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 education agency challenges and how to address them

International student recruitment challenges
Stefan
International student recruitment challenges

International student recruitment challenges can make it difficult for you as an education agent, to find students. Learning about challenges in international student recruitment and different ways to mitigate them can ultimately help you attract more international students and increase your commission.

International student recruitment challenges

Working as an education agent is an exciting career. In fact, once you get in the industry, you are likely to stick to it for years to come. Most education agents I know have been in the industry for at least 10 years. But exciting careers come with challenges of their own. Most of these challenges can be addressed by implementing a policy to use software for educational consultants to process applications throughout your education agency offices.

Have a look at the following international student recruitment challenges and possible ways to solve them.

1. Competition

You might find the right student and match him with the right course, but chances are you are not the first. There are a lot of education agents out there, and many are reaching out to the same international students as you. You might find it difficult to cut through the noise and catch the attention of genuine international students. Especially in geographical areas such as the Subcontinent, Asia, or South America, there are hundreds, if not thousands of education agencies competing for international students.

According to the Australian Government – Department of Education and Training, based on Agents or Agencies who have created CoEs between  04 April 2012 and 12 September 2018, there are 10,626 Agencies and 26,565 Agents in the world.

Solution: Take advantage of international students’ referrals. Nothing catches the attention of an international student like a friend advising them to contact you. When you successfully place international students, ask them to refer you. People often listen to those they know. Your software for educational consultants would have a reporting feature that would give you an insight into the percentage of international students recruited through referrals. Aim to increase that.

2. International students receiving several Offer Letters

Because the demand for genuine international students is high, many students can afford to be selective. They often have multiple offers to choose from and are likely to accept the most competitive option. You might put a lot of time into moving an application through the recruiting pipeline, only to find they’ve accepted an offer letter elsewhere. When students receive several offers at once, it can be easy to lose them to another education agency.

If your student chooses another offer, you might need to go back to previously declined applications. Those students have likely moved onto other opportunities as well, so you might need to start the process over.

Solution: To stand out from the competition, create a great student onboarding experience. Start with building an effective onboarding experience in your software for educational consultants. Be sure to note the benefits, outcome, and study experience your education institution offers. Be clear about the necessary academic and English entry requirements. Listen to your students throughout the enrolment process. If the education institution extends an offer to your student, be enthusiastic about it and explain the next steps.

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3. College / university partner moving slowly

The longer it takes to get a letter of offer, the more strain it puts on your education agency and your students. Education institutions want you to source quality, genuine students and your student wants their applications to be moved through the application process quickly. Accomplishing both tasks simultaneously can be one of the biggest challenges in the international education agency business.

Sometimes, a student might not understand the application process, or they might get sidetracked during the enrolment process. This can slow an education institution extending an offer, causing you to lose the student through these cracks.

Solution: Use a student application management system or a software for educational consultants to streamline your process. You can enter and organize student data at every stage of the recruiting pipeline. You spend less time searching for information and more time talking with your student. And, the software helps you follow the application’s journey, so the process can move forward faster.

4. College / university offer is poor

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to recruit genuine students. International students are a huge factor in driving the success of an education institution businesses. But if your education institution partner wants to recruit the best, most genuine students, they need to be willing to up their offering.

Scholarships, perks and innovative approaches to programs delivered are all huge details in an international student’s decision. If your education institution partner doesn’t have a competitive offer, it will be hard to source top genuine applicants.

Solution: Talk to your education institution partners about the importance of having an attractive offering. Show them examples in the industry. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Your college / university partner might need to get creative when it comes to international student perks. For example, they could offer flex timetable, scholarships, or discounts at various partner businesses.

5. Low international student retention

It’s more common than ever for international students to jump courses. When this happens, your college / university partner might question whether you’re able to find the right students for their programs.

International student retention issues can hurt your education agency reputation. You find an international student and your education institution partner onboards the student. After a few months, the new student finds a course that is cheaper elsewhere. You have to start the application process all over. Or worse, the student doesn’t even choose your education agency for their application to the new program. This can quickly become one of your biggest international student recruitment challenges.

Solution: Start by sourcing international students with a high potential to complete the course. Ask behavioral questions during interviews to screen for loyalty. Also, make sure your college / university has a strong culture and onboarding program. And, check in with your student once they begin their studies. Find out if they have any concerns, and resolve issues early on.

