The ultimate guide to student management in 2020

Stefan

In an education or a migration agency, you probably have hundreds if not thousands of contacts in your database. This is why we need all the help we can get when it comes to managing our vast contact network.

But what does contact management mean for education agencies, exactly?

Student management is the process of recording contact data for prospective and current students in your education agency’s network and managing your interactions with them.

The contact data can include information such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, date of birth, passport number, passport expiry date, visa number, visa expiry date, etc… – anything you might need to service that student contact. It could also include information such as person’s stage in their application journey, the likeliness to convert, and the list goes on.

Student contact management is not as simple as keeping contact information on file. You need to make sure all this data is properly organized so you can fully utilize it. Managing your contact data properly involves many important best practices, such as:

            • Education agency wide standards for data entry and maintenance

            • Performing regular clean-ups

            • Choosing the best CRM to store and manage your data

            • Segmenting your data to send the most timely and relevant messages to each subset of your audience;

            • Optimizing the way you collect data to make sure you only collect data that matters to you

It may sound like a lot of work but it pays off. A highly efficient contact database will not only make life much easier for you and your team, but will also empower your education agency to offer a seamless student experience.

Collecting and storing high-quality data is absolutely critical to know your students. Understanding their needs, their interests and history with you enables you to provide a personalised and relevant service. Personalisation is the secret sauce to better student retention and satisfaction.

So how can you implement a stunning student management strategy and reap the rewards?

Organising your student database

Before you do anything else, make sure your existing student database is organised. If youre like me, it’s likely that over the years, you’ve gathered data that is outdated or no longer valid. You might have a lot of duplicates or data that you’re not supposed to keep due to privacy regulations such as GDPR.

This data is doing nothing but cluttering your database. So, before implementing a new and improved student management strategy, look carefully at your current student contacts and go through the following steps.

1. Backup your data

Your education agency is built on the strength of your student data, and the last thing you want is to lose data. You will do a lot of editing and deleting in the process of organising your data, which could lead to mistakes.

Before you get started, backup your data. Most CRMs in contact management tools allow you to back up your data, but if yours doesn’t, try exporting this data in a csv file and save it to your desktop. In Inteleagent for example, you can export your student database in a csv file in one click. If the editing process goes wrong, you’ll be able to go back and start over.

2. Pause any active integrations or syncs you may have

If you already have some sort of integration in place to sync data between your tools, make sure to pause it before you start cleaning up your data. You will want to make sure you don’t have constantly incoming data into your student management tool while you’re trying to organise it.

If you don’t have a sync integration in place, don’t implement one just yet, until after you’re prepared your database. This will ensure you get the best results from your sync.

3. Remove duplicates

Your CRM or contact management tool, such as Google Contacts, or Apple Contacts may already have an option to find and merge duplicates. If it does have this function, use it to remove any duplicates you may have in your database.

With Inteleagent for example, you can export your database in csv file, use the Excel function to remove duplicates in your spreadsheet, and upload the csv file back in Inteleagent. This way you can easily make sure your database is clean of duplicates.

4. Delete outdated or incorrect data

This includes emails that keep bouncing back, phone numbers with invalid formats, incomplete addresses, old passport numbers, expiry dates, etc… It can also include students you know they have finished their studies or changed their visas and you can’t help them anymore.

If you don’t have a huge database yet, you could go through the data manually, but there are ways to do it automatically. You can also use Excel spreadsheets to do the work.

5. Manually scan your contacts

Once you’ve merged and cleaned up the duplicate student contacts, your database should be in good shape however, if you want a great database, you’ll need to go over it manually.

This process will take some time, but if you implement education agency wide data entry standards and commit to quality data, you won’t have to do this more than once.

Choosing the best student management software

If your education agency already has a CRM system or student management tool you’re happy with, you can skip this step. However, if your current software is not the best you would like, and you haven’t found the right tool yet, or your student contacts are stored all over the place, choosing the best software is potentially the most important thing you can do for proper student management.

