The EdTech industry has been giving traditional universities a run for their money in recent times, with hordes of students opting for the more convenient ways to learn. But that poses a question for EdTech startups. How do they keep their students updated about everything that’s happening with their courses?
That’s where WhatsApp broadcast messages come in.
With Engati, you can deploy an intelligent chatbot on WhatsApp and broadcast notifications to your students and prospects.
What is an EdTech chatbot?
An EdTech Chatbot helps you engage with your students even when a teacher isn’t present. It can share course materials, pick up common doubts and also be used for quizzes. You can also use it to engage with your potential customers by showing your courses and helping them navigate through them.
What are the benefits of using a EdTech Chatbot?
Getting an EdTech chatbot comes with a lot of benefits.
1. Round the clock availability
Teachers cannot be available all the time to solve their student’s doubts. A chatbot can pick up doubts like these or provide reference material at any time of the day.
2. Real time enquiry
Chatbots can prompt assistance as soon as a student lands on your website, and help the student go through different courses and suggest new courses based on the students field of interest
3. Better time management
Chatbots help teachers manage their time better by automating most of the repetitive students’ doubts. This will give them more time to build a better course. It also saves a lot of time for students as their doubts get solved almost instantly and don’t have to wait if a teacher isn’t available.
4. Automate the follow up process
You need to follow up on your potential students, but following up on multiple students can be difficult. You can simply use your chatbot to automate the entire process, the chatbot itself can reach out to these students and engage with them.
5. Better engagement
Your chatbots can identify what courses and fields your students are interested in, they can recommend similar/advanced courses in the same field. It can also share additional reference material for ongoing courses to keep your students engaged.
6. User specific
The chatbots are user specific, not every student is the same and could be performing differently. You can use the chatbot to analyze every student’s performance and send out extra material, quizzes accordingly
7. History of interaction
The bot can store all historic data, about the student, student’s performance across various subjects, grades, making it very easy for the teachers to plan the course work around their students.
There’s a lot you can do with an EdTech chatbot, it’s also the easiest way for you to reach out to your students. But for that, you’ll need to set up WhatsApp template messages that you can use to broadcast notifications to your students and prospects.
The good news is that you don’t need to create these templates from scratch, we’ve got you covered.
Here’s a list of a few templates that’ll definitely work for you!
8 use-case specific WhatsApp message templates for EdTech startups
Sharing resources
Got extra reference material that you want to share with your students? You could send it to them on email, but there’s no guarantee that they’re going to see it. Whether it’s deeply relevant to their course material and will be important for their exams, or just additional information that’s good to have and will help them grasp the concepts they are learning to a greater extent, if you’re creating or compiling reference material, you’d want your students to see it, learn from it, and end up benefitting from it. That’s why sending these resources as WhatsApp broadcasts makes more sense than sending an email that might never get read.
And you aren’t limited to just sharing resources with your students. You can also use these WhatsApp broadcasts to engage your prospects and share educational material that could get them interested in learning more from your EdTech startup.
You could use this template:
Hi, here’s an article on <topic> that is required reading for your course. Hit the link to read it now - <link>
Assignment submission reminders
You don’t want your students to miss on their submissions just because they forgot about them. That’s just a completely avoidable headache that nobody should have to deal with in the first place. All you need to do is shoot out a message when the assignment topics when they are declared, and send out reminders to your students when they are approaching the deadline. Be sure to maintain a bit of a buffer when you’re sending the reminders out so that your students actually have some amount of time to finish their assignments before the deadline, or else they might just end up giving up if they feel like there’s no way they’re going to be able to complete their assignments in time.
Remind them to submit their assignments with a WhatsApp template message like this:
Hi <name>, your assignment on <topic> is due soon. Please complete and submit it before <time> on <date>.
Cross-selling and Upselling courses
Acquiring new customers can cost up to 5x more than it would cost you to retain an existing customer. Rather than trying to acquire new students all the time, you should spend some of your energy working on increasing the customer lifetime value of your current students. You’ve already got records of what they’re studying, all you need to do is make broadcast lists of students that have taken a particular course and broadcast template messages pitching related courses that complement what they are already studying, or more advanced courses that would allow them to dig deeper into the subject that they are studying and understand it in a more comprehensive way, helping them evolve from novices into experts. You should even send these messages to students who have completed their course and have not enrolled for another one yet, especially students who have finished their courses recently.
You don’t even have to wait till a user actually enrolls for a course, if they have expressed interest, you can already start pitching a more comprehensive course or engage in product bundling, pitching a complementary course, along with the one that have expressed interest in, at a lower overall price.
Here’s a template that you could use:
Hi, since you’re learning about <topic 1>, you should also check out this course on <topic 2> which would help you understand <topic 1> in a more holistic way. Hope it helps!
Exam schedules
As an EdTech company, you don’t have a physical notice board to put up your exam schedules (not that students really pay much attention to the notice boards in their colleges anyways). Now, you could just decide to put up a notice on your website, but let’s be honest, are your students visiting your website every day?
The idea that makes the most sense is to send the notice out to them, but emails don’t really get a ton of opens either. Your best bet? Shoot the notification out to your students on WhatsApp itself. The very overt notification that they’re going to get pretty much guarantees that they’re going to read your message and see the schedule.
Your EdTech company can use this WhatsApp template message:
Hi <name>, the schedule for your <month/semester> exams has just been released. Download the exam schedule now!
<Schedule document>
Exam results
The days before the exam results are supposed to be announced are always quite a stressful time for students. There’s a lot of anxiety involved here, they’re all worried about how they fared.
You can create a much better experience for them by broadcasting a message to them over your WhatsApp chatbot.
The message could have a CTA button that takes them to your website or eLearning portal for them to access their results confidentially, or you could send the result documents to them individually. You could even hook your bot up to your database, allowing the bot to directly pull the results and share them with your students over WhatsApp.
Use this template to share exam results with your students:
Hi <name>, your results for your <semester> exams have just been released. Hit the button to see them.
<CTA button>
Promotional offers and discounts
Everyone loves a good discount. They’re a great way to get people to make impulse purchases. This allows you to catch a customer who was delaying a purchase and get them to buy your course immediately instead of putting it off indefinitely.
You could shoot out a standard notification to your entire contact list (like a site-wide 35% off discount notification), but it would be better to create separate broadcast lists on the basis of the courses that your students are enrolled in and your prospects have expressed interest in. This helps you send out promotional offers that are more relevant to your customers, thus making the pitch more effective.
Try this template:
Hi <name>, we’ve got a special offer for you. Get 45% off on our <course they’re interested in> course. The offer lasts till <time>, hurry up!
<CTA button>
Re-targeting former students and prospects
Your students don’t need to be done with your EdTech company as soon as they finish their courses. While they might not join another course immediately (there still is a chance that they will), it’s quite likely that they would want to either dig deeper into the subject that they studied or learn another subject that is very closely tied to this one. People are wired to be more comfortable with things that are familiar to them, so if they are interested in learning more and you pitch these courses to them, they would be more inclined to learning from you than another EdTech company or institute (provided their experience with your EdTech courses was good the first time).
Here’s a template that you could use:
Ready to learn more about <topic>? Join our advanced <topic> course at a 35% discount now!
Announcements and updates
There are a lot of course related announcements that you could send over on WhatsApp so that your students are kept in the loop and stay informed about everything that’s happening. You can send them announcements about live classes, new study material available, update in the course structure, or even send them an itinerary to complete a module on time. You could even send out notifications whenever you have a live lecture from a guest speaker so that your students get the most value from their courses and you get a bigger audience for your guest speakers.
You could tweak this template:
Live class tomorrow!
There’s a live lecture on <topic> scheduled for <time> tomorrow, <date>. Don’t forget to join on time!
Now that you have reaching out to your customers in place, let's talk about how you can get their responses. Something that will not only automate replies for you but also help with lead generation.
Best practices while using an EdTech Chatbot
Live Chat
Always allow a live chat feature option. The chatbot can take care of most of your students’ queries but some complex queries do need professional attention. Also, a lot of times student’s do prefer human attention for certain queries. You should make an option for them to connect with a professor available.
Quiz your students
You can use your chatbot to send out mini tests and quizzes to your students. This helps you and the students to keep a track of their progress. You can make these tests competitive to keep your students engaged.
WhatsApp Link Generator
Links that you can create using your WhatsApp business number for reaching out to your customers, are WhatsApp links.
You can also add a pre-defined message to your link, so your customers can directly reply without manually typing any specific.
WhatsApp Link Generators help you do exactly this. As the name suggests, WhatsApp link generator is a free tool that’ll help you create WhatsApp chat links for your business. You can use multiple WhatsApp business numbers & reach out to your customers.
Conclusion
Artificial Intelligence will continue to integrate with all fields of business and education is no exception. You can provide both educators and students with quality services. Ease out efforts on both ends and still ensure quality education. Chatbots are really going to revolutionize the learning process
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