Do you believe that your educational organisation might be enroling more leads? Does your admissions staff find it difficult to provide each enquiry with the individualised attention they deserve? This is why understanding a lead funnel is by far the most significant thing for an education organisation. Successful sales/ counselling teams are aware that attracting not merely more but better leads is the greatest strategy for achieving sales and revenue targets.
Through the lead funnel, you must raise awareness and establish authority before concentrating efforts on developing high-quality prospects through the lead funnel until they close. You will discover how to do it in this article. We’ll go through how to create a lead funnel, and how to build an efficient funnel in five steps to help you expedite your sales process.
What is a Lead Funnel?
A lead funnel, also known as a sales funnel, is a process that helps organisations to convert potential candidates (leads) into paying customers. In the education industry, the lead funnel is used to convert prospective students into enroled students. The lead funnel typically includes the following stages:
- Awareness: This is the initial stage of the lead funnel where an organisation aims to generate awareness about its programmes and services among prospective students. This can be done through marketing campaigns, such as social media, email marketing, and advertising.
- Interest: Once the prospective student is aware of the educational organisation, they may express interest in learning more. This can be done through request information, visiting the website, attending an open house, or scheduling a campus tour.
- Evaluation: At this stage, the prospective student evaluates the institution and its programmes to determine if it is a good fit for them. This can be done through research on the organisation’s website, talking to current students, or attending informational sessions.
- Application: A lead funnel also includes the after the prospective student has determined that the institution is a good fit, they can apply for admission. This typically involves filling out an application and submitting required documents, such as transcripts and test scores.
- Enrolment: If the prospective student is accepted, they can then enrol in the institution and become a student.
- Retention: Once the student is enroled, the institution should focus on retaining the student, this can be done by providing support services, engaging the student in the community, and providing opportunities for students to be actively involved in the institution.
The lead funnel is an ongoing process and educational organisations should be continually working to generate awareness, interest, and evaluations from prospective students in order to fill their enrolment goals.
How to Build a Lead Generation Funnel?
To build a lead generation funnel you need to lead funnel that can help you generate more qualified leads and increase your lead conversion. You need to follow the below-mentioned steps:
- Map out the candidate journey: Understanding the phases your typical candidate takes from awareness to conversion is essential for laying a solid foundation.
- Method to attract candidates: Determine the channels and techniques you’ll employ to reach potential candidates using your candidate journey map. For instance, students are mostly active on WhatsApp, being the most used platform by youngsters, you can leverage WhatsApp Business API and send them notifications to bolster their decision and join your organisation.
- Design your lead generation offer: As candidates are reluctant to give their contact information for free, an offer is always the spark for lead creation. For instance: If you are a university you can trade contact information against the lead magnet content, such as ebooks (career guides, which course to choose, free counselling sessions), can be useful for organisations as long as the offer (and related call-to-action, or CTA) are engaging.
- Build a lead pipeline for lead management: From this point on, you’ll require a dependable procedure for speaking with prospects, assessing them, responding to enquiries and objections, and ultimately converting them.
Final Word!
To reach your target audience, garner attention, and turn prospects into students, you must create a lead funnel management system.
But merely producing leads is insufficient. To move leads from the top of the marketing funnel to the bottom of the sales funnel, your team requires a method. You need a comprehensive CRM that allows you to perform such activities. Meritto’s (formerly NoPaperForms) Education CRM is just the ideal choice for your organization allowing you to perform inquiry to enrolment process in a single system.