You need to pick a solution that will act as a central student contact database and single source of truth for your education agency. For solopreneurs or freelancer education agents, a simple tool like Google or Apple Contacts or Outlook might work just fine.

For anything from very small businesses to large enterprises, it’s highly recommended that you pick a customer relationship management (CRM) too as your student contact database.

CRMs offer great features to organise your student database, including prospect students and students’ data in one place, monitoring interactions with customers across multiple channels (such as phone, email, voicemails, meetings, live chat, etc…), and tracking students and applications journeys and movement through your pipelines.

There’s a large number of CRMs out there to suit businesses of every shape and size however, if you’re an education or migration agency, you might find generic CRMs a little too clunky, hard to customise to the international education or migration industry and expensive.

Questions to consider when you choose a CRM:

          • Does the CRM support to scale your education agency in the next few years? It’s not just about the current size of your education agency, but also about how you want to grow. Make sure you choose a software that scales with you and doesn’t become a bad fit a few years down the track once your education agency grows.

          • What is the budget for your CRM? A great CRM will fit nicely inside your budget and you won’t end up paying for features you don’t need.

          • How does the CRM integrate with other tools your education agency is using? Make sure the CRM you choose can integrate with tools like email, accounting tools, admin tools and any other tools that store contact data. Inteleagent for example, integrates both ways with Mailchimp, Slack, Zapier, and forms such as Typeform, Jotform, and any other form you might be using to collect leads of your website.

What features do you want from your CRM tool? The range of features each CRM offers can vary a lot. Think about the features your education agency needs, now and in the future – this may include a visual overview of your application process, student journey overview, marketing automation, reporting, analytics, calendar and scheduling features, etc… Inteleagent comes with features that are specifically created for education agencies such as quotation module, specific reporting, subagent management, team member management, commission invoice management, etc…

There are plenty of CRMs out there that offer a free trial period where you can experiment with all the different features and functionalities they have. If you’re not sure yet what kind of features your education agency needs, this trial period is a great way to find out. Inteleagent offers a 14-day free trial period to test the waters a bit. The 14-day free trial period is also a great way for users to access special prices and discounts to upgrade.

Once you implement a CRM system, it will be a lot easier to manage your student contacts by making your CRM the central student contact database for your education agency and the heart of your tech stack. Having a centralised student contact database, you will be able:

          • Find student contacts easier in one place;

          • Make it easier for all the team to find data and information;

          • Eliminate information silos between departments;

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Introducing processes for data entry and management

If you’re looking to streamline how you handle your data, it’s important to introduce education agency-wide standards for data entry and management.

It’s worth checking for example, that all the necessary information fields are filled in when a student contact record is created, or that are no duplicates before a new contact is created, or that everyone else in the education agency is following the rules and that all data is entered with consistent formats.

If you run a small to medium sized education agency and assigning a person to be responsible for data management is not feasible, make sure to train all team members on where and how to correctly input and update data. Here are a few important things to teach your team when it comes to data management:

          • Where they should enter the data

          • When and how to update student contact records

          • Which information fields to fill in when creating or updating a record

          • How to check if a student contact already exists before creating it

          • How contact data flows between tools

Of course, this is different for each education agency and will depend on the specific processes your education agency implements. It will also depend on the tools in your tech stack.

Make sure you document these processes so that all new hires can quickly learn how to handle data in your business. Another reason to document these processes is for instances when your responsible person for data management leaves your education agency. In cases like these, their successor can easily catch up by checking the documentation.

Introducing education agency-wide protocols for data entry management, will significantly reduce the amount of low-quality, outdated or duplicate data in your system. It will also make managing student contacts database infinitely easier.

Gathering valuable data

You should have a good idea by now, about how to organise the student contact data you have. The question that comes up is: how are you getting this data in the first place?

It is essential you optimise the channels and tools through which you gather data, to upkeep your student contact management strategy. After tidying up everything, you might get a nasty surprise through an influx of bad data coming your way that could mess-up your database again.

