12 Ways to Attract New Customers in the Education Industry

Regardless of the industry, attracting new customers is always the most pressing issue to be addressed. Based on his thoughts and ideas from work practice, the author of this article shares 12 common ways of actively attracting new customers in the education industry, and provides a brief explanation and analysis of each method for sharing with everyone. I believe that after reading, everyone will have a deeper insight into these methodologies.

This article summarizes and sorts out the 12 commonly used methods of attracting new customers and their conversion rates in the education field.

1. Why do we need to attract new customers?

The student share in the education field is equivalent to a piece of cake, but a bunch of people are scrambling to eat it, so who can grab more? The piece of cake grabbed = market share. Educational users are special compared to other users. If a user has been taking classes under a certain brand since childhood, there is a high probability that they will continue to enroll after moving up a grade.

In other words, if a child attends Brand X in Grade 1, then they are likely to be loyal to that brand from Grade 1 through high school. Therefore, the leverage effect of attracting new students is the strongest in the education field, and the competition for attracting new students in the lower grades is also extremely fierce.

2. Who to pull?

The user groups in the education and training industry are divided into parents and students. When attracting new members, talking about academic performance improvement may impress parents but not students. Talking about teachers' humor and combining education with entertainment may satisfy students but is not recognized by parents.

So, how do we set our target users for attracting new users? In fact, it has been mentioned in articles for student and parent user groups that younger students are more dependent on their parents for decision-making power, while older students have more independent decision-making power. In previous user interviews, we also found that if older children like a teacher, they will pester their parents to sign up for the teacher regardless of whether she is a famous teacher or not.

There is a big gap in retention among educational users of different grades. High school users no longer have an urgent need after the college entrance examination, so they will naturally leave. However, kindergarten children start learning at the age of 3 and have needs at all times for the next 15 years, so they will become long-term users. To sum up, the focus and opening for attracting new students in K12 should be in the lower grades. The lower grade of classes offered in recent years also shows that major institutions have increased their attention to younger children.

3. How to pull?

New customer acquisition can be divided into active acquisition and passive acquisition. The following will detail 12 active ways of acquiring new customers.

1. 12 ways to actively attract new customers

Actively attracting new customers is the job of the operations partners within the company. There are different ways to do this, such as attracting new customers through events and attracting new customers through channels. Taking educational products as an example, here are some ways to attract new customers:

(1) Traffic generation course (including training camp)

As the name suggests, it attracts traffic through free classes, low-priced classes, and open classes. The key to traffic-generating courses is their low price. According to the author's observation, there are many traffic-generating courses on the market with prices of 0 yuan, 1 yuan, 3 yuan, 9 yuan, and 19 yuan. The price of 0-9 yuan, which is close to free, can attract a large number of users, while the price of 19 yuan, 29 yuan and above can screen out the freeloaders and attract users with a strong willingness to pay.

(2) Tools to attract new customers

Provide free high-frequency tools for users, such as photo search and question bank. Next, let’s look at three cases:

• Zuoyebang: It entered the K12 field by taking photos to search for questions, established a big data question bank of 180 million questions, and then launched the "Zuoyebang Live Class". The live course entrance tab and low-price course marketing entrance were added to the homework helper tool, hoping to divert traffic to live courses through the homework helper with hundreds of millions of users ;
• Yuanfudao: The Xiaoyuan Question Search and Xiaoyuan Kousuan launched by Yuanfudao are currently both learning apps with tens of millions of users. You can see that the "live class" page is also embedded at the bottom of Xiaoyuan Question Search, and the "49 yuan low-priced class" banner is embedded at the top of Xiaoyuan Kousuan.
• Xueersi Online School: Compared with Zuoyebang and Yuanfudao, Xueersi Online School also has tool-type products: Xiaosouti and Xueersi Oral Arithmetic. However, the product matrix of Xueersi Online School, which is considered a "clear stream", does not include any traffic entrances or guidance methods.

(3) New users of Box Course

For example, Yuanfudao, Xueersi Online School, and Zebra English, by giving away physical objects with a value higher than the 49-yuan course, hit the user's psychology of low buy and high gain, making users feel that they are getting great value for money . At the same time, interesting, novel, fun and well-designed teaching materials and teaching aids are very attractive to children.

(4) Attracting new customers through activities

The most commonly used method of attracting new members in activities is old-timers bringing in new ones: if an old classmate recommends a new classmate to register or enroll successfully, the old classmate can get a coupon. More complex ones will be designed in a step-by-step manner, where the more downline people develop, the more upline people will get.

(5) Attracting new customers through lectures

Lectures are a common method of attracting new customers both online and offline. The topics of lectures should either focus on hot topics or pain points, so as to attract and ignite the enthusiasm of parents.

For example, for hot topics such as "Analysis of College Entrance Examination Test Points", for pain points such as "Lectures on Filling Out Volunteer Applications" and "Development of Students' Self-discipline Habits", or for interpretation of a certain subject product such as "What is the next goal of English after KP".

Online and offline lectures have different subsequent conversion rates due to the different forms of information transmission. In comparison, offline lectures are more intimate and more likely to impress users because of the on-site atmosphere. The Q&A session after the lecture is also more direct and efficient. Online lectures are less intimate due to the screen, but they are lighter for users and can be participated in anytime and anywhere .

