Over the past three years online education inquiry generation has undergone a major shift in responsibility. Previously, it was about a 50/50 partnership between schools and marketers. Marketers used creative messaging and various online advertising channels to attract prospective students while the schools utilized strong recruitment and CRM practices to gain new enrollment.

As new legal and regulatory guidelines emerged around marketing messaging and recruitment practices, the responsibility of enrolling a quality student has shifted more toward the marketer. The quality and intent of the prospect needs to be well defined before she is passed to an admissions counselor. A university’s ability to develop the prospect’s enrollment intent is more limited than ever.

Schools are left to consolidate efforts to their highest-quality partners and online channels. The aggregate traffic model and an inquiry driven to multiple schools are no longer of great value; rather they are considered more of a “volume filler.” Admissions counselors can’t get into a sales competition for inquiries who express interest in multiple colleges. An admission representative should not be a salesperson, but rather a guide that aids in the process and helps the prospect make an informed decision about attending their college of choice.

As colleges and universities continue to focus on users who have a strong intent on furthering their education, they also hope to grab prospects that have shown interest in their school. We have seen a shift back to SEO and SEM channels. Schools are paying higher cost-per-leads for top placement of their logo on prominent websites. At the same time click costs are continuing to trend upward. Email remains a consistent driver of high-quality traffic but is underutilized.

Five years ago email was a major part of the quality mix of the major aggregators in education marketing; a quality compliment to internal SEM-SEO traffic that generated quality inquiries for schools. Then came call center traffic — a much cheaper, low-maintenance channel that enabled aggregators to fill high volumes in short time but relied too heavily on job data and pestering phone calls to potential inquiries. Email fell to the back burner with aggregators. Unfamiliarity with CAN-SPAM laws, and the desire to avoid spam problems, caused many schools to stay away from emailing direct information about their institutions. In reality call center traffic has become more of a spam problem, education opt-in users can receive up to 5-10 phone calls a day once their data is passed around.

As CAN-SPAM laws and processes streamline for opt-in users, email has become a higher-quality source. You can take the same user that opted-in for information about your school, send them an email presenting your school and let them choose to open and request information exclusively for your institution. The enrollment rates of those inquiries remain steady between 3%-5% and are comparable with PPC inquiries, but at a 25% lower CPL on average.

So why isn’t everyone running email traffic? Non-compliant spam is no longer a major concern, with mailers and email providers completely honed into maintaining legal practices. Besides, consumers’ opt-in to so much stuff, they end up creating their own spam. They are more or less used to email traffic as a staple of life now.

The real reason why everyone isn’t running email traffic is because email marketing isn’t easy. Traffic can be unpredictable with email providers like Yahoo and Hotmail changing their inbox algorithms and creating shifts in traffic similar to Google Penguin, a search engine algorithm update from Google. Also, maintaining data and keeping a fresh look with new data and messaging is difficult. Quarterly updates and constant landing page testing are part of the process which some agencies and institutions are not set up to handle.

All of these factors, combined with the fact that there are limited email players that cater to education, make running an education campaign for email traffic very tedious. However, as CPCs continue to rise on SEM traffic and education marketers look for new quality sources that are less tapped and competitive.

Email will become a stronger source for direct schools, and it will make a comeback with aggregate advertisers that moved away from the traffic for cheaper alternatives.

How has email marketing played a role in your education marketing strategy? Let us know in the comments below on Twitter @MediaWhizInc

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Marissa Mayer’s choices have been under the microscope ever since she left Google to head its major rival, Yahoo. Despite criticism over some of Mayer’s major decisions concerning Yahoo’s operations, I find her strategic moves both smart and interesting. She appears to be repositioning Yahoo as an online media buyer’s dream – a company that places a greater focus on ad-tech investment and development while still delivering a huge number of quality impressions, something that has always been a core strength at Yahoo.

Mayer initiated her grand plan to change the tech behemoth’s image as a slow, out-of-date Internet giant when she lead the company’s partnership with arch-rival Google (her former employer) for display advertising.

