How Can a Small Admission Office Improve Its Marketing for Under $100 per Month?

by | Oct 2, 2013 | Uncategorized

For the past five years, I have been attracted to a customer relationship management (CRM) system called Salesforce.com. Unfortunately, it is too costly for me to use, given the size of my admission team, my database, and the number of customizations that we have.   However, for a small admission office of one or two people, Salesforce.com can provide you with tremendous functionality to upgrade your marketing and sales operation for the recruitment of full-pay families.  I use it to maintain my database for MarketingtoFullPay.com.

 

Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com, made the decision to give the non-profits the same access to the tools being used by the corporate world. His company now gives non-profits up to 10 salesforce.com licenses, free of charge. Here’s what you get from Salesforce.com; also included are a few add-ons you may need to purchase:

  1. It functions in the cloud; all you need is a computer and an internet connection.
  2. You can put all your prospects data in Salesforce.com; it as a very powerful database system.
  3. You can generate all your reports, just like other database systems.
  4. You can customize as many as 100 fields to meet the particular needs of your school.
  5. You can create dashboards to track your admission funnel.
  6. This product includes a calendar function which is only okay.
  7. You can email out of this system; it will log all of your emails.
  8. You can log all your phone calls or contacts in this system.
  9. You can create tasks for yourself or your colleagues; this system will send task reminders.
  10. It has chat functionality; you can catch your colleague’s attention with a quick text in their Chatter System or send them a note about a change that has taken place today.
  11. You can upload documents to a library in Salesforce.com and be able to send them out to your contacts from wherever you are.  This will also be noted in the record in Salesforce.com.
  12. Assuming you are using Gmail (similar products for Outlook,) with Cirrus Insights (a Salesforce.com add-on,) you will be able to attach all your incoming and outgoing email to a particular student into their record with two clicks. This huge time saver will add tremendously to your operation – you really have to see this to believe it! From your G-mail account, you can also add new contacts, tasks-to-do for each contact, and calendar items. This all syncs into the appropriate record and user in Salesforce.com
  13. Although Salesforce.com has mass email capability, you will want to use the much more efficient, Vertical Response email product which requires no HTML to create newsletters or email templates. Vertical Response can track your correspondence as to the date it was opened and clicks.  It will track opt-outs and this will all be logged in the student’s record. With that kind of information you will be able to note those prospects who have not opened your email after a week or so, and then, choose to re-send your email. This action will improve your open rate.  Vertical Response allows you to include your favorite social media.
  14. Conga Composer – Because you may need this Plug-In for sending out word and excel documents with data from Salesforce.com, I have included this cost into the calculation below.  Composer essentially allows you to print documents with the appropriate merge fields.

Cost for an office of 2:

  • Salesforce.com – Free
  • Cirrus Insights – $17 per month
  • Conga Composer – $25 per month

This give your $58 dollars per month to add something that you may want to add to Salesforce.com.  You have plenty of choices.  All of these modules integrate seamlessly with Salesforce.com and you can find information about them on the Salesforce.com AppExchange site – https://appexchange.salesforce.com/.

The only catch – you will need to use Outlook or Gmail for your individual email system in order to log incoming and outgoing email. But, if you only want to log outgoing one-off emails into a student’s record, you can do that in Salesforce.com. Even if you don’t have Gmail or Outlook, you can still make Cirrus work simply by sending your office emails to a Gmail account.

If you are interested in seeing how this marketing and sales advantage works, you can go online and investigate these products. If you prefer, you can contact me directly at canderson@marketingtofullpay.com and I will be glad to speak with you about it.

This is one of the few times when an office of 2 or less people will have an advantage over the bigger offices. You will move people through the admission funnel with fewer resources and you will implement a much stronger marketing and recruitment program.  If you are interested in improving you customer relationship management software, this is the way to go.