CRM in Further Education

At a time where constant competition in the education sector is the norm, further education institutions need to differentiate themselves from their competition to stand out. So, how can they do that? Spoiler: CRM in Further Education.

If you are reading this, you are most likely part of an educational establishment – however, tools and techniques employed by the commercial sector can still apply to you. There will be quotas that must be met, organisational challenges to be overcome and competition from other educational institutions.

A CRM system can target expenditure on student acquisition, leaving more to maintain high-quality services and programmes.

CRM can also help you to support students already at the institution and organise alumni programmes.

There are three main benefits that CRM can deliver to any educational institution:

  1. Increase enrolment opportunities
  2. Enrich the student experience
  3. Improve service levels

Read on to find out more.

Increase Enrolment

When it comes to marketing in the education sector, you must focus on the efficiency of your outreach efforts. A good starting point is to use segmentation and targeting (which are core functions of CRM) to improve the response rates of your campaigns. By sending the right messages to the right people at the right time, you can expect to see a significant uptake in your marketing campaign ROI.

Open days will, in most cases, be the first in-person contact that you have with your potential students. Using a CRM system, you can analyse the time of day that open day attendance forms are filled in (with one of our clients, the majority are filled in after 5 pm) and capture the data provided from your open day sign up forms straight into your database.

Once those who have filled in your data capture forms are in the database, it will create a unique ID for each entry. Now that you have the information in your CRM database, QR codes specific to the student can be created, which can be scanned on the day. In addition to reducing wait times at the check-in desks, this will allow you to compare the people who said they were attending with the people who actually attended.

By capturing this data can you can decide which campaign to send out to the contacts in your database. You can send one campaign to those that attended the event and a separate one to those that did not attend on the day.

On top of supporting your marketing, your CRM system can help you manage the relationships that you have with schools and other feeder institutions, such as brokers for international students. By providing information on visa status, contact details and exam history, it makes managing their experiences much easier for the education institution.

Enrich Student Experience

The students that arrive at your doors are more connected and engaged with social networking and new technologies than any previous generation. So, what are you doing to reach out to them? Modern CRM platforms are increasingly offering social media and email marketing integrations that can help you interact with your students on a more personal level, improving their perception of your institution, whilst simultaneously strengthening your understanding of them.

Improve Service Levels

CRM is no stranger to the concept of improving service levels in any industry. With CRM for education, the need is often focused on ensuring that your help desks are operating at peak efficiency, or that requests are routed to the correct departments.

You can also manage pastoral care practices within the institution, tracking any extra support required by students, extra time, counselling and so on. Having this data in your CRM then allows you to generate reports so that you can efficiently allocate your support resources.

Customisable reporting functions enable you to access key information as soon as you need it, from dashboards to traditional reports, so that you can improve on the tracking and reporting of student progress and other KPIs at any stage.

If you would like to talk about CRM in Further Education, then please get in touch. We firmly believe that CRM is more than just software it is also the processes that you implement along with the software.

With Collier Pickard, you have access to over 25 years of experience in the industry and the expertise that comes along with that. We have been helping a variety of businesses throughout the education sector for many years and we’d be pleased to help you.

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