It is vital to be systematic about how you collect data. Follow these steps to make sure you get it right:

1. Analyse and optimize the channels through which you collect data

Start by making a list of all the channels you have in place through which you collect data. It may include social media, surveys, website contact forms, signup forms, emails, mobile apps, etc…

Have a look at each one of them individually and think about how you can optimise them. For instance, having a form on a landing page with too much information that is not useful, might prompt you to get rid of the unnecessary fields and only collect the information you need. Standardising data formats in the forms might be useful as well. This could include allowing email addresses with a valid format and phone numbers with the right number of digits.

Another well placed tactic is to make sure all this data ends up in the right place. Make sure the information collected flows into the right apps that are properly connected to your CRM and have the appropriate tag labels for each contact.

One important thing you should remember is to make sure you have explicit permission from everyone in accordance with data protection laws. You can do this by implementing an opt-in that lets your subscribers actively give you permission to store their data and send them different kind of emails, updates and marketing communications. All major marketing platforms such as Mailchimp or SendGrid offer full compliance with data protection regulation. This will also help you build a high-quality student contact list with prospective students who actually want to hear from you.

2. Offer value in exchange for data

Create opportunities where your prospective students want to give you the data you need, if you want to gather as much valuable information as possible. One of the best ideas for this to happen is by giving them free downloadable content in exchange for their information. This could include ebooks, white papers, checklists, templates, guides, offers or discounts. You can offer this downloadable content in a separate landing page for example, or a website popup or an email survey.

3. Make sure this information goes to the right tools

Wherever your new subscribers go, make sure this tool syncs in real time with your CRM so the new contacts appear instantly there. The information will then enable you to begin a lead nurturing campaign and maximize your leads-to-customer conversion rate. If you use Inteleagent to manage your education agency, connecting your lead generating channels to Inteleagent through Encharge will make sure your prospective student leads not only get updated in Inteleagent, but also add them to an email sequence nurturing campaign or a Facebook Ads audience.

Also, if you’re an education agency where you meet a lot of new prospective students in person, or you have prospective students walk in your office, use Mailchimp’s iPad app to collect their details, connect Mailchimp to Inteleagent through Encharge, and have those prospective students update instantly in both Inteleagent and Encharge. You can then target them with lead nurturing email sequences to increase the likelihood of converting them to real applications.

Integrating your prospective student contact data

The information in your different apps can’t be isolated from one another, if you want your student contact management strategy to yield best results. You will need to integrate them and keep your CRM as the centralized student contact database for your education agency, prospective student management gets much easier.

There are plenty of solutions out there from Zapier to PieSync, that offer free tier options if you are just starting. Inteleagent offers an integration with Zapier to make it easy for you to keep your student database organised and up-to-date.

To create the best student contact management strategy that empowers your education & migration agency to sustainably grow, use Inteleagent to organise all your info, always follow-up, enrol more students, automate your daily work, get paid, and impress your students.

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How to use online marketing to grow your education agency

Stefan

The mistake most education agents make when trying to sell their services online is that they send the traffic straight to the offer…

It’s proven that most students take 5-12 interactions before they decide to purchase. Sending cold traffic directly to an offer will not bring you the results you wanted.

By having a channel such as email or social media to reach out to your students again, you can then deliver value and build a relationship with them. As a result, they are much more likely to come to you next time you send them an offer.

Use an all-in-one CRM such as Inteleagent to manage new students, their applications, automate the follow-up, track student applications through their lifecycle, report on profitability, and more…

Try this email course to learn how to onboard new students once they go through the funnel.

Education agency service pipeline

Stefan

As an education agent, you are constantly under pressure to bring more applications into your service pipeline, and keep track of them to make sure they don’t slip through cracks. Looking at this statement, the question that comes up is: what are the stages of my service pipeline? This is what I’ll try to answer in the following paragraphs.

1. What is a service pipeline?

A pipeline is a way of classifying your student applications through stages until they are finalised and you start claiming commission on them. A pipeline answers the question, “How many applications do I have to pursue in order to win a certain amount of commission?

