How can the education industry improve overall customer acquisition results?

China's education industry is entering a golden age. Especially with the relaxation of the two-child policy, the education of infants and children has gradually become a hot topic. However, high customer acquisition costs, scattered channels and long cycles have also become pain points in the industry.

1. Current Status of Education Marketing

The following analysis will start from the two aspects of marketing types and problems and pain points, and also point out the goals of breaking the deadlock.

1. Marketing Type

From the perspective of marketing types, marketing in the education industry usually involves placing advertisements online on search engines such as Baidu or Toutiao, or operating one’s own new media matrix - WeChat , including earlier Weibo, etc., or placing advertisements on video websites. The cost of this type of marketing is actually quite high.

There are also some offline marketing methods, such as traditional door-to-door promotion , lectures, or holding meetings, or conference marketing.

On the one hand, traditional customer acquisition methods are very costly, and on the other hand, the channels are indeed very fragmented. If you want to analyze the final delivery effect of each channel, it is quite difficult to do so. Because many times when you ask the customer who has placed the order what channel he came from, sometimes he may be very vague in his answer, or even if he does tell you, the person who enters the data into the system will not make a record of it.

In this way, the final analysis results are not accurate, and it is difficult to obtain a very precise statistics to measure the leads obtained from this activity, whether the orders were finally placed, and what the entire sales chain is like. It is difficult to have a very clear report analysis.

2. Problems and pain points

The following Excel spreadsheets are what Mingshi Education has been using in the past. When organizing an event, there will be an Excel spreadsheet. This spreadsheet will contain all the customers’ names, contact information, students’ names, grades, where the information was collected, where it came from, etc.

The registration forms are scattered. There are actually many Excel tables in a series, and there is one table for each event, which is very scattered. We have a core business system, and we hope they will record it into it, because the levels of our front-line employees vary. I may have this requirement, but they may not necessarily execute it. As a result, these leads are very scattered, and it is difficult to count the effect or track the conversion of leads.

Unable to follow the clues. Who followed up on the clues and what was the follow-up situation? Did the deal get done in the end? The information is scattered in the table, so it is difficult to analyze the so-called sales funnel in CRM, and it is also difficult to analyze the effectiveness of this activity, such as input-output analysis.

Waste of clue resources. Many times leads are wasted, why? Because these clues are collected and eventually given to sales staff for follow-up, it is difficult to monitor whether they follow up and what the progress of the follow-up is. Only the people on the front line know the situation, and it is very difficult for the headquarters to supervise. For example, the marketing department brings back so many leads and assigns them to the front line for follow-up. It is difficult to manage whether any leads are followed up or not and how the follow-up is going if there is no system to support it. In the past, there was a lot of waste of leads. That is, I spent a lot of energy collecting these leads from outside and handing them over to the sales department for follow-up, but they were actually wasted.

Therefore, we proposed to build a CRM system.

3. Construction goals

First, multiple channels are integrated into the clue pool for unified management

It is necessary to integrate various activities into a unified management platform and a unified resource pool. All activities, whether online, offline, or through lectures, can be gathered together from various channels and imported into a unified management platform, a unified resource pool, so that they can be managed in a unified way. This is the most basic purpose.

Second, sales team management

You can set KPIs, such as the amount of follow-up resources and conversion rate , which is the conversion situation of the sales funnel, and hope to follow up through this system. The salesperson's specific progress can be analyzed, such as the number of calls he made, the number of follow-up calls, and the final order status, all of which can be generated through the system.

Third, social media marketing communication

The dissemination of new media is something that has to be done. Many companies started doing it three or four years ago, or even earlier, four or five years ago. If you don’t do it now, you will be very behind the times. In China, of course, it’s WeChat, and abroad, there are Facebook, Twitter and other things. The dissemination of social media is also very necessary. Everyone knows Durex , which has done particularly well in this field. It uses hot topics and has powerful copywriting to create wave after wave of social media dissemination.

