Saw a spike in enrollments during the pandemic? Wondering how to keep that going in the post-covid world? Here are the best ways to increase your EdTech course enrollments!
Go omnichannel
It makes sense to drive marketing campaigns and generate leads across multiple channels, but you can’t let the interactions across these channels be separate, detached experiences. You got to tie these experiences together, allowing them to start on one channel and continue the experience on another channel. This means that you’re going to have to identify unique users and track their movement across the other channels with a unique identifier.
This means that when you capture lead information from several sources, you’ll also be capturing their preferences, interests, and behavior across all these channels as well, allowing you to understand your prospects in a more holistic manner and build connected experiences across all these channels, playing on the information that you’ve collected about your prospects.
Hyper-personalize your messaging
Now that you understand your leads in a more comprehensive way, your aim should be to use the information that you’ve collected to craft marketing messages that resonate with individual prospects.
Just using a standardized template and changing the prospect’s name wouldn’t fly here. You’d want to write these messages in a similar way as you’d write a BASHO email. Now even if you’re working with a smaller team and are trying to reach out to a lot of prospects, you still need to personalize it to some extent. Maybe you can’t go full BASHO, but you should still have some level of personalization involved. Don’t let all the data that you’ve collected go to waste.
Use a lead generation chatbot
This is one of the most effective ways for you to increase your EdTech company’s course enrollments. Conversational selling is a big deal, and an AI-powered chatbot can answer any questions that your prospects have about your courses instantly, irrespective of the time.
If you didn’t have a chatbot and a prospect found out about your courses at say, 3 am, they’d have to either hunt through your entire website to find answers to their questions (and that takes too much effort), or they’d have to wait till morning for your agents to answer those questions. By then, they could just move on to your competitors.
But if you have a bot deployed, they get answers instantly, and your bot could collect their contact information in a conversational format (which feels far more natural than filling a form). The bot could even ask qualifying questions to score your leads, and answer further questions that your customers might have, which helps you with lead nurturing as well.
Monitor lead activity
You’d want to keep an eye on the way in which your leads behave on your webpages and digital properties. Use heatmaps and screen recordings to observe how they behave on your website, see what holds their attention, what makes them click on your CTAs, and which parts of your webpages make them exit the website. Look for patterns here, tweak your webpages according to the insights you’ve uncovered, and, after publishing your changes, look at the heatmaps and screen recordings again to see whether there are any changes in their behavior.
You’d also want to track data about the location of the leads filling your forms, the devices that they are using, etc.
Track team performance
You need to closely track the performance of your sales and marketing teams. Your course enrollments will only go up when your sales and marketing teams perform more effectively and efficiently. Look at your analytics tools to see how specific campaigns are performing and see what you can do to improve them. You also want to look at metrics like total leads, qualified leads, app installs, and lead sources.
You should also make sure that your team has all the tools that they need in order to perform at optimal levels, generate the more MQLs, and close more sales.
Release micro-credentialing programs
The popularity of micro-credentialing programs starting rising at the start of the pandemic, especially with the lockdowns causing lay-offs, leaving people in between jobs, unable to afford a traditional degree, and unwilling to spend a year or two pursuing one. At this point, they start looking for courses that they could complete in a couple of months, allowing them to learn new quickly quickly and increasing their hirability.
With the Great Resignation underway, employees are once again looking to quickly upskill and increase their odds of landing a better, higher paying role, which makes micro-credentialing programs particularly appealing to them. Earning micro-credentials enable students to complete short skills-based, online programs that get them ready to dive back into the workforce with new skills.
Free webinars
This is a way for you to give students a taste of what they would learn from your courses and the magical part is that they can get that taste without having to make any commitment at all. They would neither have to invest money nor a substantial amount of time, but they’d get an idea of what you have to offer.
The other benefit is that you could collect the attendees email ids and contact numbers while they register for the webinar, and then use that information to deliver targeted marketing messages to them over email and WhatsApp.
Partner up with enterprises to offer training modules
Instead of trying to get enrollments from individual students, you might want to go after bigger fish and strike deals with large enterprises to offer relevant training modules that would help their employees upskill and get better at their work.
You could also sell business memberships that companies could purchase, thus allowing their employees to access a certain range of courses. This would be especially effective if the courses offered in the business memberships are primarily micro-credentialling courses.
Start a referral program
Word of mouth is the best kind of marketing, and a creating a referral program makes it possible for you to incentivize your customers to spread the word about your EdTech startup. People believe what their peers tell them far more than they believe claims that companies make in their marketing and sales messages. If you can find a way to get your customers to talk positively about your edtech platform or your courses, you should definitely attempt to make it happen.
Offer them a varying degree of discounts on future courses, maybe even a free course or cashback on the courses they’ve already signed up for, depending on the number of they referrals who end up enrolling as paying customers.
Launch free (or more affordable) mini courses
Once again, this plays on the idea of letting students experience learning from you, and then upselling them on paid or more expensive courses so that they can learn more advanced concepts. Free mini courses are more tempting than webinars, especially if they come with a certificate of completion that your students can display on their LinkedIn profiles.
There’s also the fact that when anyone in their social circle asks them where they did that course from, they’d mention your edtech company.
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