At Meritto (formerly NoPaperForms), we recognize the challenges faced by educational organizations when it comes to enrolling more leads and providing personalized attention to each enquiry. We understand that understanding and implementing an effective lead funnel is crucial for your organization’s success. Successful sales and counseling teams know that attracting not just more, but better leads is the key strategy to achieve sales and revenue targets.
In this article, we aim to help you gain a deep understanding of the lead funnel and its significance for educational organizations. We will guide you through the process of creating a lead funnel and provide you with five essential steps to build an efficient funnel that will expedite your sales process. By following these steps, you can raise awareness, establish authority, and focus your efforts on developing high-quality prospects until they successfully convert. Meritto is here to assist you in optimizing your lead generation and conversion strategies to drive enrollment and revenue growth.
What is a Lead Funnel?
A lead funnel, also known as a sales funnel, is a process that helps organizations to convert potential candidates (leads) into paying customers. In the education industry, the lead funnel is used to convert prospective students into enrolled students. The lead funnel typically includes the following stages:
- Awareness: This is the initial stage of the lead funnel where an organization 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 organization, 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 organization’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 enroll in the institution and become a student.
- Retention: Once the student is enrolled, 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 organizations 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 organization.
- 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 organizations 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.
