You’ve done the bulk of the hard work – raised the level of awareness surrounding your school and attracted prospective parents and students. But now they’ve dropped off the grid entirely.
This could be due to a number of reasons; the initial impact of Covid-19 and the time restrictions brought on by homeschooling, parents assuming your Open Days are now cancelled, or those that merely couldn’t make the last date you had in the diary pre-lockdown.
Reengaging with old leads via email remarketing is one of the simplest and most effective ways to boost leads for your now virtual open days. Here are Digithrive for Schools’ top tips to help you achieve new admissions through email remarketing.
Email Remarketing: How to engage old leads
Utilise your Data (Cookies)
For email remarketing campaigns to be successful, you will need a browser cookie installed on your website. This cookie will monitor your site visitor’s experience and collect information on them. For instance, by using cookies you will be able to understand which Open Day your prospective parent was initially interested in attending, as well the factors they cared most about, whether it be your school’s academic achievements, school facilities or fees. This is all done by tracking the pages visited on your website.
Automated Email Sequences
Once you’ve collected this data, utilise it by segmenting your audiences into relevant categories, for instance academic year groups or day/boarding, then send them highly bespoke automated sequence email campaigns that provide answers to your prospective parents’ questions. As the sequence is automated, it creates multiple touch-points with the perspective parent and guides them down the sales funnel. Not only will this majorly increase your chances of conversion, it’s a relatively low cost digital marketing approach as it utilises the CMS you should already have in place.
We use Hubspot and highly recommend it for setting up sequential email marketing campaigns.
Remember, it’s not only website visitors who haven’t made direct contact that you can add to email remarketing campaigns. What about those parents who have contacted you via telephone, contact forms or school events, but haven’t taken the next step? Or what about those who have previously signed up to an Open Day but were unable to attend?
For example, if someone doesn’t attend an Open Day, you can send them a ‘Sorry we missed you’ email with details of the next one. Then once they’ve signed up, you can send them a second email that can be your prospectus and vital information about the school that parents need.
Less is more
Within your email, keep the information relevant and concise. To help parents take the action you want them to, you need to be specific. If they were looking at an Open Day for Sixth Form, don’t mention other year groups in your email, only the dates of the upcoming Virtual Open Day for Sixth Form.
Make sure you include a clear CTA button that takes them to a signup form (landing page). Keep this specific to the event and easy to fill in and easy to navigate.
Give options
Not only has the Coronavirus pandemic changed the way schools conduct open days, but it has also changed the behaviour of prospective parents when researching and considering schools. Some may dread the thought of attending an open day and feel most comfortable on a one-to-one zoom call with the Head or Q&A with the admissions officer. Whilst others may be less risk-averse and simply couldn’t select a school without experiencing a physical tour and talk.
With our current campaigns, we have found giving three options works best for parents, with mixed results per event per school. These include:
- A pre recorded tour of the School
- Personalised Q&A session (via Zoom)
- 1-2-1 Zoom interview with your Headteacher.
- 360 Tours of the school (if you have the time and resources)
Reset & Repeat
Another advantage of using email remarketing is once you’ve created these sequences, you can easily reproduce these campaigns and create an automated funnel for prospective parents going forward and open events in the future. This can easily be done by creating a ‘trigger’, that automatically enters parents into a remarketing funnel once they’ve taken a specific action on your website.
If you would like more professional tips on marketing your schools do get in touch with the Digithrive For School’s team who are always happy to help. contact us here