Our mystery shopper experiment as well as our direct work with university clients has shown us repeatedly that many international admission officers don't have appropriate digital support services, such as email, mobile delivery and publishing tools available. This article will introduce you to several cloud-based services to ease your work with prospective international students.
Cloud computing is a big word, but it simply means that you are accessing software or hardware service via the internet instead of installing the software on your own computer.
We will focus on services you need to support the top part of your marketing funnel, which means the early contact phase with a large number of prospects. How do you attract students? How do you follow up and respond to their questions and those of their parents? How do you inform college counselors and international agents of your newest information? We will exclude the back-end university services such as your application system, and student management, administration, and learning management systems. Our survey is not exhaustive by any means, but we'll highlight services that we have either used ourselves or that have received strong reviews from people we trust.
Graph 1 gives you our priority of digital marketing services you need to deploy to communicate with students and support your offline enrollment activites.
- Email: Good "old" email is still an important cornerstone of your marketing activities, the same way your website itself is the foundation of all your digital marketing. If your office uses Outlook or any other email system to respond manually to inquiries or has no way for prospective international students to sign up for information, go sign up for a cloud-based mailing service, which can be low cost or even free. Do it now.
There are many different cloud-based email services. Our favorite solution, Mailchimp, offers free usage for up to 2,000 email subscribers and 12,000 emails per month. After that you pay as you use the service. Other comparable providers are Constant Contact or Aweber.
It is important that the email provider gives you a means to set up an easy registration for prospective students or for you to add email addresses. From there you can inform your prospective students with automated emails. The goal is to reduce your workload, allowing you to provide regular updates.
A great feature of cloud-based email providers such as Mailchimp is that they already come with built in analytics and very easy reporting. You'll know your delivery rate, open rates, click throughs, etc. -- all critical metrics to see whether your message arrived. Furthermore, most of these companies already optimize your email templates for mobile delivery -- a critical component in today's marketing environment.
- Videos are a powerful marketing tool. Video usage is growing steadily and YouTube, Vimeo and Youku (in China) are powerful marketing channels. YouTube, which is owned by Google, records the second largest number of searches after Google itself. So users don't just passively watch videos -- they search for them and may prefer the video over text based content.
We find more and more instructional videos. Think of how you might explain the process of completing an admission application or submitting a form on your website. By the way, you don't have to create all content by yourself. You may be able to find relevant content online. We did a simple search on how to fill out an I-20 and we find this instructional video.
- Document sharing services: The question is whether you are looking for public sharing or sharing with a targeted group or individuals. The difference is important, particularly as it relates to privacy. Let's focus on sharing information that is not of a personal nature, which is usually true for most marketing information. GDrive or Google docs is a widely used system and it allows you to share different types of formats, ranging from simple Word-type documents and spreadsheets to specifically designed forms. Dropbox is an easily accessible file sharing service. You can establish groups with access so if you want to share documents with a group of counselors, admission officers or agents, it's quite easy. Your ability to control distribution is limited and documents can be shared easily. Sharefile from Citrix or other commercial services, which carry a price tag, provide you with more control and visibility as to who is receiving your files.
- Voice and Video Communication: International students don't have the possibility to visit your campus so you must establish direct contact. Free or inexpensive voice and video communication can be very helpful. Most of the services also allow you to share a presentation or present documents. You have all heard of Skype, which is now owned by Microsoft and is easy to use and free for one-on-one audio and video conversations. The group feature for video requires a subscription. Google Hangout is a more recent addition to this space and is completely free even for group conversations of up to 10 users. It may take you a little bit more time to get used to the set up of Google Hangout--use doesn't appear as intuitive as Skype, but maybe that's just my challenge. GoToMeeting is a commercial service, which allows you to use audio, video and screensharing. There are a plethora of commercial webinar providers.
- Contact management systems and customer relationship management (CRM)
Lastly, a cloud-based integrated marketing solution: Hubspot. [For full disclosure, we are a user and customer as well as an implementer of Hubspot for our clients.]
If you look at the chart above of the five building blocks of marketing, Hubspot is that and more. It combines the functionality of email, social media, and blogging with a prospect and contact database and powerful marketing analytics.
There are many outstanding services providers that fall under cloud services. We welcome any questions you may have and are always happy to offer advice. If it exists we've either tried it or would like to learn more about it.