But she took the change-now, change-big plan one step further last month with the surprise announcement of Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr. By acquiring the most influential microblogging site in the United States (Tumblr hosts more than 112 million blogs and almost 60 billion posts per month), Mayer laid down the future of Yahoo. It’s a future built around smart online advertising opportunities and digital content.

So what does the acquisition mean for Yahoo? 

First, it shows that Yahoo understands the value of display advertising, which will be Marissa Mayer’s first bet at monetizing Tumblr despite users’ aversion to ads on the site. Display, a traffic source often underestimated by marketers, has developed dramatically over the last couple of years even outperforming traditional paid search in certain verticals. Furthermore, Google’s paid search cost-per-clicks often turn out to be too expensive for certain industries, pushing advertisers to explore other traffic options in order to pay more efficient cost-per-acquisitions.

Second, given that approximately 40% of Tumblr’s users access the site via their smartphones, the acquisition opens up new opportunities for Yahoo to expand its mobile presence. Tumblr’s users belong to a younger demographic that truly engages with mobile apps and mobile content. Yahoo could use the experience of the Tumblr team in building and growing a mobile audience and carry it over to its other properties in order to become a big player in the mobile space.

Yahoo will make use of Tumblr’s user database to serve ads that are relevant to each microblog’s owner and respective readers – ads will be served, not only based on interests and content, but also on whom these individuals are. Furthermore, the content that prevails on the microblogging platform – travel, entertainment, food , etc. – doesn’t overlap with the content currently displayed on Yahoo’s most trafficked properties (sports, news, finance), giving the search giant more opportunities for monetization.

Finally, this decision puts Yahoo in the news once again, this time as a company that is rebranding itself as hip and current in an attempt to get rid of the ‘old search engine’ image that it currently holds.

Overall, I see this as a smart move that brings Yahoo more data: the acquisition will give the company access to 300 million unique users per month, something that aligns with Mayer’s primary goal of increasing the company’s revenues by growing Yahoo’s impressions, page views and user interactions.

The challenge: How will Yahoo monetize this traffic without scaring Tumblr loyal users away? Will it find a way to monetize display and mobile ads as well as Mayer’s former employer? I believe it is possible, but we will have to stay tuned.

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The post What Yahoo’s Acquisition of Tumblr Means for Online Media Buyers appeared first on MediaWhiz.

If you are having trouble with your conversion rates or generating leads from your mobile site, then Conversion Conference in Chicago this month is a must-attend event. And our Giles McGrath, creative director, has all of the insight you’ll need for designing your mobile site with lead generation in mind.

In his presentation, “Don’t Just Replicate: Designing for Mobile Lead Gen,” Giles will distill our top-10 best practices for mobile lead-gen design. As he writes in the introduction for his presentation:

Mobile websites shouldn’t be a simple reproduction of your brand’s desktop site. Effective lead generation with mobile requires thoughtful consideration about how consumers interact with brands on Donttheir mobile devices, how they share content and the type of content and features that grabs their attention. In this session, you’ll see how you can unclutter your mobile website or app to improve conversion and generate more qualified leads.

Conversion Conference brings together expert speakers from all walks of digital marketing to help you increase your conversion rate and lead generation. With Digital marketers ranking conversion rate optimization as one of their top priorities of the year, it makes Conversion Conference an important event to attend.

We hope to see you at Conversion Conference Chicago, where we’d be happy to answer your mobile creative and lead generation questions. If you’re planning to attend Conversion Conference Chicago, please contact us so we can meet you.

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The post Conversion Conference Chicago: Our Expert Talks Designing for Mobile Lead Gen appeared first on MediaWhiz.

Editor’s note: This is the fourth post in a series focusing on best practices for lead generation in the online education industry.

Online performance marketing remains the most cost effective form of marketing and advertising. As society becomes more digitally focused, and consumers increasingly user their smartphones and tablets to run and organize their lives, advertisers will recognize additional opportunities to reach out to them directly to share the benefit of their perspective goods and services. Colleges and universities are no different.

