A note from our Co-founder I’m sure you’ve been exposed to a number of Marketing books over the years. A couple of excellent books come to mind such as ‘Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind‘ by Trout and Ries and ‘Ogilvy on Advertising‘ by David Ogilvy, both great reads for anyone studying the art of […]
Did you meet your January targets? How are you planning on meeting them?
Adding in those last few students to an intake can turn underwhelming intake numbers into full enrollment.
In this short, yet packed webinar, Enrollment Resources co-founders Gregg Meiklejohn and Shane Sparks shared seven simple process improvements you can implement immediately at little or no cost. Terry Zaleski of CNYSCS.com also said a few words explaining Why State Associations are Important to the Success of Your School.
Check out our Podcast #30 “Seven Low Cost Tips To Increase Your Next Intake” to learn helpful education marketing strategies. With 1 click you’ll have access to over 30 podcasts featuring industry insiders espousing their wisdom to you – for free!
New research: How quality discussions with prospective students impacts enrollment rate…
First point of contact with a potential student is the murky area where marketing ends and the admissions process begins. A weak process during this stage in the enrollment process can reduce revenues by as much as 30%. At Enrollment Resources (ER), we know that small process improvements throughout the enrollment process can result in retaining that revenue.
In this recorded conference call, Gregg Meiklejohn from ER and Martin Lind from Velocify share new research about the dynamics between the length of calls with inquiries and appointment set rate. What is the ideal call length? The answer might surprise you. We will also explore what is the best call length during the morning, afternoon and evening and the days of the week.
In this short (4:25 minute) video, Shane Sparks explains how schools can break away from third party lead generators and the long-term benefits of split-testing.
Recorded at the 11th Annual Pacific Institute’s Best Practices and Business Conference in April 2014.
Shane discusses how fundamental your product offering is and the consequences of giving marketing to 3rd parties. Marketing is about “testing your way to the truth”, Shane shows some neat examples of split testing, including a 20% improvement conversion rate just by changing the color of a button on a call-to-action form.
My opinion is we’re at the end of about a 10 or 15 year marketing experiment that has failed for the crucibles, and what we’ve done is we had really taken away responsibility. We had to market our own businesses and given that to third party people in the form of lead generation, and the result of it, the consequence for our sector is we’ve commoditized our businesses, we’ve commoditized our schools. As a result, the result of that is that we’ve had a product erosion, which sucks.
The good news is that the path to prosperity and the path to improving our station in our marketing starts with product. It’s the systems, the people, it’s the experience we deliver, it’s fulfilling the promise of creating a transformational experience for the students that attended our schools.
Fundamentally the question we all have to ask ourselves about our businesses is, fundamentally, do we have something worth buying? Is it worth it for somebody to invest their time and their money in our enterprise and do we deliver on the promises that we make in our marketing? Fundamentally this is about product. Can we deliver on what we promise in our marketing or is it just lip service? Is it just words that somebody wrote in a board room or an ad agency wrote on a whiteboard somewhere?
That’s the challenge we have, product, and product extends from how you first engage prospects, that lead generation stage, and that extends all the way through the admissions process, the delivery of our programs, the job placements, externships, the career services part through graduation and continuing education with our graduates. When we nail it, when we hit product right, when we do it right what happens is that an abundance of new opportunities come to us because we succeed on social media, we increase our referrals, we establish our brands as a premier place that people want to go. It’s an attraction strategy. What’s awesome about it is that it comes from fundamentally doing the right thing so your people can get behind having an exceptional organization.
Marketing doesn’t have to be that hard. It’s basically psychology and math. It’s responding to the unique wiring that we have as human beings. I’ll give you an example of that. We have a client where we’re testing an advertising campaign. It’s landing pages, and we’ve been testing three different photos–they’re all very similar–that advertise the program. What we found is that one photo in particular of these three resulted in a 50% higher conversion rate, so people were 50% more likely to take action, and all that changed in the ad was this one little photo. So the math and the lesson on that is that when we find the thing that is psychologically resonant with somebody, when we find that, and assuming that we’re measuring it so that we can actually know that this is an improvement, we create a permanent result. We’ve permanently created an innovation that we can use for years to come. So fundamentally marketing is just about testing your way to the truth.
Another example would be on, most businesses have some kind of sign-up form, so there’s something that is “fill this form out and click a button.” After a number of tests we found that having a button that was red vs. Blue created a 20%, it was actually a 19.65% lift in conversion rates. We created almost a 20% improvement and all we changed was the color of the button and so when you do the ROI on that, it costs, well, nothing really or maybe a $100 to get somebody to make a red button, but the return on that is permanent. That’s a permanent 20% improvement in conversion rate, and the only way you find it is through testing.
How can a single sentence can increase conversion and two other surprising test results
On December 18th, 2012 and again (due to overwhelming requests) on February 14th, 2013, Enrollment Resources co-founders Gregg Meiklejohn and Shane Sparks conducted a Webinar presentation on the Art & Science of Testing. Read more
How the Right Balance of Images & Copy on Your Website Can Mean a Big Return in Conversions
A number of us here at Enrollment Resources (ER) recently attended an interesting webinar put on by MarketingExperiments, an internet-based research lab dedicated to conducting experiments in optimizing sales and marketing processes. After the webinar, we got to talking about a topic that comes up again and again when we’re looking at and designing web pages: “Images vs. Copy.”
We’re always trying to help schools articulate their offering in a way that is clear, distinct, and speaks directly to the target market. Most often we do this through copy.
This webinar was a great reminder of the power that a good image can have (and the unfortunate power that a poor image can have too). Read more
Today, in the Higher Education field, in the area of marketing in particular, opportunities abound to leverage your time and money to increase school revenue. These points of leverage create results greater than what seems to be possible. Organically a School can typically grow 20-30% per year without a huge stress on infrastructure. Yet in growing organically, one can often get steamrolled by competitors who grab market share at a greater pace or simply lose the potential of a program opportunity. Nature abhors a vacuum. Slow organic growth particularly when rolling out a new program or geography often doesn’t do the trick in the cut and thrust world of marketing. Read more
2012 – A SWOT Analysis Looking into the Future of Education Marketing
An audio recording and notes as presented from our Webinar Presented on January 5th, 2012 by Gregg Meiklejohn of Enrollment Resources Inc. Read more