While other educational institutions have one main enrollment period, the language school booking process is a year-round ordeal, requiring your staff to always be on their toes. As a result, the CRM and Marketing Automation for Language Schools software can be a language school’s best friend when coordinating recruitment activities.
From automated follow-up to detailed reports to agency monitoring, these platforms offer several helpful features to streamline the student recruitment process. Learn about the most useful CRM for schools and marketing automation tools.
1. Monitoring Language School Agent Activities in CRM
For many language schools, agents are the main method of reaching students. Despite their invaluable role, however, many admissions teams struggle to manage and assess the overall impact of the agencies their schools work with. Since agents work independently, it can be difficult for language schools to keep track of how many leads they’re in contact with, how many bookings they’re submitting, and what stage they are at with each prospect.
That’s where CRM and marketing automation come in. When set up correctly, your system can enable you to track and measure the activity of both individual agents and agencies.
Example: HEM’s Mautic CRM has a section devoted to agencies where language schools can create and manage agent and agency contacts and track the associated leads.
2. Create and Integrate Online Forms with Marketing Automation for Language Schools
Most CRM and marketing automation platforms enable you to create various online forms and track and organize the data these forms collect. From inquiry forms to online quote generators to bookings, you can customize forms that perfectly fit your school and your prospects.
Example: Mautic enables users to build fully customized inquiry forms. You can determine the name of the fields you use and use different field types, such as checkboxes, dropdown menus, and text.
Another perk of creating forms with CRM and marketing automation for language schools is that all the information they collect is centralized within one system, making it much easier to keep track of your leads.
When a prospect submits their information on your website, a contact will automatically be created in your CRM, and the form fields will automatically populate their profile. As they complete other forms, their profile will be updated with additional information.
Example: In Mautic’s contact dashboard, you can easily see what stage each prospect is at in the enrollment journey. You can also click on an individual profile for an in-depth look at which forms they have submitted and their responses to help inform your follow-up efforts.
By integrating online forms to your CRM, you can manage all your data in one place and ensure your contacts are as accurate and descriptive as possible. Having this information organized and readily available will help you address your prospect’s exact needs and concerns when you contact them.
3. Lead Scoring for Language Schools
While it’s considered best practice to follow up with all of your prospects, lead scoring can help you organize your efforts to increase your chances of reaching your enrollment targets.
This marketing automation feature assigns a numeric value to contacts based on their suitability for your school and readiness to book.
Example: In HubSpot, a popular and comprehensive CRM and marketing automation program, you can score leads based on their contact information and actions. For example, leads are rewarded if they open a certain email.
Source: HubSpot
Your school will define the parameters that make an ideal lead and the factors that decrease a prospect’s chances of booking, and your CRM will automatically score each lead that comes in.
For instance, if a prospect’s language proficiency qualifies them for their program of interest, points could be added to their score, while those whose proficiency levels are below the requirements of the course they are interested in could lose points.
Likewise, prospects inquiring from your main markets or those who live locally could be assigned a fairly high score upon entering your system. On the other hand, if a prospect is from a region where obtaining a study visa is difficult, their score may be docked.
Points can be added and taken away similarly based on a prospect’s engagement with your marketing and follow-up activities. For example, completing a free online quote may be worth a certain amount of points, while you might deduct points from prospects who haven’t opened your emails or answered your calls for some time.
4. Make and Log Phone Calls Using CRM for Language Schools
Although there are several ways to reach prospective students online today, phone calls remain among the most effective ways to drive leads toward booking. By talking directly to prospects, you create a one-on-one connection that no digital channel can fully replicate.
On the flip side, though, the personalized nature of phone calls can also make it difficult to keep track of your calls, as they don’t leave a digital footprint like texts and emails do.
However, with a CRM, you don’t have to resort to sticky notes and scrap paper to take down contact details and record important parts of conversations. Many CRM platforms enable you to log phone calls and record notes.
Example: You can log calls and take notes in Mautic, stored in the contact’s profile. This way, you can easily refer to past conversations whenever necessary.
This will help your admissions team organize all the pertinent information gathered from calls and track what calls were made and when.
Of course, some language schools may shy away from making phone calls during the follow-up process due to the high fees involved in ringing international numbers. However, many CRM systems offer integrated Internet calling platforms that enable users to contact prospects overseas for a reasonable price.
For instance, HEM’s Mautic packages include a browser-based click-to-call feature with a flat fee of only $40.00 per user per month to make unlimited calls to local and international numbers.
5. Automated Email Workflows for Student Recruitment
As any language school knows, email is one of the simplest ways to relay information to prospective students. But to use email well, your messages must be personalized, appropriately timed, and relevant to your prospects at each stage of the booking journey.
