Sarala Birla University Increases Student Enrollment Rates by 100%

“SBU has seen a tremendous growth journey ever since their partnership with LeadSquared. We have managed to streamline our admissions by making them completely paperless. We have also created a benchmark for our admissions and marketing teams and witnessed enhanced student inquiry to admission rate. We have seen a growth of 100%. An admission management system such as LeadSquared is highly advisable to scale, and we would rate it 9 out of 10.”

Ajay KumarDean, SBU

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ZERO

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

INCREASED

ADMISSIONS

360º

PIPELINE VIEW

ADMISSION

INSIGHTS

Loves LeadSquared for:

100% Lead Capture
Complete Student Admission Journey Tracking
Detailed Reporting Capabilities
Managing Student Drop-Offs & Nurturing Leads
Easy Follow-ups – Zero Missed Opportunities

ZERO

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

INCREASED

ADMISSIONS

ADMISSION

INSIGHTS

360º

PIPELINE VIEW

Sarala Birla University (SBU) is a state-private university located in Birla Knowledge City in Ara, Ranchi, Jharkhand, India. The university was established by Bharat Arogya and Gyan Mandir in 2017. With over 1500 students and 100+ faculty members, SBU offers 50+ courses and is spread over 60 acres of land. It aims to create new benchmarks for quality education in various fields, viz. Technical, Professional, General & Medical Education in Jharkhand in particular & India and overseas in general. Even as a growing organization, it has seen a massive rate of enrollments in the last admission season.

SBU aims to be a global leader by creating a knowledge economy where academia and industry would integrate to nurture leaders who are closely connected to the roots and are creative, enlightened, and dynamic. SBU, envisions developing well-motivated global leaders who will be intellectually competent, morally upright, socially committed, and spiritually inspired.

Challenges Faced by SBU:

As a newly founded educational institution, SBU was on a mission to establish its brand image and create a presence among students and prospects. However, without an enrollment enablement tool, they faced multiple issues while scaling their admissions in turn facing reduced enrollment rates.

Student opportunities getting missed due to manual lead capture on excel sheets
Improper or missed follow-ups with prospective students
Improper nurturing sequences and zero to no personalization in student touchpoints
Prospect activity management and tracking
Unable to track student intent and priority
No marketing or admission analytics

Solutions Provided by LeadSquared’s Enrollment Automation:

Ever since SBU partnered with LeadSquared, they have increased their overall admission efficiency by over 35%, and enrollment rates by 100%. The main areas for the improvement of their admission processes were as follows:

1. Integrations With Affiliates and Publishers for Student Inquiry Capturing

“In the initial days, there were no proper records of potential students, we had above 1.5 lakh dialed calls, but no way to track the second follow ups. This led to delayed or missed follow-up on the leads and low enrollment rates. But ever since we implemented LeadSquared, we can now track vital activities, and our reach-out strategy has also become refined.”

Ajay KumarDean, SBU

LeadSquared has over 200+ integrations with multiple publisher panels and affiliates. Ever since SBU started its digital marketing initiatives, they had numerous lead inquiries from various sources. LeadSquared helped them integrate all channels and consolidate them. Currently, LeadSquared helps SBU with the following integrations:

Their university website and landing pages
Google,
Facebook
Shiksha
Other vendors
Mastersoft ERP
GreyQuest – Education loan provider

The purpose of this integration was to consolidate all data and manage them through a single dashboard. The integration has helped them create a vast presence among potential students through all publisher channels.

2. Exponential Increase of Student Inquiries and Capturing them without Leakage

We had traditional ways of marketing, no affiliates or publishers. We would organize seminars/webinars, procure databases from different vendors and cold-call them to bring them into the admission funnel. This would lead to a lot of confusion and ambiguity. LeadSquared’s integration with all channels helps us track leads from a single dashboard. This has dramatically increased our productivity and enrollment rates.

Integrating with multiple affiliates and publishers such as Google ads, Shiksha.com, Twigsnetwork, exit pop-up & others, helps SBU land 60-120 student inquiries daily. With numerous leads coming in from various channels, admission counselors are bound to miss out on follow-ups, leading to missed opportunities, and low enrollment rates. LeadSquared helps SBU capture leads from online, offline, and other channels and automatically distributes them among admission counselors based on multiple criteria.

3. Student Inquiry Distribution and Deduplication Logic

SBU wanted to reduce the student turnaround time. As soon as a student inquiry is captured onto LeadSquared for SBU, they can distribute these inquiries based on several criteria: lead origin, lead source, course, location, etc. Student inquiry deduplication is also a significant issue which they counteracted with the help of LeadSquared.

