A marketing campaign your institution is bringing in hundreds of leads, but when the enrollment conversion data comes in, the numbers are not so encouraging?
Learn what is lead scoring and understand why you might be making mistakes in it!
What will you see in this post?
- How does lead capture work?
- What is lead scoring
- Data that can be used in the lead score
- Demographic data
- Online behavior
- email marketing fees
- spam detection
- Why do lead scoring?
- cost reduction
- Increased productivity of your team
- More assertive strategies
Good reading!
How does lead capture work?
The lead capture process is very diverse and depends a lot on the objectives of each higher education institution. But, as a rule, top-of-the-funnel content is used to attract those interested in what your educational institution has to offer (types of courses, etc.).
When we start using strategies for the lead capture process, it is common to worry a lot about the amount of leads to be generated and end up leaving the management of these leads for a second moment.
Like this? When defining a marketing strategy, we are generally very concerned with the number of contacts generated and, many times, we forget that a good capture process goes beyond "just attracting".
As soon as we start the fundraising process, it is important to think about nutrition actions after fundraising. These actions help us to understand who is really interested and who is not, and this is precisely where lead scoring comes in.
What is lead scoring
Lead scoring is a lead categorizing strategy. It is nothing more than a tool used to classify your potential customers (students) through a classification based on comparing your lead profile with your persona.
When we start converting prospects into leads, not everyone is ready to start a consumption journey with your institution, do you agree? In this case, segmenting this contact base helps to dedicate the necessary time to each lead, educating them according to their own needs.
In this scenario, the lead scoring helps in this segmentation, assigning a score/segmentation to each lead. Classification forms can be different: A, B, C, D or E; hot, warm or cold; 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5.
This classification is based on socio-demographic and behavioral data, such as consumption and reading habits, number of interactions with the educational institution, type of content consumed on the internet, places frequented and others.
The lead scoring helps you to understand in which sales funnel stage each lead finds himself, and consequently, define what type of treatment he should receive, which messages are most relevant at each moment and how to lead him to the next step of the shopping day.
In practice, lead scoring can be done based on your persona (as we've already talked about) or on information collected from your customers' data.
You can analyze the data collected from your customers and understand how the working day from their point of purchase to the moment they actually become customers.
When evaluating this history, you will find the most diverse attributes and habits, such as demographic information, online behavior, email engagement, social engagement and so on.
After this assessment, your marketing team will be ready to identify the profiles that are most likely to become students and segment these leads according to their behavior in relation to your educational institution.
Data that can be used in the lead score
In order for you to understand more easily the direction that can be given for the classification of your lead base, we separate some data/criteria that can work for the segmentation of your educational institution:
Demographic data
Taking into account that your educational institution may have different audiences (face-to-face courses, online, hybrids and even specialization courses), in your enrollment forms, you can ask questions about the location (such as city and neighborhood) and based on the answers, make regional actions for your audience.
You can also collect data related to age, family income and others that you deem important. But remember: don't create forms that are big and complicated to fill out, this only makes data collection and user experience more difficult.
Choose carefully the data to be collected on your capture pages.
Online behavior
The interaction of leads with your website is essential for us to understand how interested (or not) they really are in your educational institution.
You can easily identify which leads became customers directly through the website, for example. You can also identify the frequency with which they accessed your website, if they stopped accessing it and what are the paths they took within the website and pages.
Email marketing fees
When capturing this lead, if he agrees to receive your communication via email, you have another strong ally in lead scoring.
Open and clickthrough rates are great for measuring audience interest. The more accesses to the communications sent, the greater the lead's interest in your content and, consequently, the greater the chance of conversion
Spam detection
By defining your lead score points, you can assign negative points to those who fill out contact forms with suspicious data.
Strange name and surname, fields typed with letters close together on the traditional keyboard, emails with only numbers and very different from known providers, can indicate a spam contact.
Creating, monitoring and adjusting this entire process requires tools, like a CRM for example. In this case, the Hubspot can be an excellent ally to help you make lead scoring one of your most important performance indicators in your marketing strategy.
Read too:
- What is link building? Learn how to make it successful;
- The 8 essential tips to improve your CRM. Check out now;
- Automation: how to create a purchase flow in 5 standards!
Why do lead scoring?
It's a fact, new leads captured by any company, from any segment, are not always ready to buy something. This is no different in the educational marketing.
That's why we need to use strategies to lead nurturing, like the email marketing, to educate them throughout the shopping day and thus prepare them for enrollment.
But not only that. Learn about some of the advantages of carrying out lead scoring at your institution:
Cost reduction
The larger the audience you want to reach, the larger your marketing budget tends to be. Although this is not true in 100% of cases, it happens quite often.
When you do lead scoring properly, your marketing team can optimize communication and relationship strategies in order to send only those leads that are ready for registration to sales.
In this way, the work of the commercial team is optimized, as well as the budget allocated to this sector. Goals are met with greater quality, classes are formed quickly and students are satisfied with their choices.
By making your team aware of marketing and sales about what lead scoring is and why use it in your educational institution, you are promoting an alignment between these two sectors, one more point for the success of any marketing strategy.
When marketing and sales speak the same language and have the same understanding of what a qualified lead is, the flow of enrollment opportunities is accentuated in their sales funnel. In other words, your educational institution becomes more effective at converting.
Increased productivity of your team
By using lead scoring, your team will have direct access to different types of audiences according to their position in previously defined categories.
This position generates a filter for your sales cycle and the time required to collect the audience is drastically reduced. This is because this entire division process will have already been defined at the time of defining the categories.
In addition, your team will not "waste" time with leads that have low potential to become customers. That is: reduction of time with repetitive demands, and all of this leads to increased productivity.
More assertive strategies
As we have already mentioned, segmentation offers a productivity gain by optimizing time with data collection, but this is also true when we talk about strategies to make the lead move through the sales funnel.
The post capture is essential to transform leads into customers (this is no secret), the high point of all this is that when you already know the level of the audience you want to reach, it is easier to define the strategies to approach it.
Email marketing, ebooks, blog content and even social media. When your leads are already divided according to interactions and possibilities of conversion with lead scoring, it is possible to target specific content with greater assertiveness.
We hope this content has helped you to understand more about the importance of lead scoring in capturing leads for educational institutions!
Now, if you want to know more about lead scoring and how to implement this strategy in your educational institution, take the opportunity to check out this other blog post: 5 best practices for relationship flow with students.
Happy reading and until next time!
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