In the 10 years I have worked in online marketing, I have worked with many of the nation’s top educators and administrators. In that time I have been a witness to the incredible growing demand of online education. The reach of the Web is endless. Educational opportunities that were once unavailable to many people   are now available to almost anyone, anywhere and at any time, throughout the world.

Online education is truly one of the greatest beneficiaries of the benefits of performance marketing. And no doubt the performance marketing industry has benefitted tremendously from its ability to help educators and administrators engage, acquire and retain prospective students.

No longer do you have to consider the cost of moving and living in a different state to obtain a college degree and figure out your housing budget to attend the classes that fit your major.

The surge of online degrees and course can, in part, be attributed to the fact that higher education is now so accessible to many people. The flexible schedule of an online degree, acquired from the comfort of your home, is hard to measure but being able to maintain your current job or family lifestyle and continue to expand your education is a priceless opportunity.

We are seeing everything from certificate and vocational training to master’s degrees and doctorates coming online from colleges and universities throughout the world. In some cases, schools are going even further by translating their curriculum into other languages, such as Spanish and Portuguese, to reach the LATAM audience. This provides people from every corner of the world the opportunity to get a certified U.S education.

With that in mind, it’s clear to me that this is an incredibly exciting time for online education. Its reach and accessibility is on a scale we have never seen before and it continues to grow at a steady rate.

Backing online education’s impressive growth is a robust performance marketing ecosystem.

It all starts with that first point of contact. That first email, call or search from a prospective student. The first point of contact is everything. It’s the beginning of the pipeline to a potential student realizing their dream of a college education.

MediaWhiz helps to plant and cultivate those first seeds and find those potential students everyday with our vast knowledge of the online education space and distribution channels, such as our internal email network and top-ranked affiliate network.

In some cases, by utilizing our Full Service Lead Program, I’ve created an entire portfolio of private, branded sites to the branded specification of a university and driven traffic directly to those pages to help increase not only the visibility of the brand but, more importantly, drive additional applicants to the school of their choice.

The Most Powerful Words in Online Education

Accessibility. Flexibility. Choice

These three simple, powerful words encompass the amazing ability of performance marketing to bridge higher education and the Web to the masses. College isn’t for everyone but now, more than ever, it’s available to so many more people for all the right reasons.

Please join me and my MediaWhiz colleagues at this year’s APSCU Convention and Expo, June 5-7, in Orlando. You can find us at booth #708. I’d love to learn about your ideas and goals for engaging prospective students online.

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The post How Performance Marketing and Higher Education Became Best Friends appeared first on MediaWhiz.

The evolution of search engine algorithms has added to the complexity of search engine optimization. More significantly, it has impacted the level of integration that is needed with other forms of Web optimization. SEOMoz has a great page that shows the updates year by year.

Search engine optimization is no longer strictly about publishing quality content and building the authority of the content. SEO now involves engaging consumers and building relationships.

The new paradigm of SEO is that it must be implemented in tandem with other website optimization efforts. These include user experience design and social media marketing.

Optimizing for the Desired User Action

Getting qualified traffic to a website is only half the battle; once visitors arrive, they need to perform an action. Whatever the desired action may be, whether it’s filling out a lead form, signing up for a newsletter or completing a purchase, the landing pages and the site in general must be optimized in such

a way that makes the desired action clear and compelling to visitors. Otherwise, the SEO efforts and investment that drove people to the site will have been done in vain.

Given the importance of both driving traffic to a website and influencing that traffic to execute a conversion, it is important not to think of these as two mutually exclusive tasks. The ability to drive traffic is partially dependent on the actions completed once visitors land on a website.

