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 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.