A student maybe interested in more than one course. This creates multiple opportunities for the university, and hence, various counselors keep following up with the student, which might lead to a missed opportunity. SBU captures student email/phone numbers as a unique field, and if there are multiple entries from a single student, it will reflect on leadSquared in real-time. SBU also has escalation parameters. Suppose a student inquiry that has landed into the system hasn’t been contacted within a stipulated time. In that case, It is passed on to another counselor, and they are updated about upcoming/pending tasks against that student lead.

4. Student Intent Tracking

counsellors can connect to students at any point based on critical student actions and touchpoints thereby increase enrollment rates

“On average, after follow-ups on 100 dials, universities see a 5-10% conversion ratio. With the help of LeadSquared, we can now gain a microscopic view of the student’s intent. This has allowed us to achieve conversion ratio and enrollment rates as high as 15-20%. Personalization and intent-based tracking have helped us overachieve our admission targets.”

Ajay KumarDean, SBU

It is essential to track the intent of a student. This helps counselors create engaging and personalized touchpoints. LeadSquared helps SBU track the website intent of applicants. They can track email opens, links visited, webinars attended, activity on SBU’s website, and more. They also have an exit form that has drastically increased the traffic to lead conversion ratio by 75%. “

Counselors can reach out to them through emails, SMS, Whatsapp, or call based on crucial student activities. LeadSquared offers winning email templates that help counselors drag and drop relevant emails and shoot them out to students within no time. The intent is also essential to prioritize students and plan a reach-out strategy.

5. Student Prioritization

Prioritize leads based on urgency and conversion readiness and increase enrollment rates

The admission counselors in SBU, on average, make around 2000 calls per day. Before LeadSquared, they used to call each student that would land up in their excel, but this was not efficient. Based on intent tracking by LeadSquared, these student inquiries are given scores. This helps counselors pick and choose the student that has a higher chance of enrollment. Universities can also define their criteria to prioritize student leads. For example, SBU prioritizes students that have filled the application form but have not paid the fee. Once the fee is paid through LeadSquared, the lead details are automatically pushed to the counselor team, who provides course details.

6. Tasks & Automations

Automate and establish communication channels based on applicant actions and increase enrollment rates LeadSquared’s automation has helped us digitize the entire admission process. We can automate redundant tasks and establish communication with applicants as soon as they take critical action. We also automate drip campaigns to keep nurturing the leads in the system. Thus helping us revive cold leads and bring them back into the admission funnel.

Each student has a unique ask. To grab their attention, it is critical to engage with them on a personal level. LeadSquared’s enrollment automation helps personalize and automate touchpoints through emails, SMSs, WhatsApp, or other channels as soon as the student inquires with the university. SBU’s team uses the intent of the student to plan their reach-out campaigns. LeadSquared keeps track of emails and SMSs sent by the team and the open and click rates. Counselors can also track their pending activities, upcoming tasks, and various stages of any student in the admission funnel.

This also helps them reduce application drop-offs and increase enrollment rates. Being long and time-consuming, finishing application forms at one go might not be feasible. For example, SBU has the following as a part of its application form.

Basic info
Application details
Contact details
Academic details
Document attachment
Make payment

Students may wish to leave and continue from where they left, and counselors on a real-time basis would see where the students are in the application process, thus reducing drop-offs by 20%. Through personalized communication, SBU has also managed to increase lead engagement by 25%.

7. Deriving Admission and Marketing Insights

derive Data driven marketing and admission insights and allocate your budgets accordingly LeadSquared helps devise trends in the coming sessions. The manual process does not help us derive conclusions, but LeadSquared’s reporting capabilities have helped us analyze and devise strategies to boost our admission rates. Therefore, we can pinpoint best-performing courses, agents, regions, and more. Deriving admission and marketing insight from LeadSquared’s custom-made reports has never been easier.

SBU uses LeadSquared for both marketing as well as admission efforts. The productivity reports help all their teams track efficiency, set KPIs, and allocate budgets. LeadSquared has over 150+ marketing and admissions reports and helps multiple teams in the following ways:

Admission heads can track all admission counselor activities and profitable lead sources in real-time.

Admission counselors can track daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly metrics such as – Number of dialed calls, connected calls, Overdue tasks, the best time to reach out to students, student website intent, daily enrollments, inquiry to admission ratio, pipeline progression, and much more.

Marketing users can track metrics such as the number of inbound student inquiries, leads from sources, MQLs, from multiple integrators, email and SMS campaign efficiency, open & click rates, drop-offs, and more.

Results

Ajay Kumar, Dean, SBU, concludes by stating “SBU has seen a tremendous growth journey ever since their partnership with LeadSquared. We have managed to streamline our admissions by making them completely paperless. We have also created a benchmark for our admissions and marketing teams and witnessed enhanced student inquiry to admission rate. Thus, nurturing students in the database and leading them to conversion has become very easy, and we have seen a growth of 100%. We have 60 users operating on LeadSquared and have found the support to be top-notch. An admission management system such as LeadSquared is highly advisable to scale, and we would rate it 9 out of 10.”