The engagement value of a website is a ranking factor. If a website has low engagement, the site’s organic search rankings can be negatively affected. For example, search engines can easily determine that a website has a high bounce rate if users click on an organic listing then quickly return to the search engine results page. This is a strong signal to the search engines that the site has either poor-quality content or simply provides a bad user experience and, therefore, the search engine will no longer want to send its users to that site. This results in lowered rankings. For this reason, it is essential that SEO efforts are integrated with usability/user experience optimization.

Integrating Social Media and SEO

Another important area of necessary integration with SEO is social media marketing efforts. Social signals, such as Likes, Tweets, +1’s, etc. are strong authority signals in the eyes of search engines. Furthermore, it is important to build strong relationships with consumers via SEO and maintain those relationships through social media. By building strong social communities and engaging with those communities, search engines will view a brand as a positive destination for its users and those connected to the brand’s followers will be more likely to come across and engage with the brand.

The integration between SEO and social media marketing that should always happen includes facilitating website visitors to join a brand’s social communities by prominently placed social media buttons and links on the website. If performed correctly, visitors driven to the site by SEO efforts can be leveraged for building a stronger social presence for the brand. Alternatively, website content meant to generate organic traffic should be shared via the brand’s social media profiles/communities to build authority to that content, increasing the SEO value.

These are just a few examples of various Web optimization principles and channels that should be integrated with SEO.

SEO should not be viewed as a stand-alone channel for inbound marketing, but rather part of a larger digital strategy that is fully integrated. Allow SEO to help other channels succeed and allow other channels to benefit SEO.

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The post HOW TO: Improve Your Site’s Optimization with SEO appeared first on MediaWhiz.

Editor’s note: This is the third post in a series focusing on best practices for lead generation in the online education industry.

The tide is changing in higher education. A more diverse student population can be found at most college campuses throughout America. The opportunities — and challenges — for universities to find, enroll and retain students have never been greater.

Two recent reports underscore this emerging reality.

A press release from the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU) reported that a surprising 92% of current students meet one or more standards of a non-traditional student. A glut of undereducated employees in the workforce — 90 million of them, according to APSCU — has helped widened the gap in the labor market. With an expected 85% of new jobs requiring a postsecondary education, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for higher-learning institutions to close the gap.

Institutions are facing challenges with student recruitment, retention, employer advocacy and more while striving to gain a competitive advantage.

Through years of admissions management experience I have gained an in-depth understanding of the ever-changing realm and unique marketing challenges of private higher-education.

What’s the silver bullet to achieving online marketing success in higher education? While it may seem rudimentary, the quick answer is clear: put the student first. Develop and maintain a student-centric approach. This requires higher education marketers to make all decisions with the student experience as the main priority.

Measure Higher Ed Marketing Results Early and Often

Many colleges and universities that have begun this transformation know that success lies in the ability to measure results, specifically by measuring student impact. The journey, however, begins with learning about the student beyond demographic information and engaging in a process of discovery before true engagement. Advisors are expanding their roles to form relationships with students. Faculty members are moving beyond a focus on learning outcomes and focusing more on the student’s overall learning development. But when does this student-centric focused approach really begin? How can this approach be optimized for greater success?

We know that the first year of the student experience is crucial for retention in the student life cycle; however, the path to long-term enrollment and retention success involves a truly holistic approach before the student even has an interaction with the college or university.

A student’s experience begins before he or she registers, fills out an application or even receives an informational brochure. It begins in the research stage, initiated by a basic question: “Which school is the right fit for me?” In my experience, making the decision to even ask this question is daunting, not to mention the proposition of starting the unknown path of an educational journey. Therefore, it is essential that every interaction the student has within the admissions process and beyond is tailored to the student experience.

Your marketing partner must be the true first step in the student enrollment and retention lifecycle. They are the bridge between your college or university and engaging the right potential student. Having a detailed understanding of student needs and creating the best student experience from this initial stage through the admission and retention steps has proven extremely valuable for me as the education project strategist for MediaWhiz.