Pipelines are typically defined in stages:

  • How many student applications have you created
  • How many student applications have you submitted
  • How many student applications are you following
  • How many applications are you claiming a commission for

Every education agency business process is different, so there’s no set standard for how you categorise your student applications in your pipeline. The main idea is keeping track of where each application is in the pipeline, so you don’t lose them.

2. How to create a service pipeline?

To create a pipeline, first categorize the applications you are tracking. What are the stages of your business process from start to finish? What is the stage where your application enters the pipeline? Let’s call it: the Interested stage. Here are your applications where students are interested in studying a particular course, but have not decided yet.

What is the second step in the application’s lifecycle? This would be the stage where the potential student decides to go ahead with an application. Let’s call this stage, the Created stage, because you’ll create an application. The application is not lodged yet, because you still need to collect more documents, however the application is created.

The next logical step in the application’s journey would be the stage where the application is lodged with the education provider. Let’s call this stage the Submitted stage, because this is the stage in your application’s journey where your application is submitted with the education provider.

We already have three stages in our pipeline. You would have figured out the ropes by now, how this works.

A study application’s lifecycle pipeline, from start to finish, would need to have around 5 or 6 stages.

Your education agency service pipeline should look something like this:

If you lodge student visas for your students as well, you should create a student visa application pipeline as well. This journey of the application would be similar in length to the study application journey. In total, the study application journey plus the student visa application journey should have around 11 or 12 stages.

Online student management system

There are plenty of project management tools out there where you can build this service pipeline to keep track of your applications however, I recommend an application management software specifically created for education agencies, such as Inteleagent. Inteleagent comes out of the box with a services pipeline for your study and student visa applications. You can edit the stages as you see fit. Each stage comes with preset tasks that you can edit or delete to fit your business processes. Each stage is automated, meaning, every time you complete the last task at that particular stage, the application will automatically move to the next stage.

What is your education agency service pipeline? Feel free to share…

5 tips on how to engage potential students with social media

Stefan

It is a certainty in the cultural environment we live, that your current students will be talking about their experience with the college or university they are studying with, and they will be posting images and videos on social media platforms. If this user generated content is positive, it can be an excellent recruitment tool that you can’t afford to miss.

As an education agent, you can leverage the positive content your recruited students are providing, by adopting a dynamic and responsive approach. You need to encourage it, respond to it in an enthusiastically manner, making it easier to find on the wide space the social media platforms provide.

User generated content is 35% more memorable and 50% more trustworthy than traditional media, according to a recent Ipsos/Crowdtap survey.

Here are 5 tips you can take home to positively influence your brand:

1. Use Emojis

Emojis are visual, and they are part of a student’s language. According to recent research, if you tweet with emojis, you are bound to receive 25% engagement than without them. Facebook likes increase by 57% and comments by 31% on posts with emojis. Emojis offer a more personal, fun and humorous conversation than just “liking” the comment.

2. Hashtag it

Hashtags are at the base of searchable content, so make sure you come up with a good hashtag that is cool and unformal. If the students get the impression that you are forcing it on them, they won’t use it. Encourage students to use your hashtags and try to promote them everywhere you can, such as physical spaces, brochures, email newsletters and on social media.

3. Be responsive

Out of respect for students, who took time to write the post, take that picture, or tweet, you need to respond timely and thoughtfully.

4. Be thankful

Flowing from number 3 above, make sure you thank the student for posting, adding a personal touch to the comment. If you want to engage in a conversation, you will need to put a bit more effort in, to show that you are genuinely interested in the student’s post.

5. Leverage your influencers

If you really want to succeed in your social media student engagement quest, ask a few of your closest students who are enthusiastic about their experience and are active on social media, to tag their posts with your hashtags. Ideally, these students have quite a following.

Social media can have a great impact on your marketing overall, and thinking strategically about it would bring positive outcomes to your education agency recruitment strategy. As always, the secret is perseverance. Never quit! Keep on moving forward!

