Not all student leads are born equal. And here’s a simple question to understand this statement: What is your enrollment success rate like? Good? Great? Or barely surviving?
If it is barely surviving, there is a great chance that you’ve been acquiring irrelevant leads over time. If you have at all.
This is a situation that most recruitment teams of Indian universities find themselves. For context, there are more than 760 universities and 38,000 colleges in the country. Which means there is fierce competition for student enrollment.
How to acquire quality leads
So, there goes the real question, “How do I acquire quality leads?”
Here’s a list of seven proven ways that you and your admissions team can get high-quality student leads and ultimately increase the number of enrollments for your school.
#1. Build an Out-and-Out University Website
As a higher ed marketer, your major source of lead generation should be your university’s website. This is so for many reasons, including the fact that it is considered the most suitable platform for getting the contact details of prospects. Obtaining this might be quite difficult on other platforms simply because of …trust.
However, your university website as a source of quality student leads is down to certain factors such as responsiveness on mobile phones (trust me, this is where most prospects will visit your website from), the flow of your landing pages with one another, quality of forms, ease of finding information, etc. In other words, your university website should be more than a website. It is a marketing channel in education to get qualified students.
Download the free Ed-Tech Sales & Marketing Playbook Now!
#2. Advertise and Collaborate with Higher Ed Portals
This is especially useful if international recruitment is part of your enrollment strategy. But it works greatly for generating student leads locally too. College portals like Shiksha are adept at providing prospects information about studying in certain universities and colleges in India. It also enables institutions to advertise on the portal.
College portals also have better ranking on search engines like Google than your university’s website. Some of them are also known to run paid ads on Google. So, if you want greater visibility and expand your reach, it is something you should try.
#3. Invest in Google Analytics
Beyond generating leads, you want to convert them into full-fledged students of your school. Google Analytics brings you closer to this goal. It ensures you are investing your team’s energy in the right direction. Consider your website for instance where you have a lot of webpages with different information for prospects. Google Analytics lets you know if more traffic is going to the scholarship/aids page and as a result, can influence a decision to update that particular page.
#4. Adopt the A/B Test Model
At the end of the day, no one marketing campaign is a guaranteed success until proven otherwise. Which is why it is always advisable to do A/B tests when running your content marketing campaigns for student recruitment. An example is online forms, like Course Eligibility forms, which are predominant on university websites and landing pages. There is no denying there are a lot of questions you want to ask prospects, which will help in your follow-up endeavors.
However, this can be a hit-and-miss sometimes. Hence, the need to test different variations of these forms, with different content. Each form will most likely generate different amounts of leads, one more than the other. And if you have a tool like Google Analytics, which helps you track the performance of each one, you can optimize accordingly.
The same goes for the calls to action on your websites. As you already know, calls to action can be very delicate. It is sometimes the trigger for whatever decisions a visitor makes when on your website. A/B testing means that you can try a different copy for different webpages.
#5. Buy student leads from lead generation platforms
Platforms like IndiaStudyChannel are known to provide clients in the higher education sector with quality student leads in India from their database. The website basically collects contact information from students who are looking for admission to schools in India and shares it in exchange for a small fee per lead, which is often based on the type of course these students are looking for.
#6. Speed Up Communication with Chatbots
We are in an era where everything has become faster-paced than it has ever been. Adding chatbots to your website ensures that your university or college is not playing catch-up. Prospects who have questions about certain courses, for instance, can get them answered in real-time, without having to wait for a phone call or email from a recruitment agent.
With chatbots integrated into your website, the chance of a website visitor becoming a lead is greatly increased. Also, students from India, China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore all agree that when it comes to choosing from similar universities, they would pick the one that responded first. It is a no-brainer that chatbots offer arguably the fastest means of delivering responses to prospective applicants.
#7. Search Engine Optimization
A lot of students don’t usually have their school choices figured out until they begin to search online. It won’t be rare to find a candidate who wants to attend medical school to search for “Best Medical School in India”. Search engine optimization (SEO), when done properly, ensures that your school ranks high for medical schools in the search results. And this involves a lot of work, from optimizing the content of your website with relevant keywords to building high-quality links to it from other authority pages.
Converting Your Student Leads
Getting leads is never enough in marketing. The same applies to higher education marketing. The end game is enrollments. Hence, the need for a solution that helps your marketing and admissions team to achieve this.
Armed with all the necessary features, Leadsquared’s enrolment system does not only capture leads from all channels, but it also enables you to automate the entire admission process. From responding to inquiries to sending alerts for follow-up and tracking applicants’ activities.
Having helped streamline sales and marketing processes for top Higher-Ed and Ed-Tech companies like Byju’s, Vedantu, Unacademy, Great Learning (hybrid online & offline), and more, we compiled our learning into a sales & marketing playbook. What will you learn from the playbook?
- Opinions from industry experts
- Ways to enhance EdTech sales opportunities and marketing strategies for educational startups
- Increasing sales productivity across teams
- Driving student retention, up-sell & cross-sell
- Maintaining sales regimentation & right intervention during WFH
FAQs
While lead generation platforms offer targeted options, they might not always fit every budget. Consider Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to improve your website’s ranking in search results, making it more discoverable by students searching for programs like yours. Utilize Google Analytics to track website traffic and identify which marketing strategies are most effective in attracting your ideal student profile.
Focus on quality over quantity. Partner with reputable lead generation platforms specializing in Indian demographics relevant to your programs. Craft clear qualifying questions during lead capture to identify students with a genuine interest in your offerings and the academic qualifications to succeed. By implementing these strategies, you can attract potential students who are a good fit for your institution, increasing your chances of converting leads into successful enrollments.
Data is key to successful lead generation. Utilize website analytics tools to track user behavior and identify which aspects of your website resonate with prospective students. Analyze the demographics and interests of leads generated through different channels to understand which strategies attract your ideal student profile. Use this data to refine your online presence, optimize your marketing efforts, and ultimately generate higher quality student leads for your institution.
