Imagine this:
It’s the morning of your next big college fair. You’ve got your booth prepared, and the marketing materials look inspiring. You’re all set to greet students with a big smile and crush your admission goals.
The event turns out to be better than you hoped. Hundreds of students show up at your booth and dozens fill out your inquiry forms. You’re going home with a grand loot.
Back at the college, you manually upload these leads into your system and assign them to your admission reps. Now, you spoke to the prospect in person, you know she’s interested.
At this point there are three things that usually happen:
- The rep reaches out to the student once, twice, but doesn’t connect. And there are no more follow-ups. He forgets the lead and moves to the next one
- The rep reaches out to the student, he finds out he’s late because she has already made up her mind about another school.
- The rep reaches out to the student, connects and invites her for a campus tour
Only one of these outcomes is in your favour. But what if I said all three could be and should be?
Enter Landing Pages and Engagement Journeys.
Two factors decide whether a prospect will enroll at your college after you’ve met her at an event:
- Are you reaching out to her before everyone else?
- Are you reaching out to her even after most others have stopped?
And it’s simple (if not easy) to cover both these bases:
A. Make a Landing page for the event
Instead of pen and paper inquiry forms, create a landing page with a lead form specific to the event you’re attending. And keep this page open on one or multiple tabs at your booth.
Your enrollment system should have a bunch of landing page templates you could choose from and publish within minutes. On a modern enrollment system, this DOES NOT require any coding and is only a matter of a few clicks & drops.
Using a landing page as a form allows you to capture and transport leads immediately into your enrollment system. There’s no manual upload needed at all. And your reps can start a conversation on that very day.
How’s that for a quick first move?
B. Create an Engagement Journey
Even before the event begins, put down your follow-up plan on a sheet of paper.
Once you have your strategy down on a paper, map it on your enrollment system. This again just a drag and drop activity and shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes. Here’s an example:
With an intuitive and robust enrollment system like LeadSquared you can make this workflow quickly on your way to the event, it’s that easy.
Engagement workflows make sure you start connecting with the lead as soon as they fill up a form at your booth. But more importantly, a defined workflow makes sure your reps work every lead well and through, with multiple follow-ups, before discarding it.
- It sends out regular follow-up reminders to the rep
- It sends out automated, but personalized emails and SMS at scale
- It tracks clicks and website activities to notify your reps if any lead shows admission intent.
C. You’re all set!
You’re ready to take on that college fair. Just make sure to connect the engagement journey to the landing page, and the inquiries you capture would be added to the flow automatically. Cutting down the response time to just a few seconds!
In Conclusion
315 out of the 400 schools we audited said they’re tired of struggling with this problem. That’s 80%, nothing trivial, a loss of thousands of dollars every year.
But (as we saw), two steps could skyrocket your conversions. It’s just a matter of keeping invested in your prospects even after the event is over. After all, if you stop caring right after the fair, why shouldn’t they?
Key is, move fast and stay interested. To sum it up –
- Stop using paper forms at events, they’re not needed anymore. Your audience today is much used to a digital touch.
- Instead, use landing pages with lead forms and keep these open on multiple devices at your booth.
- Design a follow-up strategy, map it on your enrollment system and let it assist you in seeing every lead through.
So, ready to stop inquiry drop-offs at your school? Take a demo to see how LeadSquared helps you set this process up in a day.
