Attracting students is one of the main goals of an educational institution, after all, it is with the entry of new students that you keep your finances up to date and can perpetuate the business.
But what many do not know is that, in addition to the number of enrollments, there are other indicators for educational institutions to be monitored on a daily basis. Want to know what they are? Continue reading and discover, in this post, six strategic fundraising indicators.
In this post, you will see:
Student enrollment: which indicators to observe?
- Cost per lead
- Cost per subscriber
- Cost per enrolled
- Return on investment (ROI)
- Lifetime Value (LTV)
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Good reading!
Student enrollment: which indicators to observe?
Much is said about planning, inbound marketing and strategies to capture qualified leads, and if you are a regular reader of our blog, you must have seen some tips here, right?
The truth is that many institutions invest in social networks, blogs and various tactics to attract students, but leave aside one of the most important elements: enrollment indicators.
Tracking these indicators is a way of controlling and measuring what has been done. In this way, your educational institution can not only evaluate the performance of your fundraising strategies, but also analyze the results and identify possible failures to improve your planning.
Now, you must be wondering what these indicators are, did I get it right? Below we list six of them:
- Cost per lead;
- Cost per subscriber;
- Cost per enrolled;
- Return on investment;
- Lifetime value;
- Net promoter score (NPS).
Next, we will detail each of these indicators and explain how you can put them into practice in your educational institution. Let's go?
1. Cost per lead
The cost per lead, also known as CPL, is one of the key performance indicators for any educational institution.
As you invest in educational marketing actions to attract the attention of parents and students who do not yet know your institution, it is necessary to monitor how much each interested party is costing the organization's cash.
To calculate the CPL, there are no secrets! Do you know the budget estimated by your educational institution in marketing planning? Just divide it by the total leads generated.
CPL = TOTAL INVESTED / TOTAL LEADS GENERATED
So that there is no doubt, let's go to a practical example? Imagine the following situation: your educational institution invested in a campaign and, from start to finish, 170 thousand reais of the marketing budget were spent.
With this campaign, your institution was able to attract 40,000 possible students. To know the cost per Lead, just divide the 170 thousand (total invested) by the 40 thousand leads generated. That is, the cost per lead was R$ 4.25. Simple, isn't it?
2. Cost per subscriber
If you do your lead scoring, know that not every lead is ready to become a subscriber and that the work to convert a lead to a subscriber also comes at a cost, related to marketing and sales work.
In this way, it is essential to know this value as well, after all, the lower the cost per subscriber, the more effective your conversion strategy is. The cost per subscriber calculation follows the same formula as the cost per lead.
3. Cost per enrolled
Of the three indicators for educational institutions presented so far, this is the most important, as what you really want is more students enrolled.
The cost per enrollment also follows the same calculation rule as the cost per lead, but you must consider the entire amount spent as an investment, from capturing a lead to converting it into enrollment.
Remember to consider any incentive for enrolling in this amount, such as a free tablet or exemption from the enrollment fee.
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4. Return on investment (ROI)
Another indicator for educational institutions that should be taken into account is the ROI (return on investment). This is the value that each student recruited generates throughout the relationship with the institution.
Let's say you spent $1000 on capture of a student and that, by the end of the course, he will bring R$ 10,000 in profit to the organization. This means that you are earning 9 times the amount invested.
So that you know how to apply the calculation of the ROI, here is the formula:
ROI = (REVENUE - INITIAL INVESTMENT) / INITIAL INVESTMENT
5. Lifetime value (LTV)
The student's life cycle value or lifetime value corresponds to the total value generated by the student throughout the entire relationship with the institution. So, if you have a school that serves students from kindergarten to high school, a student who spends 12 years at your school has a life cycle of 12 years.
As you can imagine, the higher the LTV, the greater the profitability that the student brings to your institution. Therefore, it is essential to invest in retention strategies and loyalty to extend the life cycle of the student as much as possible.
To calculate lifetime value, use the following formula:
LTV = AVERAGE VALUE OF MONTHLY PAYMENT X NO. OF MONTHLY FEES X STUDENT RETENTION TIME
The student retention time can be calculated in months or years, depending on the type of course he is taking, and it is worth remembering that extension courses can also be considered in this calculation, ok?
6. Net promoter score (NPS)
And of course, the Net Promoter Score could not be missing from our list of recruitment indicators. Known as NPS, the performance indicator aims to measure the satisfaction of parents and students.
The NPS survey is widely used in the retention process, but that doesn't mean it can't help with your recruitment strategies.
In fact, NPS can be a great ally! Through quality indicators, you have the opportunity to discover the strengths of the institution from the student's point of view and, therefore, use this information as arguments in your recruitment campaigns.
In addition, with NPS, you have important qualitative data at hand, which can be used to improve your Educational Marketing actions.
But, after all, how to calculate the NPS? In practice, the NPS is a survey focused on the student's probability of indicating their institution on a scale of 0 to 10.
Those who answer 9 and 10 are promoters of their educational institution. Those who respond between 7 and 8 are considered neutral, and those who respond with scores from 0 to 6 are detractors, that is, they would not indicate their institution.
After research, to calculate your total percentage of NPS, just use the formula below:
NPS = (PROMOTERS – DETRACTORS) / TOTAL RESPONDENTS x 100
The ideal result is for your institution's NPS to be between 90% and 100%. It is worth remembering that you can also ask open questions and invest in questionnaires, thus opening space for students to rate what they like most or improve in their educational institution.
Now tell us, do you use all these capture indicators in your educational institution? If you already use some of these indicators, but want to improve your results even more, we have foolproof tips for recruiting students, check out!
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