5 Ways To Enrol More Students With A Strategic Lead Nurturing Program

Turning your prospects into leads and then into students is a process that requires a considerable amount of nurturing. Your prospects have many options open to them and may be considering courses from numerous educational institutions. To help attract these students, your RTO can adopt a lead nurturing strategy to inform them about your courses and help them find the best one to suit their needs. Use these five practices to help improve your RTO’s lead nurturing program.

1. Develop detailed personas

To attract the right leads to your RTO, you need to develop detailed personas to gain a better understanding of your ideal prospects. Focus on their interests, their needs and their challenges. What stage of life are they in? What are their priorities? You can use your existing students to help you flesh out your personas by examining their goals, pain-points and demographics. Detailed personas will help you build a personal relationship with your leads, which will make all the difference in your lead nurturing program.

2. Focus on your priority leads

Lead generation can be time-consuming and costly, so it’s important to focus on leads who are likely to sign up with your RTO. To help you decide on whom to prioritise, implement an internal scoring system that helps you measure their levels of engagement and interest. Once you know who is interested, you can strategically plan lead follow-ups based on your prospect’s overall score. These actions all indicate your prospect is showing a good level of engagement:

• High email open rates, responses and click-throughs
• Completed contact forms
• Repeat visits to your RTO’s website
• Downloading course information and material
• Phone calls to your RTO
• Interest in registration dates, deadlines and possible scholarships

   

  3. Put a follow-up strategy in place

To convert a lead, you need to respond to their enquiries quickly. An automated response system is the ideal way to ensure no one is kept waiting and that your prospects receive the right communication and material when they need it. Follow up on your automated response with a personalised email, as this is the best way to find out key information about your prospect. Your email must indicate your acknowledgement and appreciation for their enquiry. Key content to include in your email is:

• A welcoming reply that addresses your prospect by their first name
• Links to your social media platforms and blog
• Relevant links to any resources they are looking for; this can include course information, application processes, admission details, etc.

Once you have connected with the lead on a personal level, your sales team can follow up with emails and phone calls to move the relationship forward.

4. Create an ongoing relationship with a touch-point strategy

To build an ongoing relationship with a lead, you need to connect with them at specific points over a series of time. Your messaging should include different points of communication, including texts, phone calls, emails, invites to relevant events, invitations to webinars, etc. The more ways you can reach out to your lead with relevant, engaging content, the more solid your relationship will become.

5. Test the effectiveness of your communication

To understand whether your lead nurturing messaging is working, conduct a simple A/B test to judge the effectiveness of your communication based on your prospects’ behaviour. If your prospects don’t download the ebook, click on the desired link or respond to the call-to-action, it’s an indication that your messaging needs to be refined. Once you have accrued enough relevant data, compare your results and use your winning messaging as your new standard. You need to continue testing this to stay up-to-date with the changing wants and needs of your prospects. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that if a message works today, it will work in six months time.

Lupo Digital is an inbound marketing agency that specialises in strategic lead nurturing for RTOs, helping them with their student engagement and nurturing all the way through to close of sale and after. We have a passionate, experienced team dedicated to bringing all the benefits of inbound marketing to RTOs. For more information about how inbound marketing work for RTOs, download our executive guide to lead management for RTOs.