When it comes to keeping a full house, many marketing and sales managers end up doing everything they can to try to get more funding for a campaign or even decide to invest in a larger team of employees in the loyalty sector team.
However, the secret to a higher rate of student retention can be right under your nose and be much less complicated than you imagine, basically consisting of a set of specific techniques that can actually prove to be less costly than the options mentioned just now.
Do you want to know what these techniques are and how they can help you be successful in your student retention strategies? Continue reading with us to check it out!
Ground zero: understanding your processes
There's no point in insisting. You probably already know that student acquisition and retention READY hand in hand and that there is no point in spending loads of money on the first process without an adjusted strategy for the second. After all, what matters, in the end, is the LTV (Lifetime Value) of the student, that is, how much he represents, in the long term, as an “asset” of the institution, making monthly payments relating to his education.
What we want to say is: if you have a bottleneck in your loyalty process, all the effort to attract a student ends up being in vain. And this ends up being evidenced by its rate of ROI (Return on Investment), which will most likely show decreasing numbers.
So, the fact is: at the beginning of the semester, everything seems wonderful: new freshmen with all that spacewire of universal youth ful necessary and a very favorable climate for student satisfaction, however, it is already known that, according to data collected by National Household Sample Survey, the PNAD, on school dropout, points out that of 50 million Brazilians aged between 14 and 39 years old, of these, 20.2% failed to complete some of the stages of basic education.
Read too:
In relation to the pandemic scenario, the value observed by the Datafolha Institute points out that in 2020, around 4 million students aged between 6 and 34 dropped out of school.
Having understood this scenario, let's get straight to the point: how to retain more students with some essential techniques.
Essential techniques for student retention
1. CRM
Since we are talking about what is essential, let's start, precisely, with what cannot be missing at all for better student retention: software CRM appropriate, combined with an adjusted strategy.
This is the basics that must be done to start a relationship that perpetuates the student's academic life at your institution. After all, it is within the software that data relating to the student's recruitment process and the activities they carried out to follow their own path within the student will be stored in the marketing and sales funnel of your institution, in addition to contact information, such as name, email and telephone number.
One such CRM software that has proven its name more and more is that of HubSpot, a complete marketing and sales solution that provides a complete intelligence and data analysis center, allowing you to concentrate all your operations within the same platform.
2. Nutrition flow
And it is precisely through adjusted CRM software and strategy that you can begin another essential technique for maintaining a good relationship with your customers, which is nutrition flow.
This strategy can be used from the customer acquisition phase through communication rules designed appropriately to keep the lead's level of interest and engagement high.
From a strategy of automation efficient, it is possible to build a flowchart or design of the “path” that will be followed by the contact from the moment they enter the CRM base and then understand their source of origin (be it paid traffic, organic traffic, social media, ebooks, among many others), as well as generating better communication throughe-mail marketing, WhatsApp and SMS messages.
You can, in this way, bet, in parallel, content production written specifically to talk to your student's pain points and send them periodically to them through automation.
Therefore, it is a “wild card” strategy that can be maintained permanently, from recruitment to retention. Remember that the important thing is to show that you are interested in helping the lead or student so that they feel supported by the institution.
3. Artificial intelligence
More necessary than ever, AI is proving that optimizing processes and obtaining powerful insights are increasingly constant through its use.
And within this robotic world, there are some tools that are efficiency highlights as part of a retention strategy. Are they:
Predictive retention diagnostics
Student dropout can occur due to different factors, varying from case to case. However, today, it is now possible to map the weight that these different factors may have on a student's decision to leave the institution.
Through techniques of Machine Learning (or Machine Learning, in Portuguese), it is possible to create systems in which artificial intelligence learns, with its own data, to identify patterns and, therefore, better understand student behavior and monitor the manifestation of signs related to churn ( evasion), as well as generating a predictive diagnosis which will help managers of educational institutions to make better decisions related to student retention.
Chatbots
The use of chatbots for customer service is another great tool provided by Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning is also present, so that robots can learn from the results of the conversation themselves.
Bots are programmed within AI software so that they can answer students' most diverse questions based on specific programming, created through analysis of the robot's audiences, as well as understanding the particularities of the student's own context.
Well, with that understood, it can be said that you know which techniques cannot be missing from your student retention strategy, and it is certain that, by applying them correctly, the chances of a decrease in your institution's dropout rate of teaching will be much greater!
And to complement the text, here is another reading suggestion that makes sense within the context of what is most new and essential in the world of educational marketing.
Because of this, how about checking the 4 new trends in Educational Marketing strategies?
Portugal