MediaWhiz’s online education portal, ChooseYourColleges.com, which has traffic dominated by targeted search engine marketing, applies the same student-centric approach to engage the right students online. This strategy, as well our internal email channel, focuses on hand-picked media sources to deliver quality results. An additional distinction is that MediaWhiz acquires and manages the exclusive data we send via our internal email channels. Doing so ensures compliance and quality control remains with your college or university through an approval process.

Call Centers: The Unsung Heroes of Education Marketing

Another quality process that connects potential students to a college or university is a call center’s process of hot transfer. This process helps ensure a student has a more tailored fit with a school by identifying the student’s key needs through a dynamic conversation.

Call center hot transfers are a crucial starting point of a student’s overall higher education experience. The first conversation a potential student has with a college or university is with a call center representative who can tarnish the student experience.

The realm of control over a student’s first experience with a college or university rests largely within the admissions department, which can be frustrating with traditional call center operations. This is why I’m excited that MediaWhiz has partnered with a 100% inbound hot transfer product that holds an educated 20- to 30-minute call with the potential student before the student is transferred to the school, resulting in a 100% contact rate.

Being a part of a student-focused business partnership is very beneficial. This is what the experts at MediaWhiz can offer you.

How are you ensuring your higher education marketing campaigns are engaging and retaining prospective students? Share your best practices in the comments.

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The post Choose the Right Marketing Agency for Higher Education Advertising appeared first on MediaWhiz.

Ahh, summer. That most glorious time of year. The sun is shining, the beaches are beckoning and everywhere you look, people are on their smartphones — shopping and watching entertainment.

At least, that appears to be the trend for summer 2013. According to Adweek, “brands are preparing for what could be a break-through quarter in mobile advertising as consumers spend more time outdoors while constantly checking their iPhone or Samsung.” Summer, according to Brian Ng, marketing director and lead for brand strategy and trademark development at Del Monte Foods, presents an “unstructured environment” in which mobile is key to bridging the “planning-to-purchase divide.”

Mobile marketing and the summer go together like peas and carrots, to quote Forrest Gump. And to that combination a mobile performance marketing functionality, such as mobile lead gen, and marketers could see a big growth opportunity for their brands over the next three months.

eMarketer estimates that 15% of all US online retail sales in 2013 will be made on a mobile device, an increase from 11% in 2012. As I wrote in a recent post, mobile marketing is starting to positively impact brands’ sales trends. With more consumers using their mobile devices for shopping-specific actions (e.g., comparison shopping or searching for a store near them), the opportunity to reach consumers with relevant information, exactly when and where they need it, is the true benefit of mobile marketing.

Researching products and prices on mobile is the most popular consumer shopping activity. Seventy-two percent of consumers report they use their phone to research prices or seek a better deal online, according to a study of U.S. mobile Internet users conducted by AYTM Market Research.

Stats like that lend credence to our recent launch of MediaWhiz Mobile, our mobile performance marketing practice. As more consumers adopt a mobile-first approach to all aspects of their lives, particularly shopping, the ability to engage, acquire and retain mobile customers in an ROI-positive manner will be crucial for most brands.

Right now, many mobile marketing campaigns are centered around branding and apps. That’s all well and good but there is a great need for mobile-specific customer acquisition that taps into consumers’ mobile-shopping habits and needs. MediaWhiz Mobile is here to meet that growing demand.

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The post Coming Attractions: Mobile Commerce Is Poised for a Blockbuster Summer appeared first on MediaWhiz.

When looking for a distribution method for your marketing budget, where do you start? There are relationships with aggregators, vendors and others but with the ever-changing nature of the education industry and the goals related to school success, how do you know who to partner with? Who will give you what you’re asking for? Most importantly, who will deliver to you — the end buyer — what they’re promising?

This is a conundrum that many schools and education marketers deal with. Some providers haven’t survived the changing landscape. Whether it’s falling behind with compliance requirements, or struggling to maintain enough traffic to stay afloat, many online education marketers and agencies leave the business and move on to other, less-quality driven industries.

