “Hey, if you’re not sure if this is right for you, why don’t you take the quiz and find out if your career training ready?” And that pulled better than anything else, and it’s simple.
Shane:
So there’s lots of these little improvements that exist. They’re there, you just got to hunt for them. And I was thinking about the bad actors comment, and that’s been a theme for years. We hear about these bad actors. They’re these bad people, the villains that are off doing bad stuff. I don’t even necessarily think it’s bad actors so much as just either laziness or lack of creativity. And I’m curious anyone else’s thoughts on this. In our business, we look at our competitors, they knock off our stuff all the time, and while it’s frustrating, we view that as the cost of doing business. I don’t think they’re bad people, but I wonder why they don’t come up with their own ideas. And I think that’s true of the schools that are poorly positioned, that are not unique in the market. I don’t think it’s bad people or bad actors so much is a lack of either focus or creativity or lateral thinking or something that would spur the conversation, “How do we be better at what we do?” I don’t know.
Gregg:
Well, that’s it. I think there’s a lack of a, in our industry you and I are in a lack of intellectual curiosity, and I think a great HR practice, for those on the call, is if you can … How do I say that? If you visualize your employees, each of them having a little lab bent, little thing, mice, some beakers, a little bit of propane, you give them a green light to, within the context of their job, their work, give them an opportunity to split test some a little things, like the admissions reps who can split test different phone messages. It turns them in from workers into owners or leaders and it makes their job much more interesting and reduces churn. And so you can actually take that marketing stuff and really take that philosophy, Shane, and extend it out.
Shane:
Intrapreneurs is a term we’ve used. Love that. If you can have an organization filled with intrapreneurs, staff that are trying new things, that are actively trying to make your organization better, that’s the gold standard. That’s a home run.
Gregg:
Total home run. And that’s a cool way to take best practice from direct response marketing and transfer it into HR practice as a cross pollination of disparate ideas.
Gregg:
I think that’s a good time to jump off here. It’s almost the end of our call. We covered a lot of items here, you guys. Christie, is there anybody with a question right now by chance?
Christie:
Hi, there. There were a couple of questions. Earlier in the talk you were talking about quality, and the question from Heather was, “Who determines quality? How does that not become a constant battle between marketing and admissions?”
Gregg:
Maybe it’s neither. Maybe it’s the student and the employer. I don’t know. What do you guys think?
Shane:
Well, the classic way to evaluate quality would just be conversion rate. So if you’re measuring likelihood to enroll by lead source, then it’s pretty easy to say, okay, website leads convert higher than paid search, paid search converts higher than purchase lead, referrals convert the best. And that can be broken down more granularly. That’s probably the most accurate way to determine quality.
Gregg:
Yeah. And maybe for product, the programming, the best metric for that to determine quality might be persistence and graduation rates. Community colleges have a two-year associate degree grad rate averaging 19.2%, one out of five.
Shane:
Ouch!
Gregg:
Yeah. And proprietary schools, apples to apples, their grad rate is 63%. So that could be a metric that the students get better service, better retention. So just saying. Jen or John, Jen or John?
Jennifer:
Yeah. I mean, I can jump in. Oh, sorry. [inaudible 00:53:43].
John:
Go for it.
Jennifer:
I was just going to say, along with split testing and doing all kinds of good creative things, is make the changes that you do, make them right for business longevity. And we can certainly help you figure out any of the ways that you need to do that. But that was just a last remark that I wanted to leave before we got off the call, was just to just audit all of the things to make sure you’re doing it the right way, so that you can take off running when hopefully this is all over.
Gregg:
Cool. Cool. Next question there, Christie?
Christie:
Debra asked, I’m not sure exactly what this was referring to, but the question is, “What do you think about direct mail?”
Gregg:
I’m a fan. I used to have an art card publishing business many years ago, so I love cards and social stationary. I personally think they’re used really well after somebody has come in for a visit, remote or otherwise, a little campaign with little handwritten postcards. The other thing I really like, although it takes some organizing, is to have, after a visit, a long letter from the president of the school.
Gregg:
John, you have had much experience in communicating with people the old fashioned way.
John:
Everybody’s so used to getting bombarded with emails and the social media canned messages and robotic replies, if you will. It’s kind of strange you mention that, because I have had some clients that have said, “Listen, let’s let us think outside the box a little bit and go back to the old fashioned postcard, if you will, and have the admissions staff put a little bit of a handwritten note in there.” There was one school that had a, and it was of course pre-COVID, had a work-study team in their admissions department, and they were literally handwriting postcards to potential students. So, they said they were getting some pretty good return on it, and the initial response, when they got him on the phone, was, “Wow. I really appreciated the handwritten card. It reminded me of when I was a little kid and I got a thank you card from going to a birthday party.”
John:
So, it almost triggered an old, warm, and fuzzy feeling, if you will. So it’s certainly something that … Hey, it can’t hurt. It definitely can’t hurt. And it’s a little bit [crosstalk 00:57:15] … yeah.
Gregg:
Shane, it feeds up the research is about a third of us are primarily kinesthetic. By the way, folks, you can tell if a person’s kinesthetic, you give them their business card, and if they unconsciously start rubbing the paper, you know that they’re a kinesthetic learner and you can use feeling language more effectively with those people, but, Shane, often those kinesthetic people get overlooked, eh?
Shane:
Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. I agree with John. The tenet of marketing is take every opportunity to differentiate. That’s another way of saying the relentless improvement all over. And it’s a kind of dehumanized world right now, all this digital stuff, it’s depressing, right? There’s a world that exists when you’re staring at a computer screen and a world that exists when you’re not, and they’re increasingly unique. So, I love direct mail, just because hardly no one hardly anybody does it. So it’s a zig when everyone’s zagging kind of a strategy. And it could be postcards, it could be info kits. Remember when we all had info kits focus and we’d send them a brochure and a letter and a bunch of crap, nobody does that any more. I’ll bet you, the school that did that was willing to spend a bit of money on it, would do awesome, because those were great sales tools. And PDF doesn’t count. Emailing a PDF does not count.
Gregg:
Yeah. That backlit screen can really start to chip away at your psyche. For every 43 minutes of cognitive white screen time, you need 17 minutes for it to deepen into the deeper recesses of your brain. So, yeah.
Gregg:
Well, you know what, you guys, I think we have some more questions, but I think we have to respect the time budget of those that have come on. So, what we’d like to do is if anybody would some free time with any of our panel, just go and drop us a note or text us at 250-888-7111, that’s 250-888-7111, and we can tip a bit of Calendly time and help solve the world’s problems, and one or two of your problems, maybe, if you want to extend this into something that’s more like a regular cup of coffee on the phone.
Gregg:
That’s all we have today. And, Jen and John … you guys should be a pop duo, Jen and John, and Shane, and on behalf of our panel and myself, thanks, everybody, and we hope you’ve learned something today and have some thoughts starters to work on. All the best. Take care.
Shane:
Goodbye.
John:
Bye, thank you.
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