5 Tips for designing landing pages that convert international students

Stefan

If you’ve been looking at generating new international student leads by leveraging the power of digital marketing, there are high chance you have stumbled upon the term “Landing Page” by now.

But what is a landing page?

Landing pages are valuable marketing channels that can benefit your education agency. Whether your goal is to grow your list of students, promote a particular course or a scholarship offered by an education partner, landing pages are a great way to get new students to get in touch with you, educate potential students about your services, and drive conversions.

The website’s homepage (generally designed to provide an overview of your business) is different from your landing pages. A landing page focuses on a specific short-term goal, and helps you build student loyalty and increase profits. Setting up landing pages for a marketing campaign, a particular audience, event or promotion, provides international students with a clear call to action and makes it easy for them to get in touch with you.

Here are 5 tips you can use to build and design landing pages that convert

1. Consider your goal

As with every project, before you get started, you need to figure out what you want to achieve with a landing page. You might want to get a student to get in touch with you for a specific promotion you run, so you will need to setup a sign up landing page. Or maybe you are looking to grow your newsletter list, so you’ll need to consider a landing page that sells your newsletter to interested international students. Whatever your goal is, first thing is first: you will need to figure out what you would like to achieve with a landing page.

2. Decide on your audience

You will need to be aware of your audience and the message you would like to convey in order to increase the relevance of your landing pages.  Rather than using generic landing page templates and messages, try creating more landing pages, each reaching a portion of your audience.

For example, if you run an education agency that sends international students to various countries such as the US, Canada, or Australia, you could design a landing page that promotes each country as a study destination, to make sure you reach a larger portion of international students that might not be interested in Australia only.

3. Write compelling copy

Another aspect of having a successful landing page is a thoughtful copy that is concise, on-brand and relevant to your international students.

The headlines need to grab students’ attention as soon as they land on your page. The body message needs to be simple and informative. If you are promoting a scholarship, make sure there’s a sense of urgency in your copy. If you want students to provide their email addresses for your newsletter, make sure you are straightforward about why you are asking for their details and what they should expect to receive from you. Your call-to-action (CTA) needs to be clear and actionable. You will need to understand what stage your students are at in terms of their decision to study, and tailor the CTA accordingly. Make sure you include your contact information in the footer so students won’t have any trouble contacting you if they have any questions or concerns.

4. Use beautiful
images

There are many free image databases out there, so there’s no excuse not to use beautiful images on your landing page. They say an image says more than 1000 words. If that’s the case, it might be a good idea to use more images, without overusing them, of course.

Checkout resources such as Unsplash, Pexels, or Pixabay.

5. Build trust with reviews

If you are in the habit of reading reviews before making a purchase, then you already know how important reviews are for a business. People care what other people think. According to BrightLocal, 85% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

Take those positive feedbacks you have on Google, Facebook, etc… and display them on your landing page. They can help you advertise your services to international students and may be the nudge you need for a student to choose your agency over another

Conclusion

Landing pages are a great way to drive conversions and with these tips, you are well placed to build amazing landing pages that get more clicks, more signups, and more students for your education agency.

5 Mistakes to avoid when planning your education agency’s email marketing campaigns

Email Marketing
Stefan
Email Marketing

According to the Radicati Group, a technology market research firm, there are more than 281 billion emails sent every day, and it’s projected to reach 333 billion by 2022.

Despite countless articles in the past decade forecasting the death of email as a marketing communication channel, email is most likely to stick and the main reason is, you have to take a manual action in order to deal with emails, either read them, delete them, or archive them. You can’t ignore them, unless you want your inbox to clog-up and forfeit its purpose. While your social media newsfeed can be ignored, you can’t apply the same strategy with email.

This is why email marketing is such an effective solution for your education agency. Email is the most effective tactic to engage with your potential and actual international students, measure the impact and save on administrative and operational overheads for your education agency. Of course, many of your subscribers will unsubscribe, but email wins every time when it comes to long-term engagement.

When working on building your email marketing plan, you’ll have to agree with yourself that you will fail and be OK with it. No matter how many best guides and practices you read, the only real way to improve your outcome of your email campaign is to try, learn, iterate, measure, and repeat.