Fourth, marketing activities management

Marketing activity management, including support for marketing activities and analysis of activity effects. If I want to do a marketing campaign, I have to set up a goal and a plan for the marketing campaign, including how many people the plan covers, how many leads can be returned in the end, and how much data is actually converted into orders. I hope to be able to make good plans. At the same time, I can keep following up during the process to find out what is actually happening, and then analyze the input-output ratio of the marketing campaign and what the ROI is, so that I can know whether to continue this type of marketing activity next time.

Fifth, customer management

Customer management actually includes customer profiling, and precise marketing can be done through tools . Only with customer profiling can precise marketing be done. Customer profiling is actually something that many people are discussing, and you can label customers accordingly based on their behavior.

For example, in the education industry, if you are a junior high school student, I should not push high school courses to you. If you are an elementary school student, I should not push courses that are irrelevant to you. If you push them to him, he will have no demand and will not be interested. So this is why we need precision marketing, and I believe it is similar in other industries.

6. Marketing Automation

Marketing automation means that I can design some tasks, determine whether the customer is interested based on tags, and push content that the customer is interested in at regular intervals.

Once we have these construction goals, we will look for solutions and think about how to implement them.

2. Marketing Automation Solution

1. Find a solution

In the process of searching for solutions, we did look at many types of CRM on the market, including CRM platforms and software. When we proposed this goal, we did not explicitly say that we wanted to build a so-called SCRM, because we might not have known about the existence of SCRM at the time. We searched for it in the way of CRM, and later in the process of searching, we discovered that there was a concept called SCRM. When finalizing the plan, the differences between CRM and SCRM were also considered.

One difference between CRM and SCRM is that traditional CRM actually focuses more on the back-end process, that is, the management of the sales process, and is more of a platform for sales personnel to use.

Of course, some of the more advanced foreign manufacturers also have this marketing section. For example, Hubspot also has this marketing function, but its marketing function is usually more through EDM, that is, through email, or text message, or integrated with some foreign social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. If it is implemented in China, it will not adapt to the local environment, because the most popular social tool in our country is actually WeChat, and they don’t actually have such a ready-made solution. Of course, their products are still very complete, that is, the back-end process is very powerful. Its front-end marketing may be more suitable for foreign users. For example, EDM and other things are indeed very effective, but for domestic customers, especially for our education industry, customers seldom use email. They use WeChat and mobile phones more. Another way to reach customers is to use text messages. In fact, the effect of text messages as a way of reaching customers has been getting worse and worse in recent years. Now we seldom send text messages, and the text messages we receive are all marketing text messages, and we usually delete these marketing text messages without even reading them, right? So now more ways to reach users are still through WeChat.

The focus of CRM is actually on optimizing processes and improving internal efficiency. It focuses on data recording and analysis. These projects are very powerful. It actually pays more attention to internal processes. It is mainly used by our sales team and account personnel because it focuses on the automation of the sales process and customer service, as well as the entire customer life cycle.

SCRM is actually more of a bridge to communicate with customers. It can then be used to carry out marketing and communication activities, interact directly with customers, and create customer portraits. Only with these portraits can precision marketing be carried out. It actually focuses on opening up the social network , connecting with the customer externally, and then telling them to do more precise marketing, focusing on front-end marketing.

2. SCRM solution planning

How does SCRM perform marketing automation? From customer acquisition to final transaction, there is actually a process in between. These processes are actually linked together through SCRM to facilitate the final transaction. How is it done?

First, customer acquisition

There will be many channels to acquire this customer, such as online Baidu promotion , Toutiao promotion , or some customers will search our official website through search engines, and there will also be some leads coming in. There will be various offline marketing activities and live broadcasts online.

Second, know your customers

Customers who come in through various channels will leave their information and enter the traffic pool. As long as he enters this pool, will he be able to successfully acquire customers? Will he have to leave his cell phone number? What happens after you get this customer? In fact, we can do some actions to identify customers. Why? Because when you are doing this kind of marketing activity, or when you are doing a live broadcast, or when you are releasing some content, you can actually label the activity or content accordingly, such as giving a lecture called "9th grade English".

