Email Marketing has been a great addition to our private school marketing tools. Its customizable format makes it ideal for targeting full-paying families and its low cost makes it affordable for most organizations. But there is a more powerful sibling to email marketing now within your reach – Marketing Automation! This is email marketing on high power steroids.
Marketing automation allows you to communicate at another level. Here are some examples:
- Trigger Campaigns – an email campaign that responds to changes in the consumer’s step in the admission process. For instance, your applicant has just completed his/her interview; the change is noted in the student’s record. Based on this change, the program is triggered to automatically send out a series of letters to the student over a set period of time – this is known as a drip campaign. When the student opens two of these letters, the program is triggered to alert the admission counselor.
- Web Analytics – once you have a prospects email you will have the ability to tell when they looked on your website and how much time they spent there. You can identify what captured their attention and what their particular interests are. This enables you to create the best follow-up and contact with the prospect around those interests.
- Lead Scoring – This allows the marketing automation program to determine who is hot and who is not based on how you rate your prospective student based on their interactions with you, your program, and your program requirements. Once this prospect hits a certain score (say 60), there will be an action to alert the admission counselor, or to send a special email to that prospect.
Examples of possible ratings for this kind of interaction might be:
- Student opens a sports email = 10 points
- Student opens an arts email = 15 points
- Student clicks a link in any of your email correspondence = 15 points
- Student attends an open house = 25 points
- Student receives a high score when interviewed = 25 points
- Student submits an application with fee = 15 points; add another 35 points if financial aid is not required
Once there total involvement exceeds 60 points an action or task notice is triggered.
There are many marketing automation services available and once you research them, you will discover the best one suited for your school’s purpose. Listed below are some of these services:
- Eloqua.com;
- Genius.com
- Marketo.com
- Net-results.com
- Pardot.com
- Salesfusion.com
- Treehousei.com
Marketing automation continues to get more affordable for private schools. Learning how to use these tools will be an important part of your marketing strategy in attending to the needs of the full-paying family.