There’s no magic algorithm that will make your education agency successful, otherwise how would marketing consultants make money?! However, if you are just getting started and you are looking for quick ways to improve your strategy, there are several mistakes you could avoid. As a general rule, always try to pay attention to detail, test everything before you shoot through, and try to look as professional as possible.

1. You do not pay enough attention to how professional your emails look

More than 65% of your education agency students are at the awareness stage. They have never heard of you in the past. The first impression always counts, and this principle applies to the way you design your emails too. Pay attention to your email layout, the images you use, your Calls-To-Action (CTAs), your brand experience, email colours consistency with your brand colours, easy-to-spot logo and link to more information.

One golden rule is: two pair of eyes are always better than one. Always try to get a fresh pair of eyes so you can ask for a critical opinion. Ask if they would really read the email or just delete it? Ask about the consistency with your brand, and if the images you used are useful or they just distract…

2. You do not offer value to your reader

3. You do not automate your repetitive tasks

Do not assign an education consultant in your team to manually send thousands of emails by hand. It’s a waste of money in wages and time this person could spend more productively doing something meaningful. There are plenty of automatic solutions that could send all your emails with a simple click of a button. Think Mailchimp, AWeber, Sendinblue, etc…

Take a break and think where you can save time in your marketing process. Time is money and if you are already short on resources, automation can help you get back your most precious resource: time.

4. You are using too many CTAs or too many images

5. You send your emails without testing

Always test your email messages before sending your email campaigns. Spelling errors are embarrassing, but there are so many things that can go wrong, from the logic of things (if you are sending a series of emails) to images not loading. Check to make sure everything works and looks professional.

Check your emails against different platforms and email clients. Some email clients might not display your emails properly and others might not display your email messages at all. There’s no other way to know what happens unless you test. By testing your emails, you will put yourself in the shoes of your readers and you should ask yourself: Would I read this if I would be the one receiving it in my inbox? If the answer is no, it’s definitely the time to make a change.

In summary, it is important to know that you are not the only one your readers hear from. If you always focus on the reader and provide them with value when you create content, you can avoid some of these common email marketing mistakes and eventually get better conversion results.

4 steps to ensure success before implementing a marketing campaign in an education agency

marketing-campaign
Stefan
marketing-campaign

Running a small education agency means you often have to wear more than one hat, such as marketing, sales, operations, finance, administration, HR, etc… When wearing the marketing hat, it might be just you in the team, or you might have one or two staff assisting you. This would be classified as a small marketing team.

In order to be successful you will need to focus and stay focused. The problem is time. There’s never enough time to stay focused. So, prior to implementing a marketing campaign, small marketing teams need to identify their goals and have a clear-cut plan. To set you small team up for success and gain this much needed level of clarity, you will need to carry out the following four steps. This will ensure optimal performance.

Step 1: Setup a high-level plan

The marketing context changes frequently and education agents need to always be on top of new trends while managing their day-to-day tasks. Due to so many things happening at one time, it’s easy to get side-tracked and lose focus by being pulled in so many different directions. To stay on top of it, you will need to create a high-level plan that focuses on the bottom line (student conversion and revenue generation). The most important part: stick to it. There’s nothing more waste of your precious time than having a plan and not sticking to it. By implementing the plan you created, you will ensure your team stays focused on what’s important.

Step 2: Create student personas

A student persona is a detailed description of your ideal students, highlighting their behaviours, goals, skills and attitudes. The creation of your student persona is your base for all your marketing efforts, especially for small teams. Without properly defining your student persona before implementing your marketing campaign, small education agencies won’t be able to tailor their message to the likes of their potential students. The better defined the persona, and the more it intersects with the design and messaging of the marketing campaigns, the more successful small teams will be at getting potential students’ attention and converting them. This will allow small education agents to focus their time on marketing campaigns that cater to their potential students and not waste time on campaigns that don’t work.

