Marketing is the best way to ensure steady growth of your business. This is also a truth for the language teaching market, where competition can be fierce. Automating the sales funnel is therefore one of the secrets to a successful online language school.
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Deploying a marketing strategy for your language school allows you to optimize the communication of the benefits and distinctive features of your offering.
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If you feel it is important not to rely solely on word of mouth to reach new students, you should choose a Learning Management System accordingly. And Edugo.AI's LMS comes integrated into a platform that makes it easy for you to make sales. But what is a marketing funnel exactly, and how do you use it to grow?
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At Edugo.AI we help language businesses get more students and scale online – This is how we usually introduce ourselves. But how do we manage to do that? Thanks to our advanced software completely designed for language learning, which leverages Artificial Intelligence to optimize the learning and teaching experience, as well as the school management. All within the same online environment.
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“Interesting” – you may think – “but still, how exactly do you ensure online growth to my business?”
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When designing our platform, we kept in mind very specific funneling strategies for student acquisition, that no longer referred to the traditional business model of brick-and-mortar schools.
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In the past years, schools have shifted the learning experience to the online market – a transition that has been even quicker due to Covid-19. Within a short space of time, the market has become saturated with virtual programs, and competition among language-training providers has reached an all-time high.
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As such, traditional language schools have had to review business models in order to better offer students a legitimate online-learning experience, as well as ensure that schools prosper commercially. For newer “click-and-mortar” language schools, funnelling strategies take on a whole new approach.
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A marketing funnel describes your customer’s journey with you. It goes from the moment a person knows about your business, till the time s/he buys your service and then invites other people to try your product. It has a bottle-neck shape, as people tend to “drop out” at each stage of the funnel.
Taking as reference Dave McCloure’s funnel model, as it’s the optimal one we use to help language schools acquire new students online, we can break down the customer journey in six different stages:
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You put a lot of work into starting an online language school, but no one will know if you don't make people aware of your services. This stage is all about (guess what?!) brand awareness – how many people know your language school? How many students have heard about your language courses? The answer to these questions should always be “as many as possible”.
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It’s the time when you get, for example, potential students’ email addresses after interactions with the website – signing up to your newsletter or taking the language placement test you may offer.
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At this stage, the student does something more than simply leave his/her email. For example, book a free trial lesson you may offer or use a promo code for a language course.
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When a student purchases one of your services – should it be a package of live lessons, language material or preparation courses for official exams – you enter in the “revenue” stage of the funnel.
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It’s time to be eager – nobody wants students to leave the school after the first purchase. