Welcome to Marketing automation 101. This guide explains the power of marketing automation for attracting prospective students. There are seven lessons in total, plus a practical assignment for the final assessment. By the end, you will have a solid understanding of marketing automation for student acquisition, and a roadmap for delivering it.
Lesson 1: Introduction and overview
There are three types of education available after secondary school:
- Unaccredited courses, also known as hobby courses.
- Tertiary education, vocational training: trades and diplomas, for example. These are practical, competency-based courses that build and assess student skills.
- Tertiary education, higher education: bachelor’s and master’s degrees, for example. These courses are rooted in theory, research and understanding concepts.
There are three main reasons people decide to study one of these courses:
- To get a job
- To get promoted, or for professional development
- To support a hobby, interest or side hustle
Why do these distinctions matter? Because they shape how students enrol, and therefore how educational institutions should engage with them.
Lesson 2: Customer profiles
On average, a student will have around 80 touchpoints before they commit to enrolling in a course (write that down, it will be in the exam). These touchpoints are spread across the customer journey.
As always, the journey starts at Awareness, where the prospective student recognises they need to study for one of the three reasons in Lesson 1.
The student then moves to the Education stage, where they may make an enquiry with an institution. At this stage, prospective students fall into one of three categories:
- Eagers: ready to apply. Approximately 10% of prospects.
- Procrastinators: need answers to questions or concerns (career outcomes, or what a day in the life of a student looks like, for example) so they can picture their future and convert to enrolment. Approximately 30% of prospects.
- Researchers: no intention to buy, either because they don’t want to or aren’t ready. Approximately 60% of prospects.
Lesson 3: The role of marketing automation
Marketing automation lets institutions attract the people who want to enrol or are ready to, while managing those who aren’t ready to commit, to keep acquisition costs down.
For the 10% of students who are ready to enrol, the first person to reach them by phone often has the best chance of making the sale. Marketing automation can identify these prospects and prompt your sales team to reach out quickly.
For the 30% who are procrastinating, marketing automation takes cues from the content they engage with and delivers targeted messages aligned with their interests. That keeps your institution top of the class while they make their decision.
Marketing automation also helps institutions manage their acquisition cost per lead. Many enquiries start with a Google search, and every click on a paid ad or a third-party lead costs money. Procrastinators and browsers may engage with your content many times over many months, which keeps driving up the cost of your campaigns. Those campaigns may attract more students, but without careful management they create a high acquisition cost on top of the extra expense of catering for more students.
Marketing automation and smart ad suppression can keep acquisition costs down. Procrastinators can be nurtured with targeted content so they don’t keep going back to Google. Ads can also be hidden from people who are only browsing, then shown again once their online activity signals they are ready to explore their options seriously (you won’t find strategies like these in any old marketing textbook).
Lesson 4: Integrating sales and marketing
Prospects expect the content they receive to line up with their enrolment experience. There are important triggers in the sales process that indicate which marketing materials and messages to send to engage a prospect successfully. Prospective students have their own checklist of information they need before applying, and your marketing messages must address those checklist items throughout the automation journey. For example, prospective students need to know what a course costs before they learn about the class structure or size. That’s why sales and marketing need to stay connected throughout and beyond the sales journey.
Write this down and underline it: marketing automation must align with sales throughout the customer journey.
Lesson 5: Marketing automation channels
There are a number of channels you can automate. Each has a different purpose and should carry different content, while reiterating the same key messages across the student journey. Some examples:
- Email marketing: drip-feed campaigns to prospective students who have subscribed, engaged or asked for more information.
- Social media: posts that provide social proof, such as student testimonials or “day in the life” content. This channel is especially effective for students interested in vocational training.
- Digital advertising: retarget students who have visited your website with social or LinkedIn ads as application deadlines approach.
- Website: publish articles about your university’s surroundings, or detailed student testimonials, to reach prospects searching for a study destination.
Marketing automation platforms such as Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) let organisations get the most from these channels. They consolidate, track and, where needed, extend the work of each one.
Lesson 6: Benefits
Marketing automation can deliver educational institutions a long list of benefits:
- Reduce the administration burden
- Deliver relevant, timely content aligned with the sales journey
- Create consistent, personalised messaging
- Run scalable, affordable marketing campaigns
- Optimise content to attract the right students
- Personalise content for each stage of the customer journey
- Support a speed-to-contact approach, with automatic follow-up and no response lag
- Nurture leads through the enrolment funnel, from prospect to applicant
- Streamline onboarding
- Support recruitment and the student journey that follows
- Measure ROI and refine marketing strategies
Lesson 7: Marketing automation examples
In our final lesson, we work through scenarios showing how to use marketing automation to engage and attract prospective students.
Example 1: Gated content for early prospects
Gated content suits top-of-funnel prospects because it doesn’t ask for much commitment. Blog posts and ebooks offer easy-to-read, actionable advice and can target several personas at once. Posts about time management, for example, are just as useful to school leavers as to mature-age students juggling work commitments.
Example 2: Targeted content to maximise engagement
A prospective student has registered for an open day, which is an important milestone for an institution. Share content that prepares them for the event and helps them get the most out of it, such as how to plan their day and which sessions to attend.
Example 3: Converting prospects who have applied but not paid
The prospective student has enrolled but not yet paid or received funding for their course. Content at this point needs to encourage them to take the final step and address any remaining concerns, such as student support, affordability, study and life balance, and fitting into student life.
If you have access to learning analytics, address the areas of concern or delight that current students report. If students love your classroom spaces, for example, make that part of your automation messaging.
By the time a prospective student has applied, you should have a good idea of their persona and interests. Highlighting the strengths of the course against those interests makes them less likely to withdraw early.
Practical examination: Implementing marketing automation
For your practical examination, here are the steps to follow to implement marketing automation in your institution. The results will speak for themselves.
1. Select a course and define all the customer personas
Personas differ across courses and types of education, so it’s worth spending time to get this step right.
2. Create customer journey maps
Use each persona to define its own customer journey, and document every touchpoint it has with your institution along the way. Touchpoints are key opportunities to influence prospects. Document behaviour-based triggers too, such as website enquiries, event registrations and collateral downloads. These determine the messaging, targeting and tactics at each stage of the journey.
3. Identify pain points, questions and challenges
Prospective students have a checklist they want to complete before they apply. They want to be confident that the cost, duration, online or in-person study, travel time, class flexibility, job pathways and internship opportunities all suit them. Here is an example of the checklist items a persona may want to explore at each stage:
- Awareness: course cost
- Education: course types and location
- Selection: course guides, career outcomes, financial support and student testimonials
Identify the checklist items that apply to each persona, then confirm the stage of the sales journey where each one matters.
4. Create content
Craft compelling content that meets each persona’s needs (see step 3) at each stage of the customer journey, tailored to the channel best suited to deliver it.
5. Build a lead nurturing sequence
Map the content and channels to each stage of the journey. Use that map to build a lead nurturing sequence that follows the student journey and the sales process from enquiry to enrolment.
6. Review your work
If engagement stays low after the nurture sequence goes live, the course may not be the right fit for the prospect, it may not be the right time for them to enrol, or the course may be too expensive. Spend time finding the root cause, then change the content and approach to address why students aren’t applying.
Congratulations! You’ve just graduated from Marketing automation 101. On top of your A for attendance, you now have the knowledge to create and implement a marketing automation strategy for your institution.