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Engaging email marketing in international education industry

engaging email marketing strategy
Stefan
engaging email marketing strategy

This article will discuss the elements of an engaging email marketing strategy applied to an education agency. Every day, the average person will be exposed to 2904 media messages, will pay attention to 52, and will only remember 4. (SuperProfile 2010) Obviously, not all of them are good examples of an engaging email marketing strategy.

The question that comes up is: How do you make sure your email is part of the 4 emails remembered? The answer is: your email must be more trusted, relevant, conversational, coordinated across channels, and more strategic. You need to apply an engaging email marketing strategy to your education agency.

The old way of sending an email to a batch of people in your students list is not effective anymore. In this day and age, your emails need to engage with your students.

Trusted

Relevant

Conversational

Coordinated across channels

Strategic

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Marketing Automation in International Education

marketing automation
Stefan
marketing automation

Every education agency in the international education industry, has one thing in common: the desire to recruit more students and achieve higher revenue faster. Where most education agencies fail though is in aligning their people, processes, and technology to achieve these objectives.

 

What is
Marketing Automation?

A rough definition of marketing automation would be: the technology or software that empower companies to streamline, automate and measure marketing operations, tasks and workflows, so they can increase the efficiency of their operations and grow faster. Marketing automation is driven by data.

What are the features of
Marketing Automation Platforms?

There are certain features that set apart marketing automation platforms from other platforms. You recognise a marketing automation platform by the following features:

  • email marketing
  • landing pages
  • campaign management
  • marketing programs
  • lead generation
  • prediction/scoring
  • lead management
  • CRM integration
  • social marketing
  • resource management
  • marketing analytics

Why is Marketing Automation so hot right now?

Marketing automation is not a new concept. The term was first used in 1980, according to Google Ngram, started to gain traction in the 1990s and peaked around 2004. It started to decline in usage and reached a low point in 2007 before rising again. Today, it’s used as much as back in 2004.

The rise of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions drove marketing automation to become a hot trend again.

A case for education agencies using marketing automation to increase revenue

There are three core benefits to marketing automation:

  • Save time and money
  • Measure and optimize marketing investments
  • Faster revenue growth

Most education agencies today operate in batch email mode, leaving them in the dark when it comes to tracking the effectiveness of its marketing content. On top of that, because of such a diverse student base, the sales cycle could range from just a few days to four years. Education agents need flexible solutions that provide detailed insight into student behaviour and the sales pipeline.

The marketing automation platform that is perfect for education agencies has to have the ability to provide first-hand insight into how potential students progress through the website, interact with the landing pages and how they respond to marketing campaigns in real time.

By using marketing automation, education agencies can gain deep, actionable insight to determine the content that has the most immediate impact on lead generation, open rates, conversion rates, and enrolments. As a result, agencies will be able to move potential students through the application cycle faster, and at the same time, lower the cost of marketing. The ability to measure ROI will be dramatically improved and this in turn, will allow Marketing to become the driver for higher revenues.

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What is the relationship between marketing automation and CRMs?

Many CRM systems have a module for marketing, but CRMs are designed and optimised for a very different scope. CRM systems in general do not provide functionality for things like email marketing, prospect behaviour tracking, and marketing program management. While the business goal for a CRM system is to track opportunities and pipeline, manage contact and account information, the goal for marketing automation is to develop customer relationships, automate marketing programs, and measure marketing ROI.

What is the relationship between marketing automation and email marketing?

Email marketing still works really well, but the world is changing. Marketers have to deliver their relevant messages in more formats to multiple devices, more frequently. Gleanster Research says “Marketing automation solution delivers essentially all the benefits of an email marketing solution along with integrated capabilities that would otherwise need to be cobbled together using various standalone technologies.”reached a low point in 2007 before rising again. Today, it’s used as much as back in 2004.

The rise of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions drove marketing automation to become a hot trend again.

What is inteleagent?

The question that rises is: is inteleagent a marketing automation platform? The simple answer is NO. inteleagent is an application management system built around the process of tracking the applications through pipelines, manage student details, and account information. 

