How do educational training institutions expand their customer base and attract students for enrollment?

The terms customer acquisition, traffic generation and enrollment need to be broken down and discussed separately. There is not much practical significance in discussing them together.

Customer development is to expand new customer sources. Traffic generation is divided into general traffic generation and precise traffic generation. Enrolling students is the goal. To achieve enrollment, we must not only have a stable and precise source of students, but also a guaranteed registration conversion rate.

As a professional, we have to solve the actual enrollment problem, so let's discuss customer flow. General traffic is not within the scope of our discussion. After all, you want to generate revenue through enrollment and achieve stable development of the organization, not to increase advertising quotations through entertainment.

Well, customer development and customer flow attraction have roughly the same meaning, which is both about acquiring customers. The other half of the problem is the registration conversion after obtaining accurate customer sources. Don’t think that everything will be fine if you have accurate customer sources. As a practitioner who has been in the education and training industry for six years and has led a marketing team for more than three years and has thought deeply, the conversion of course consultations also profoundly affects the operation of an institution.

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1. There are many ways to acquire customers. At present, I would first recommend short video delivery on TikTok.

As far as online is concerned, there are two most common ways to acquire customers: either paid promotion or providing valuable content. Paid promotion consumes budget, while high-quality content costs time and manpower.

If you want to acquire customers, no matter what method you use, you will always have to pay, don’t think it’s “completely free”.

There are many branches in the field of education and training, and some sub-fields are subject to geographical restrictions. Creating a content account requires a lot of time and a stable number of high-quality content providers, which is actually a threshold for many small and medium-sized enterprises.

In addition, the customer traffic obtained through content is not restricted by geographical location. For small and medium-sized organizations that are restricted by geographical location, this is bound to cause a huge waste of traffic unless you can upgrade products suitable for online conversions.

Paid promotion is relatively straightforward. As long as you or your operations team are professional enough, the effect will be immediate after the launch. The launch area can be set according to the coverage of your business.

Six or seven years ago, Baidu bidding was in its golden age, which promoted the rapid development of many companies. Bidding promotion is still effective now, but it is undeniable that it has suffered a considerable impact and the overall channel customer flow is declining. As an emerging delivery method, information flow advertising plays an increasingly important role.

In information flow advertising, video marketing is the main trend. Compared with pictures and texts, video carriers have their own advantages. Coupled with the daily active users of Tik Tok, the effect it brings is rocket-like.

This is the result of three days of work we did for a new client doing job search training.

The number of accurate students obtained in three days of cooperation even exceeds the effective student sources of many institutions in half a month or a month. Based on the customer reception efficiency, the next step is to slow down the pace and optimize the conversion system.

This is the result of our five-day promotion to art training institutions before the New Year.

Art examinations are a very niche vertical field, but even so, the effect it brought them was twice the previous online customer acquisition volume, accounting for more than 20% of the institution's annual revenue.

The reason why I only talk about ways that can bring practical results to most organizations, instead of listing a bunch of methods, is because I know that people’s time and energy are very limited. Even if you know a lot of methods, there is a high probability that only one or two of them will have a practical effect on you. It’s not that other methods are useless, but that to accomplish something, you must spend time and energy to delve deeply into the subject. Broad coverage will not produce results.

2. Each conversion link has a probability, and the course consultation process management should be done well

When it comes to conversion, many newcomers feel that they are making phone calls all day long, urging students to come to the campus and register and pay fees.

The purpose is right, but the process is problematic.

Conversion involves many links, especially for traditional offline institutions, from obtaining student leads, to making phone calls and adding WeChat to explore needs, inviting experience, home visits, trial classes, registration and payment, word-of-mouth introductions, etc. There is a conversion probability in each link. People who have just started sales do not have this concept and will think about trying hard to grasp every student, but the result is often half the effort with twice the results.

Professional course consultants are aware of the conversion probability of each link and can distinguish between different types of students to review and optimize their own conversion processes, thereby achieving twice the result with half the effort.

This topic is full of details. It not only involves process management, but also team incentive mechanism, and the balance between the course consulting team and the customer acquisition team.

So if you are doing online promotion, what is the average conversion rate in the education industry? 20%!

An excellent course consulting team can achieve a conversion rate of more than 20% for new customer leads; even a very novice course consultant can achieve a conversion rate of 10% for new customer leads. The conversion rate between them directly determines the rate of return on the institution’s enrollment costs.

I would like to emphasize here that what we are discussing are the precise leads obtained through online paid promotion, not other channels, nor gross leads. Only the comparison of indicators is meaningful.

3. The logic of campus enrollment is to establish its own marketing system and form its own enrollment closed loop

As a business entity, you must be clear about what your target customers want, what their purchasing mentality is, and what ideal state they want to achieve.

For example, in the field of art exam training, students choose to study art exam courses not just out of interest. More students want to "take the college entrance examination with low scores" or "get into their ideal university." For example, in the field of job hunting guidance, students want to "enter a large company and get a high salary even with average academic qualifications and project experience."

So what is the ideal state of the students you are targeting?

This cannot be done based on your own subjective imagination or arbitrary guesses. You have to let them tell you and get to know their true demands at the deepest level in their hearts.

Only if you grasp their ideal state, your courses and publicity direction will be effective and have a greater chance of impressing them.

With a clear value proposition, the next step is to manage your own customer flow channels, optimize your own conversion process, and combine it with your own business philosophy to form your own enrollment closed loop. This is the source of an institution's steady development and also its own industry moat.

When we were building a marketing system for art institutions, we were the first to use many leading methods in the local art exam market in Xi'an. Other peers saw this and followed suit, but those who simply imitated us failed to succeed. The fundamental reason was that the peers who followed suit only saw the superficial methods and did not delve into the root causes, thus failing to form a closed loop of enrollment and compete with a systematic enrollment model. The result is predictable.

Author: Yoyo Youchai

Source: Lu Songsong's blog