Marketing Automation in Schools

Independent schools are all about the personal touch. To each and every student, potential student, parents, partners, and sponsors. It’s why parents pay the fees and a big part of the reason for why those fees are typically sizable. This starts from the moment they first lay eyes on a piece of marketing collateral, to their opening day and all the way through?

However, personalisation in marketing is often overlooked. The common misbeliefs being that it can be incredibly time-consuming, difficult to execute, and hard to quantify the results. The answer to this is Marketing automation; something often overlooked by schools around the country, despite its benefits being insurmountable.

Event marketing is one area where marketing automation comes into its own. It can be harnessed to promote events such as open days, performances, campus tours or even webinars. You’re able to create workflows that trigger event-specific messages based on previous engagement from the student and parent.

The first thing to look at when considering bringing marketing automation into your playbook is how it can help increase admissions. And then secondly, how you can utilise it to see the process through from first inquiry to application. The standard ideas for marketing automation would be a simple workflow consisting of the typical questions like “Why should my child attend your school?” or “How much do you charge?” with the last few emails reminding them about deadlines and processes.

However, there is so much more potential that is not yet utilised. Picture a school with three main selling points; Academia, Drama, and Sports. We can start a personalised marketing journey around these three areas the moment they first land on the school’s website. In this scenario, let’s say the parent of the child is interested in an open day and the school and they are looking for a school with an excellent sports department, their marketing journey could look something like this:

They have heard about Force24 School from a family friend so have decided to do some research and sign up for their open day. Their child has excelled at their current school in rugby so they want to make sure the school has a great rugby department to keep pushing their child. Before they sign up to the open day, they are likely to check over the sport related pages of the website to find out a bit more about what they could expect for their child. With a modern marketing automation platform, this activity is tracked and logged against their IP. They like what they see, so they sign up for the open day in two weeks and leave their email and mobile number. This is where the journey begins.

That tracked web activity is now linked to the email address they have added. Each time they visit the website in the future, that activity is added against their individual profile that has now been synced automatically with the schools CRM. The automation platform knows they have viewed a lot of content and web pages related to sports at the school, so after they sign up to the open day, their confirmation email could contain more information about sports at Force24 School.

Leading up to the open day, all communications could feature sport as a primary aspect of the marketing content with academia and drama featuring less prominently. If the parent started to view more information about the academia of the school, then automatically the communications could adjust to reflect that. All of this continues to maximise engagement by sending them the most relevant communications at the right time.

A huge benefit of marketing automation for schools is the ability to add SMS directly into marketing campaigns. On the day of the open day, 7:30 AM the parents could receive a text reminding them of the open day and saying they are looking forward to having them there. 15-minutes before the start of the day, they could receive a text telling them that at 11:30 there is a sporting event on the field, and to respond “Yes” to receive a map. Or alternatively, if their engagement in marketing material has altered to be more oriented around drama, they might get a text telling them there is a performance in the theatre in 20-minutes.

There are so many possibilities and use cases for open days alone, but it doesn’t just stop there. One thing we commonly see automation used in schools for is student retention. There are a few key age groups where schools tend to leave private schools, year 7, year 9, and year 12 / sixth form.

Automation helps with retention by adding that personal touch to all communication with parents and students alike. Parents want to feel involved with their child’s school life and appreciate that personal touch. With modern platforms, this is easily automated and controlled. Each parent and each pupil will automatically be placed in different marketing lists depending on where they sit in the CRM. If you are Jack’s parents and he is placed in Mrs. Oldfield’s class within the CRM, this will update within the platform, and they will receive any relevant communications to Mrs. Oldfield’s class. Jack might also be in the rugby 2nd team, so will end up in that marketing list as well.

The first thought we see schools have when starting to think about the potential of marketing automation is the inevitable cost and time. All that sounds very expensive and time-consuming to get off the ground, doesn't it? But when it comes to it, it’s pretty much the complete opposite. We find that most schools, whether using our platform or another, cover the entire annual cost and more by enrolling just one more student that they wouldn’t have met otherwise. That’s not to mention retaining students on the fence about looking elsewhere. When that’s all it takes to justify, it ends up being a bit of a no-brainer.

The next thought is often “What if it can’t integrate with my CRM?”. Well, any platform worth its cotton socks have an in-house integrations team that can custom build integrations into any CRM with an Open API to your exact specification. Be warned though, there are some platforms out there that can’t do this.

Now just as your students are going to get the best education from subjects like Maths to English, Force24 will teach you everything you need to know about marketing automation.