The focus of inteleagent is primarily sales and sales management, as well as some marketing. Inteleagent can help your agency streamline the business operations of your education agency, track your student applications through customised pipeline stages, generate invoices and keep track of commissions, as well as many other features that will improve the way you run your business, all for a low monthly subscription.

How to build your brand presence with LinkedIn

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Stefan
LinkedIn brand presence

If you want to build your brand, LinkedIn is the largest professional network platform in the internet, with more than 400 million members in more than 200 countries and territories. The solutions it offers expanded beyond hiring and networking, to include robust company pages, highly targeted advertising solutions, and a publishing platform.

 

Build your education agency brand presence

Education agencies can build a profile on LinkedIn, that showcases products, employee networks, blog posts, upcoming events, and status updates. Users can follow your profile to learn more about your agency, just like on Twitter or Facebook. You can also advertise job openings on LinkedIn and search for potential candidates. This makes LinkedIn and great place for recruiting talent.

As an education agency owner, you should encourage your education counsellors and branch managers to participate on LinkedIn, so they can promote your brand and their own personal brands. Asking your education advisors and managers to share your education agency’s posts, and join and participate in relevant groups will build your brand’s presence in the international education industry.

In order to establish a strong LinkedIn presence, you will need to leverage different aspects of the social network, and these include:

Groups

These are communities formed around topics of interest, industry, title, professional organisation, brand, etc… In groups, users can share articles, post jobs, and exchange advice. Groups can be a strategic way for your education agency to create a community of international students, gain insight into their pain points, and develop relevant conversations.

LinkedIn offers a variety of functionality controls in groups. For example, you can choose to have an open or closed group, turning on or off the ability to post jobs, etc… These settings will need to match the goals of the community you are trying to build. You can use Groups to locate potential customers. All you have to do is make a list of keywords that relate to your international students or countries you are targeting, and run a search for any LinkedIn Groups related to the keywords. Once you find the right groups, you can participate in discussions, ask questions, and make connections.

Content sharing

You will be able to share posts on your education agency’s LinkedIn page. If you want to build followers, posting on LinkedIn is the key. LinkedIn is perceived as a professional network, therefor your content mix should be fairly professional and engaging. Educational posts perform very well, because members are on LinkedIn mainly for professional purposes.

If your purpose is to expand your personal brand and thought leadership, LinkedIn Pulse is the latest offering by LinkedIn. You can publish to LinkedIn Pulse and, if you get enough readership and distribution through their own network, LinkedIn will share it broadly across the network which in turn, will increase the visibility of your post.

If you want to build your education agency’s brand, cultivating a set of thought leaders in your company will definitely be beneficial. By using LinkedIn Pulse articles, you will increase your inbound links, support your thought leadership platform, increase the followers on your education agency’s profile page, and boost your social following on other social platforms.

Showcase Pages

These are extensions of your education agency’s company page designed to highlight specific services you offer. Showcase pages are useful when your education agency offers multiple solutions with different types of fans and followers. For example, if your company offers education counselling services as well as migration advice, you can build separate showcases that highlights these solutions to your target market. Having these segments will allow students as well as potential migrants, to follow the part of your business they are interested in.

Profile page

This is where your users land when searching for your education agency or clicks on the logo from a user’s profile. Profile pages are a free LinkedIn service for any user looking to start one on behalf of their brand. This is the primary, branded landing page on LinkedIn so make sure your give it a careful thought about the images and messages you will use, because they will represent your brand.

Tips and tricks

Participate

Encourage your staff, education counsellors, managers, etc... to participate on LinkedIn Pulse and LinkedIn Groups to build their network and generate awareness around your education agency’s brand;

Create

Create and build a group for your international students;

Optimise

Optimise your LinkedIn Page for SEO by including your top keywords in your education agency’s description, to see a real impact in search results;

LinkedIn Pulse

Use LinkedIn Pulse to engage with influencers and keep up with the international education industry news.

Free email course

Organise your students’ applications into a repeatable, automated process that will save you time
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