It’s quite attracting when I ensure a 100% guarantee on all that you dream for-Decrease the Cost Per Lead, Increase the Conversion Rate and Decrease the Manpower Resource. You might be thinking if these are really achievable goals?
Let me tell you the truth-these are definitely possible by just following some simple strategies which might be missing from your business. There is no rocket science involved in deriving a successful strategy for your business. Just including some missed out elementary features would be enough.
I have spent more than 3 million Dollar for digital marketing in higher education. These were solely for branding, lead generation, SEM, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, App promotion, Video Marketing etc. I have processed 1 million leads so far and helped enrol 40000 students.I controlled and optimized the digital campaigns over 50 countries across the world. The students who enrolled were mainly from India, Middle East and Africa.
I have also associated with more than 100 agencies to collect leads/data and managed more than 100 counselors to process the leads. I also developed websites,mobile apps, CRM’s. I have been doing these for the past 8 years of my career. To inculcate a spirit of learning, I actively took part in digital marketing events/conferences specially devoted to Higher Education conducted across the globe.
I developed a successful digital marketing strategy for higher education through trial and error methods on optimization of digital campaigns, implementing Artificial Intelligence in the custom CRM, big data analysis etc. I also insist to implement automation wherever there is scope to avoid manpower. This not only helps in cost cutting but also helps to eradicate human errors.
For e.g. While I took over an online MBA project, there was just 1 counselor to process the incoming leads. But due to my activities on SEO, PPC etc the flow of incoming leads increased and we expanded to a team size of 100 in 1 year. We analysed the data for a period of few years and thought to implement Artificial Intelligence in our CRM. The studies led to various insights and we derived that just 50 counselors were enough to process the same amount of data.
The end result was amazing. I must tell you that it did not all happen on one single day but through a course of events over a period of time. I should say it evolved over a period of 8 years and I can implement the same thing for you if planning to expand your business. I just need to be given a chance to study your digital campaigns, CRM, incoming data etc and I can provide you with lots of quality inputs for cost cutting, reducing man power, increasing conversion rate and decreasing the cost per lead.
I have observed that in majority of the big companies, there are different departments to handle SEO, PPC, Email Campaigns, CRM, development of Mobile Apps, website development, data analysis etc. One department doesn’t intervene in the other’s business but the hidden truth is that these activities are all interconnected.
A website development should happen in the guidance of an SEO expert as both are interconnected.In my opinion, there should be one person who is an expert in all the above activities to overlook and guide all the different teams.Every optimization activity handled by different teams should be carried out with the guidance of an expert.
I’m putting down below some measures which I had adopted to achieve the above-mentioned goals.
Increase Conversion Rate
- We had a team of 75 counselors and I demanded a target achievement of 7%. The allotted time period was 1 month. But no one achieved. So naturally a talk sprouted that it was an unachievable task for them. But in the later months one person achieved the target and he was rewarded. So, the unnecessary talks vanished and in the following months we got 3 counselors who gave more than 8%. Just see the difference. Some strategies to manage the counselors should be carried out in secret to derive better results.
- Don’t assign data equally to all the counselors instead distribute data based on performance basis. The best leads should be assigned to best counselors and vice versa. You might think why but here there is reason to double think. Why do you need to waste the good quality leads by assigning to a bad counselor?
Increase lead count
Suppose 100 visitors flow in to the website and only 1 enquiry was made. I can increment it to 2 if the following measures are taken.
- In some cases, making separate landing pages for different campaigns has proved to a wrong strategy.
- Inclusion of live chat mechanism
- Text Ad and image Ad optimization
There are also many others.
Reduce Manpower
- Implement automation wherever possible to reduce man power. Let the CRM do the job for you instead of manually allotting the leads to counselors.
- More dependency on data analysis tools like Google analytics and other products.
Data for atleast a period of 3 years should be analysed before taking a voluntary action.
I know that if you are an online education provider, you might already be playing the game in the digital marketing scenario. You might be also possessing all the resources and techniques in-house or would have associated with a digital marketing agency. Although you might be successful, there might be chances where you have missed out various optimizations at different levels, which I can rectify for you. If you already have a 1% admission rate, I can convert it into 1.5% in a short span of time. If you have cost per lead $2, I can reduce to $1.5. If you have 100 counselors, I can cut short to 75 to process the same number of leads.
