Although important for the financial balance of an Educational Institution, loyalty strategies are essential for all universities that wish to improve their results.
However, despite its importance, numerous institutions still make the same mistakes: they invest all their efforts in recruitment strategies and leave school retention aside.
Philip Kotler, a major name in Marketing, made an interesting analogy in his book (2010): conquering new customers, but losing old ones is like “systematically adding water to a pan that has a small hole”.
So that your marketing strategy is not like a leaky pot, you should think about good student retention tactics. But, do you know how to do this? Discover, in this post, four loyalty strategies and how to apply them in your Educational institution.
In this post you can see:
Good reading!
What are the benefits of investing in student retention?
If you work with Educational Marketing, you know very well that every year the educational market faces a great challenge: control evasion school.
Only in the year 2021, another 3 million students dropped out of universities as private individuals, one of the highest rates in higher education. To get around this situation, there is only one solution: investing in retention strategies.
In short, student retention is a set of strategies aimed at keeping students in their Educational institution. That is, they are efforts made by school management so that enrolled students continue their graduation and earn a diploma at their college.
With this definition, you can already see how retention can greatly benefit your Educational Institution. But, that's not it's only benefit.
In addition to preventing school dropouts, building student loyalty and improving results, retention strategies are cheaper than attracting students, so they can maintain the balance and financial health of your Educational institution.
And since we are talking about loyalty tactics, we have complete content on the subject on our YouTube channel. Access the link below now and learn more about the importance of student retention, and its benefits.
How to retain your students?
Convinced that student retention is as important as enrollment? So, no more putting loyalty tactics aside! Now you're ready to take the next step: investing your efforts to retain more students.
To help you with this mission, we have listed four strategies for you to start applying to your Educational institution, such as:
- Listen to your students;
- Bet on Chatbots with AI;
- Facilitate student stay;
- Invest in continuing education.
Next, we will detail each one of them and show how these strategies can help to overcome the truancy.
Listen to your students
How to find out about a college's problems and what can be improved if you don't listen to your student community? There is nothing worse for students than the feeling that they are not being heard and that their demands are not being met.
To prevent this from happening, you need toInvest in a good relationship. But, of course, this doesn't happen overnight! Building this relationship involves everything from maintaining service channels that work, following up on issues that have been filed with the Institution's departments and monitoring customers in channels such as social networks.
It is important that you are not only available for dialogue, but also show the student that his opinion is extremely important for your institution. Therefore, seek to understand the needs, concerns and expectations of your students, listen to what they have to say and prioritize this relationship.
Bet on Chatbots with AI
And since we are talking about relationships, of course we could not fail to mention Chatbots. Oneone of the greatest innovations of recent years, the Chatbot with artificial intelligence is capable of answering the main doubts of its students and can be a great ally of its Educational Institution.
In other words, the software simulates a human conversation and offers first aid to students, thus reducing the waiting time they would face.
In addition to answering questions, the Chatbot with AI You can provide a duplicate of a payment slip or receive documents, for example, and thus streamline the process and improve customer satisfaction in relation to your Educational Institution.
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Make it easy for students to stay
Have you ever stopped to think about the reasons that lead a student to withdraw from a university? When the subject is school dropout, dissatisfaction with the service provided is not the only reason students drop out.
In fact, there are numerous factors that can contribute to this decision-making, such as:financial problems, academic difficulties and reconciling study and work.
These are important and common questions among students thinking about dropping out of a university, which is why, more than ever, your school management must pay attention to these points and offer solutions.
Therefore, the tip is: create mechanisms that help students overcome these difficulties. When it comes to finances, you can offer discounts, partial tuition grants or research grants for extra activities.
In addition, if there is any financial irregularity on the part of the student, his Educational Institution may offer a negotiation for him to continue his course.And as financial problems are not the only reasons for dropping out, you can even invest in extra tutoring classes, show flexibility opportunities where you can reconcile graduation with work and promote other conditions for the student to remain at the University.
Invest in continuing education
In the end, invest in a continuing education program. Rest assured that, if everything was done correctly in the previous steps, the student will not think twice before returning to their Educational Institution.
Continuing education programs involve creating postgraduate courses, or open courses, and facilitating former students' access to them. The objective here is to promote student loyalty.
Student retention starts from the student's first day in college. Every problem faced, difficulty encountered and unresolved demand are factors that will make the customer leave the institution in the future. Capturing is important, but retention is even more so, never leave it out.
Did you like the content? If you want to continue investing in your Educational Marketing strategies, contact us! Our team of experts is ready to help you improve your results!
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