VIDEO: Use HubSpot workflows to nurture prospective students

Choosing a school, college or university is a big decision and the decision making process for prospective students can often take months or even years from initial consideration through to enrolment. This presents a challenge to education marketing teams who need to strike a balance between helpful communications and not rushing the prospect.

HubSpot tools are rapidly gaining popularity across the education sector, giving schools, colleges and universities the ability to automate lead nurturing (or 'keep warm') campaigns that span months or years.

What is 'lead nurturing'?

The way that customers across sectors interact with brands has changed in recent years, with the popularity of social media and the rise of inbound marketing methods. Today's customers want the organisations they engage with to provide value and personalisation at every touch point.

The key to converting more leads into customers is to provide genuinely interesting and tailored content and communications that meet their needs at each stage of the decision-making process. This can be tricky for schools and colleges to manage, with a large number of prospects who all have individual needs and interests, and who can take many months to make a decision.

This is where marketing automation can help. Nurturing your leads means that you provide timely, relevant and helpful content throughout the buyer's journey, by automating your lead nurturing efforts you can manage this process without any prospects slipping through the net, and whilst keeping workload for your marketing team manageable!

Why is this so important in education?

Choosing where to study is a huge decision and students will have lots of questions before they join, from the subjects/courses they want to study, to finding a school or college with the right level of pastoral or learning support, clubs and activities on offer, the 'feel' of campus itself and who their tutors will be.

Typically education providers have offered lots of information like this at open events, and in brochures and prospectuses - this is great and should of course continue, but it relies on your prospects searching for answers and can risk trying to shoe-horn every prospect into the same journey simply to suit the organisation's need and not the student's.

What is a workflow?

HubSpot workflows allow marketers to build out customer journeys that automate and personalise communications over time. We have seen schools and colleges use HubSpot to build fully automated personalised lead nurturing journeys that span up to 2 years! By getting this journey right, you can stand out from your competitors, improve conversion rates from enquiry to enrolment and get real insight into the topics that most interest your students at each stage of their admissions journey.

Here is an example lead nurturing workflow for a college offering a specialist Arts programme, everything in this from the forms to the emails can be tailored to your organisation's specific needs and every email can be personalised with prospect details, the content in each of these emails can even change depending on specific audience traits (for example, one prospect who is looking at a short course can see different text and imagery in the emails compared to a recipient who is looking at a 3 year course).

You can create a range of workflows to suit your audience, you may want one general workflow for your school or college wide topics, a workflow like the above for specific courses or interests, or perhaps even one per marketing persona to really tailor your communications to your audience needs.

Already a HubSpot user?

We recommend using some of the default properties to check whether your prospects are engaging, take a look at these properties and consider adding them to your workflows:

Sends since last engagement - this is the number of marketing emails sent to a contact since they last engaged (opened or clicked a link in an email)
Last marketing email open date - the date of the most recent email open for any marketing email
Last marketing email click date: the date of the most recent link click for any marketing email.
Last activity date: the last date and time a note, call, sales email, meeting, task, or chat was logged on the contact's record. This is set automatically by HubSpot based on the most recent date/time set for an activity.

If you need some support with your lead nurturing, content strategy or technical support. Please contact us and we will be happy to help. We offer a range of consultancy, strategy and support services for organisations using HubSpot.