Many communities will be formed after lectures to facilitate subsequent operational transformation.

(6) Diagnosis and new customer acquisition

The core of the diagnostic class is "diagnosis". After registration, the subject will be diagnosed. Parents should also be involved in the post-diagnosis analysis stage to understand their children's shortcomings.

The general process of a diagnostic course is:

1. Take a set of test papers in subject X. The child will answer diagnostic questions under the observation of the teacher, who will record the child's performance;
2. Listen to the teacher’s explanation and analysis. Listen to the teacher's explanation and analysis of the questions, and record and observe the child's listening status;
3. Received a pediatric diagnosis report. Based on the child's performance in answering questions and listening to lectures, a detailed quantitative diagnostic report will be produced.

Among the above methods of attracting new customers, the conversion rate of 1v1 diagnostic classes is the highest. Personalized diagnostic reports for children can actually point out the problems and provide solutions, which can best hit the pain points of parents.

(7) Attracting new customers through offline service centers

A well-located offline teaching service point is also a channel for attracting new customers.

First, parents can feel more at ease. Many parents are worried that online education institutions will run away and they will have nowhere to turn. Offline teaching sites can make parents feel stable, safe and secure.

Second, answer questions and resolve doubts. Offline teaching sites have professional teachers to answer questions and resolve doubts, and the conversion rate of offline 1v1 communication is more than ten times that of online customer service consultation;

Third, self-promotion. Parents who are interested in enrolling in classes can first choose to try out the class offline, and the parent group formed in the parent service area is also a good area for word-of-mouth publicity;

(8) Attract new customers through offline exhibitions

Offline exhibitions such as the International Education Expo and the Parents Help Education Festival generally bring together high-quality public colleges/educational training institutions, etc., and also invite many famous teachers and principals in the education industry to give lectures. There are also many parent users who come to learn and watch.

There are usually small booths in the convention and exhibition center (as shown above), which will give free welfare toys/teaching materials/cloth bags, etc. to registered parents. Many parents could be seen around the booth, asking questions.

(9) Business development

Business development includes resource utilization, strategy formulation and market cooperation. For example, the most common form of business cooperation is to exchange volume. In order to make it more convenient for their children to attend classes, many parents embed a K12APP into the TV application for viewing on the big screen.

(10) Telemarketing

This is the most common and direct sales method, but many parents will hang up the phone immediately when they see an unfamiliar phone number or find out it is a salesperson. Therefore, the conversion rate of this method is extremely low , and of course the cost is not high. (I have received this type of call frequently recently, and I really hate it)

However, there is one situation where the effect of telephone sales is completely the opposite. When a new user actively registers for a brand APP, the institution obtains the mobile phone number. The teaching consultant calls and communicates in depth about the needs based on the child's information filled out by the parents, and then pushes the corresponding courses, which makes the parents feel cared for.

(11 Advertising

In recent years, online advertising for online education has been particularly frequent, and K12 online school advertising has exploded. One institution’s advertising budget once reached tens of millions of RMB per day. Educational advertisements can be seen everywhere, in elevators, subways, bus stations, WeChat Moments, and Douyin.

(12) Fission and new customer acquisition

With the rapid development of online education, the fission mode combining Internet + education has been coming into the public eye. The ways of playing distribution fission are becoming more and more diversified: such as group buying rebates, community fission, community operation, etc. There are still many things to pay attention to in distribution fission, such as distribution ratio, fission poster design elements, community operation routines, etc. We can talk about it in detail later when we have time.

The following is a breakdown of the successful case of "20,000+ revenue in 1 day" of an offline institution in a third-tier city:

First, by delivering "test questions" (candidates' pain points + real-time hot spots), forwarding in Moments to attract new users (the user range of Moments has been screened, most of them are local new users), then guiding them to follow the official account (directing traffic to the official account), and finally guiding them to receive physical textbooks in offline stores to achieve in-store conversion (in-store conversion is generally higher than online)

2. Passive acquisition

The highest level of attracting new customers is self-propagation - word-of-mouth publicity.

First, word of mouth is undoubtedly the cheapest way to spread information at present;

Secondly, word-of-mouth publicity is highly credible. Especially when friends, colleagues, relatives, etc. around you have achieved significant results and then promote them, it is equivalent to bringing your own success stories;

Finally, the target user group is the most accurate. When others become interested in this topic and generate topics, they have often become target users.

Conclusion

In the above text, we summarized 12 proactive ways to attract new customers. The left side focuses on methods unique to the education industry, which are combined with courses to directly address user pain points; the right side focuses on general Internet channels. The specific choice should be determined based on your own positioning, goals, costs and benefits.

In addition, we also mentioned that passive new customer acquisition has the greatest leverage benefit, low cost and high conversion rate, so how can we achieve word of mouth? In fact, parents are very pragmatic. They only see the results of their children's classes. They work hard to design the teaching system and content, and effectively improve the quality of education and teaching. Teaching children well is the key.

(It is a waste of effort to only attract new users but not retain highly active users. In the next article, let’s talk about how to retain users in educational products?)

Author: Jin Lu

Source: HelloJyn (ID: HelloJyn)