In fact, you can label this activity with two labels, "junior high school" and "English". All customers who come in through this activity will automatically be given these labels. This is automatic, and this has already completed part of the work of identifying the customer. This is automatic customer identification, which is actually part of the customer portrait and a labeling system.

Third, wash the guest

After identifying the customer, we need to do some cleaning on this customer, because not every lead that comes in is a high-quality customer, so we need to follow up and clean it. The cleaning is done through precision marketing, scoring systems and manual follow-up. That is, to follow up and clean this customer by combining automatic and manual methods, you can start from the following three angles:

• Precision marketing is actually based on customer portraits. For example, in the example of "Grade 9 English" we just gave, next time if there is corresponding content about Grade 9 English, it can be pushed to these people in a targeted manner without having to push it to everyone. Because if you push this content to high school students, they are not actually interested in it, and elementary school students may not be interested either. I can only push it to those who are interested in English, then they will be interested. This is precision marketing.
• Marketing automation can customize some tasks and push them regularly. First, determine what time of the week more people look at their phones. If it is a parent, he is more likely to look at his phone at noon during working hours, so we may push it to him at noon. You can set some tasks and push a corresponding content on this working day, such as Thursday at noon. What content should be pushed? You need to define it well. Then who should be pushed to? Based on the content, for example, if your content is about English for third-year junior high school students, then you will select this group of people, that is, "third-year junior high school students" and "English". I will push it to anyone with these two labels. This is precision marketing.
• The scoring system is combined with manual follow-up because the number of leads in the lead pool is very large. There may be tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of leads. It is very difficult to distinguish so many leads manually, and we may have to follow up randomly. If there is a scoring system to rank the priorities, we can follow up the customers according to the ranking of the scores. People with high scores are naturally those who interact with us frequently, so I will definitely give priority to following up these customers. I will communicate with these people by phone, and during the communication, I will find that he is interested in mathematics and is not good at physics. In this case, I can label him as a physics person or a mathematics person. At this time, the sales team discovered based on his past follow-up records in SCRM that he was more interested in physics or mathematics, so they focused on these contents with him, which could improve the efficiency of the sales team.

Customer acquisition, customer identification, and customer cleaning are three steps that form a main process, that is, from the time a customer comes in to how to operate, to finally pushing the customer to sales for follow-up, and finally to the final order being placed. The customer's life cycle can be clearly followed up. This is the process for new customers. For old customers who want to renew their contracts, there will be another set of procedures to follow up.

3. Main functions of SCRM

First, marketing activities management

When communicating activities through social media, they are usually spread through WeChat H5, content, or posters. SCRM will provide some H5 templates or some materials that can be edited and managed. After the content is completed, you can publish the activity, and each activity can actually have a QR code.

In fact, both online and offline activities can provide this kind of QR code, allowing customers to spread it and let others scan the code to come in. While scanning the code, they can know which channel the clue came from. How much was invested in this marketing campaign? How many leads were obtained in the end? Were these leads converted? Did they reach our CRM? Was there anyone following up? Did they finally turn into actual sales? Did they become our real customers? The entire line can be analyzed.

Second, customer acquisition

After the marketing activities are spread, customers can make appointments and go offline to scan the code to sign in when the time comes. If it is the live broadcast time, they can directly enter the live broadcast room and then acquire customers. Customer acquisition means obtaining customers through online and offline activities, content, and various other means.

Third, lead management

Lead management means that we will have a unified lead pool, and follow up and clean up these customers based on the lead scores. After cleaning, we will push them to the sales team for follow-up.

Fourth, precision marketing

Through customer profiling, precise push, customer scoring, and marketing automation.

Fifth, universal marketing

National marketing is actually manual recommendation. I forward it, and then a new customer comes in. It can be recorded that it was recommended by me, recommended by me as an employee, or recommended by an old member. As long as he recommends someone, his referral relationship will be recorded. Then I can give him points, and then I can participate in various activities to help old customers bring in new ones.