But what is important to a college or university should be of the greatest importance to the school’s marketing sources. We all know that high-quality, compliant leads are necessary for success with any higher education marketing campaign, but a partnership with the right aggregator needs to be more than just that; and a school’s expectations should be nothing less.

Compliance, quality and an understanding of a successful admission life-cycle from the first point of contact with potential students to enrollment is what most satisfies a client.

The Trust Factor

The focus of each school’s lead buyer should be the following: Do I trust this lead provider? Do they know what they’re talking about? And, do they know what I’m talking about when discussing goals, metrics and quality requirements?

The answer is probably. Your marketing partner probably knows what you’re looking to achieve, but is the entire marketing team on the same-page with you and your goals? Does their network know what you’re looking for? Does their SEM strategist understand your end goals? Does their creative team understand what will get you the most bang for your buck?

Fortunately, MediaWhiz has those tools and a team of Education Specialists to enhance the quality of all work, media and marketing going out the door.

By putting together targeted campaigns with the right marketing channels, partnerships and creative, the goals of each individual school are identified, defined and deployed with the school’s direction and insight, along with MediaWhiz’s direct-marketing expertise behind it.

So, think about your last marketing buy and think about your goals. When doing this, ask yourself this question: Do you have your goals identified?

Partnering with a marketing agency, such as MediaWhiz, that has the ability to spend time on your campaign, tackling it from all angles and using tools like compliance monitoring, sophisticated user engagement projections and true A/B testing will give you, the client, results you should expect.

The right direct marketing tools are crucial to a campaign’s long-term success. Yes, compelling copy is great, but if you have a company spending your marketing dollars you want to make sure the cost they’re incurring for quality users to “click” will actually convert on your landing page.

By using direct marketing tools and best practices, MediaWhiz helps clients increase the results needed from their marketing pieces. This gives your admissions team a better opportunity to engage the potential students you’re spending advertising dollars to target.

Don’t settle for poorly targeted marketing campaigns. Call us today at +1 646.264.0144 and learn how MediaWhiz can help you target the students you want to reach.

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The post Making the Most of Your Higher Education Marketing Spend appeared first on MediaWhiz.

Traditional and mobile SEO can’t continue to work as separate marketing initiatives. They must become synonymous.

According to the venture capital firm KPCB, there are more than 244 million Internet users in the United States and 358 million mobile device subscribers, 48% of which have smartphones.ComScore reports that 52.1% of U.S. mobile phone users access a browser on their device. This equates to 187 million U.S. mobile browser users.

Does this mean marketers need to shift all of their attention to mobile search? Not yet. But the trend indicates a definite shift in the devices people use for search. And that will have a significant impact on how digital marketers engage, acquire, and retain customers for years to come.

The rate of increase of mobile Internet users illustrates the need for marketers to stop thinking about traditional and mobile SEO as two distinct programs. Marketers need to start developing strategies to merge traditional and mobile SEO into a single multichannel marketing process that is device and platform agnostic.

The merger: Traditional SEO meets mobile

The rapid rise in consumer mobile phone use for local search and e-commerce necessitates an equally robust shift in a brand’s search strategy. Marketers need to cater their search and SEO campaigns to consumer interests and habits, regardless of the device used.

Mobile can no longer be thought of as a separate search component. Running a comprehensive search and SEO strategy that targets users on all devices opens up many customer acquisition opportunities for brands. Here’s a look at three such opportunities worth considering:

1. Ranking for mobile-specific searches. As more consumers switch from desktop browsing to local mobile search, there is a big opportunity for brands to launch paid and organic search campaigns aimed at mobile devices. Digital marketing on mobile devices remains less competitive than traditional desktop marketing, which makes mobile SEO-specific campaigns a low-hanging fruit.
2. Use Google’s mobile-specific search content index. Google has a separate index of content for mobile search than it does for its traditional search product. The results on a mobile device can be much different than those on a desktop for a given search query. One of the key differences in how Google selects its results on mobile is whether a webpage is user-friendly on a mobile device. A website that is not optimized for mobile will often provide a poor user experience on mobile devices. In those cases, Google will likely rank a more mobile-friendly page higher on the list of results.
3. Tap into local. Search results on a mobile device are more geocentric than desktop-based search results. Google recognizes that mobile users are on the go and are often searching for something close to them. Local businesses should have a mobile-friendly website, as well as optimized pages in each of the major local search engines, such as Google+ (formerly Google Places), Yahoo! Local, Bing Local, etc.