To help facilitate this, many schools and businesses use marketing automation to ensure the right messages are sent to the right people at the right time.
As such, automated workflows are perhaps the cornerstone of marketing automation for language schools. Most marketing automation programs will enable language schools to segment leads by program type, accommodation preference, and booking stage. You can create workflows that automatically send them the appropriate emails from there.
Example: Once someone fills out one of your forms – in this case, a TOEFL practice test – your CRM will send out a series of emails at a set period. If the contact doesn’t respond, a task will be automatically created in your CRM, and your admissions staff will be notified to follow up with the prospect.
CRM and marketing automation can also help automate your multilingual follow-up. You can segment prospects by language and build workflows that deliver follow-up content in those languages. This makes it much easier for leads to learn more about your school, as they’ll receive information in their mother tongue.
Example: If a prospect requests information about Camp Pilgrim’s summer immersion courses using this French form, the school’s CRM could add them to a workflow with French follow-up content.
With several different language schools for students to choose from, you want to make sure that your school does what it can to stand out – and prospects will likely recognize the extra effort you put into personalizing your communication with them.
6. Calendar Integration for Language Schools
A day in the life of a language school staff member is often busy. From coordinating meetings and calls to processing bookings, there is much to keep track of daily.
A CRM calendar can help you organize – and remember – all those moving pieces so your team can streamline its recruitment efforts. In addition, this feature can also help managers monitor their team’s productivity and workload.
Example: Your team can populate Mautic’s calendar with all your booking activities. You can also assign these events to certain staff members, and they will be notified when their task is approaching its deadline.
You can also sync Mautic to your Google and Office 365 calendars so all your events are consolidated in one place. This feature makes it easy to ensure that no follow-up task falls through the cracks.
7. Language School Social Monitoring
Social proof is an essential component of any school’s marketing strategy.
If past students enjoyed their time at your school and shared that positive experience online, more students would be likely to book – it’s the law of customer satisfaction.
This is especially pertinent for language schools, as many of your prospects are interested in traveling and exploring a new culture. This means they’ll likely be taking photos and videos of their adventures and sharing them online.
As a result, language schools tend to generally have a large collection of student-generated content. However, unless your school can monitor what students say about it, you’ll miss out on precious social proof.
CRM and marketing automation can help you track and promptly share those posts on your website and social media channels.
Example: On HubSpot, you can monitor Twitter mentions to share memorable content to your website and social media channels.
Another way to keep up to date on your online presence is through hashtags. Some marketing automation programs will notify you whenever someone uses your school’s hashtag on social media.
Example: In Mautic, you can create streams for each branded hashtag to easily track your Twitter activity.
Some platforms offer more robust social monitoring, so consider your priorities when selecting and implementing a CRM.
8. How CRM and Marketing Automation Reporting Helps Language Schools
Student recruitment is not black and white. While there are best practices that schools are well-advised to follow, a successful strategy involves constant and careful monitoring to discover which activities are performing as you expect and which need some TLC.
CRM and marketing automation systems offer highly detailed reports that will help you understand the full impact of your efforts. That way, you can continuously improve your campaigns and maximize your school’s return on investment.
HEM’s Mautic CRM offers several readymade reports custom-built for the education sector so your school can monitor the metrics that matter most to you.
For instance, knowing how many inquiries you are generating at a given time is generally a top priority for language schools regarding monitoring. You will likely also want to keep track of your program enrollment numbers to determine what courses to promote when booking deadlines approach.
Here Are Examples:
1. You can customize Mautic’s dashboard with several different reports, including the number of leads you generate and the programs they book.
As language schools want to cultivate a diverse student body, you’ll probably also want to keep track of the countries that your leads are coming from.
2. With a contact map and country chart, you can easily assess your lead demographics using Mautic CRM for language schools.
To continuously improve your digital marketing efforts, you should monitor how effectively your recruitment channels drive conversions.
Example: Mautic’s Leads by Channel report allows schools to see which channels are driving the most inquiries – which can be helpful knowledge when you need to boost certain course enrollments – and which recruitment channels you can be working to improve.
Between promoting your courses, managing your agency relationships, and coordinating your follow-up process, it can be difficult to properly organize, monitor, and assess your student recruitment efforts. CRM and marketing automation can be the ribbon that binds together all your language school’s digital marketing activities. Offering several practical features and simplifying otherwise complex tasks can make your admissions team’s lives a whole lot easier and your school a whole lot more successful.
FAQ To Consider
What is CRM in marketing automation?
When set up correctly, your system can enable you to track and measure the activity of both individual agents and agencies.