4. CRM system implementation

Different channels need to interact with each other. For example, when a clue comes in from SCRM, it needs to be synchronized to the website, and the members registered on the website also need to be synchronized to SCRM, and some two-way interactions need to be performed. Later, we found that this kind of interaction is quite painful, so we changed to this architecture and built a platform for one set of data. Below is a group of data. They interact directly with the group data, and then the master data is pushed to each system.

The project was launched in August 2017 and the training went online in November. This process is actually quite fast, because the functions of Zhiqu products are already quite powerful, and we only need to do a system docking. The entire project cycle takes about 3 months, including project launch, blueprint planning, function customization, system docking and training to promote the process.

Of course, we encountered many problems during this process, such as demand confirmation and development and customization. We found that the Zhiqu team responded very promptly and the staff was relatively professional, so we were able to connect the system in just three months.

3. Actual combat cases

1. Word-of-mouth marketing, tapping into the customer acquisition effect of old users

We can spread some of our content or activities through social media, or use SCRM to produce some effect diagrams of the activity dissemination, and then everyone can see the effect of their influence.

After forwarding an activity or article, if your friend is interested in it and forwards it again, there is another point here. He forwards it again, and this person's friends read it again, so there will be a network diagram like this. If your content is particularly good, your dissemination effect will be amazing. Just like a few days ago when we were in 2017 and early 2018, WeChat launched some 18-year-old photos. What did you look like when you were 18 years old? Many people participated in it. In fact, if there is this kind of explosive content that can detonate, and your copy is particularly good, it can cause a very good impact.

2. Live broadcast, teachers and students can interact anytime and anywhere

Through some online live interactions, we can create this event, which can generate an invitation letter or a poster. The invitation letter is actually an exclusive invitation letter. When I forward it, it actually has a registration QR code on it. First, you have to follow the service account and fill in some personal information to complete the registration. At this time, the appointment is completed. When the actual event starts, if it is offline, he can scan the code when he arrives at the scene to confirm his attendance.

At this time, I can count that, out of 200 people who signed up for my event, only 100 people actually showed up. Later, I can analyze why these 100 people did not come. Or you may have to constantly confirm with these people during the process to see whether they have arrived or whether they have set off. All of these can be managed very clearly.

3. Marketing automation SCRM, automatically cultivate high-value customers

Marketing automation is to use the accumulation of previous experience and the customers who come in through various activities. Customers will be given different labels and there will be precise customer groups. We can use marketing automation tools to carry out precise marketing. Filter the user groups, and then set a sending time at the corresponding time.

Choose a departure condition, for example, I will set off when the time comes, or a departure condition with a certain reason, what kind of marketing behavior can I do, and what is the marketing behavior? You can reach him by pushing messages to him through WeChat, or you can reach him through text messages. Of course, now more people are likely to reach him through WeChat, because after all, we know that the effect of text messages is not very good. But sometimes you have to use text messages, because there may be some people who don’t follow your WeChat account, so text messages are still an indispensable channel. Therefore, through this kind of precision marketing, I can also analyze the reach of my push this time, and then optimize the content or event planning next time.

4. Score leads and automatically find good business opportunities

Define user portraits for precision marketing and, at the same time, score leads to determine lead growth.

He will be scored through various bonus and deduction items. For example, 10 points will be added for downloading a document, 10 points will be added for conference registration, and 50 points will be added for offline attendance. If there has been no interaction in the past week, 10 points will be deducted, and if there has been no interaction in the past month, 30 points will be deducted. In the end, there will be a comprehensive score. Based on this grading, potential customers with room for growth and lower value, target potential customers and high-quality potential customers can be screened out.

Give priority to following up target potential customers and high-quality potential customers, and then pass them to sales for follow-up to further promote sales. For those who are yet to grow and have lower value, continue to keep them in SCRM and interact with them on a rolling basis. Maybe they don’t have this need at this stage, but they may have this need after one or two years. Therefore, with continuous operation, he may be converted into a target potential customer or a high-quality potential customer next year or the year after. This will greatly improve the utilization rate of clues.

The author of this article @肖欣 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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