The Web is becoming more mobile. Marketers must realize and embrace blended desktop and mobile search and SEO campaigns to remain competitive. The mobile SEO era is now upon us.

How is your brand adapting its search strategy to take advantage of mobile-specific SEO opportunities?

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The post LoMo: Why the Future of SEO is Local Mobile appeared first on MediaWhiz.

Editor’s note: This is the first post in a series focusing on best practices for lead generation in the online education industry.

Year after year universities struggle with enrollment rates. At the same time marketers are testing new advertising channels, shifting budgets, designing new creative assets and everything in between to reach that seemingly elusive enrollment goal.

But why is nothing changing? Why are enrollment rates dropping after all that investment in time, money and effort?

It’s simple, really: The first point of contact is your first impression and it can make or break the success of a prospect’s enrollment. The best advertising campaign in the world is frustratingly useless if the admissions process deters prospective students.

Many universities with large marketing budgets fail to focus on what’s happening right under their nose, and in most cases, right down the hallway. I have seen everything from a first point of contact being a direct-mail piece to callbacks that occur two weeks after an online information request is submitted.

A successful online marketing campaign for a college or university isn’t just measured by a conversion rate. Performance marketing in education requires three critical components to be successful:

1. High-quality traffic sources: You need to have traffic (students) who are interested in learning more about a particular school.
2. Optimized creative: A high-quality landing page, great email design and banner ads that really catch the eye of prospective students.
3. Structured workflow: A cohesive admissions process that is ready to work a lead.

You can leave the first two requirements to the experts at MediaWhiz. We know what converts well in terms of website and landing-page design and we know what media mix will work best for you based on your program offerings, location and unique application requirements.

The third component is where you and your admission team come in. The admissions process needs to be prepared for these new prospects, armed with answers to their questions and the ability to guide them in the right direction based on their needs.

Below are a few best practices to follow to ensure your admissions team effectively and efficiently closes the loop from the time an information request is made to the ultimate goal of enrollment.

1. Your first point of contact should be a phone call. Anything less puts you light years behind your competitors who are using this tactic.
2. Call the prospect within 24 hours. Some schools call back within the hour, but manage these times within your team’s bandwidth.
3. Make sure your team has some sales background. At the end of the day you need your team to sell your school and help finalize the decision process for the potential student.
4. Make sure your Admission Representative:

• Asks open-ended questions
• Probes to identify buying motives
• Acknowledges prospects needs and concerns
• Links program details to buying motives
• Uncovers objections
• Addresses objections with solutions
• Creates a sense of urgency
• Gains commitment

5. Have a strong call closing. Assure that the prospect begins the application process immediately or that they have everything they need to begin the application  before ending the call. I’ve seen too many universities direct their prospect to an email that often ends up in the spam folder. Needless to say, the application process ends there.

6. Follow up on the prospects that are not interested at this time. If a prospect doesn’t sign-up after two weeks, it doesn’t mean they won’t sign-up in the future. All it costs is the price of a stamp or an email distribution to stay in touch with the prospect for as long as you wish. Some take up to a year to decide to attend college.

The purpose of advertising is to sell. It’s crucial, therefore, to have a strong admissions team that can sell the school and its programs and get the prospect to begin the application process while on the phone. Unfortunately, education will not sell itself. The competition in the education market is only getting stronger. If you’re not managing your lead flow efficiently, you could be handing hundreds of thousands of enrollment dollars to your competitors.

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The post Lead Nurturing: The Crucial Steps That Affect Your Enrollment Rate appeared first on MediaWhiz.