In summary, detecting these risks early in your education agency life can make all the difference between success and failure. Consider them early in your education agency’s journey and mitigate the risk.

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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Best tools to use when launching your education agency start-up

education agency
Stefan
1964619

GSuite is Google’s response to Microsoft Office selection and can be one of the most useful tools for a new education agency founder that a lot of entrepreneurs out there are taking it for granted. Many well-established unicorns fondly remember using Google Sheets to organise things and keep everything in sync as well as Google Drive for storage when they first put pen to paper.

Launching your first education agency start-up is no easy business, especially if you are not familiar with the international education industry. Sewing together all those bits and pieces of an education agency business can seem a daunting task, especially if you are a first-time founder.

Launching an education agency business will find you managing things like customer services, cashflow, accounting, project planning, team communication, meetings, tasks, … and the list can go on and on.

Thankfully, we live in the information age, and technology start-ups have done the legwork for you by coming up with various tools to make your life easier when starting and managing your business. Most of these tools are free or relatively affordable.

So if you’re an entrepreneur looking to found a new education agency in the international education industry, check out these recommendations:

GSuite – spreadsheets, powerpoints, calendars and more

GSuite is Google’s response to Microsoft Office selection and can be one of the most useful tools for a new education agency founder that a lot of entrepreneurs out there are taking it for granted. Many well-established unicorns fondly remember using Google Sheets to organise things and keep everything in sync as well as Google Drive for storage when they first put pen to paper.

Trello / Jira / Monday – project management

Keeping all your staff in sync with all the projects you are working on can be a tough task, especially if you have multiple offices and branches overseas.

The most common recommendation from established entrepreneurs is to use one of the project management tools under the Atlassian’s umbrella. Atlassian is an Australian team-building software company.

Trello boards are praised for being great for creating personal, business and major projects, as well as keeping you accountable for what needs to be achieved. Trello is great for keeping track of projects and various tasks.

Monday (formerly known as DaPulse) is a great non-Atlassian alternative that is being howled as an amazing visual project management tool. Monday allows you to manage all your day to day projects in a visual way so you can really understand what is blocking the project from moving to the next stage.

Hubspot / Capsule – customer relationship management (CRM) tools

Your education agency is always in one of the two common situations: trying to get a customer and / or trying to retain or manage customers. It is not easy to find a CRM that really works for your business. Hubspot can automatically track your leads from emails or calls, allows you to create email templates to save response times as well as notifying you when people open your emails. Capsule is described as being a light touch CRM by entrepreneurs that used it in their early start-up days.

Slack / Telegram – communication for your team

Slack has become a classic in the tech industry and the application is commonly used by teams to communicate and share documents. It is very useful especially with teams that are spread geographically, such as your education agency branch offices, or subagents you are using to recruit your students.

Appear.In – simple video chat

Skype, Zoom, etc… too complicated. You want simplicity and an application that just works? Appear.In is the way to go. You can create any URL you would like and all your guest have to do is click on that link to join the video chat. If you need to connect with your branch offices overseas in a conference, Appear.In is what you would want to use. It just works.

Canva / Biteable – graphics and videos for your education agency brand

The Aussie company Canva produces beatiful design content for social media, for your website and images.

With Biteable you can make up explainer videos, sales videos and demos. You will get lots of attention and compliments.

inteleagent.io – your agency’s application management system

Your business is growing. Months ago, it was easy to remember each international student application you were sending through to your education providers, because there were just a few of them. It was easy to remember what stage each application is as, what documents are missing, what is the next step you need to take to make it happen, because it was only you with your company. Now, you have loads of applications, staff to manage them, and there is no way you will remember all these details from the top of your head.

In comes inteleagent.io – the only international student application management system you will ever need to improve your education agency operations. inteleagent.io will help you track those applications through pre-defined stages all the way to the end of the application process. Once your application is at the end of the pipeline, inteleagent.io will generate beautiful commission invoices for you, remind you when to send them through to the education provider. It will keep track of your agreements with the education providers and remind you when they are due for renewal. Your team will be able to collaborate on applications, you’ll be able to track actions performed on applications in time with the integrated timeline, and you will be able to generate easy to read reports to help you make better decisions in your business. These are just a few of the features inteleagent.io has packed in for you.

Give it a try now and experience the difference!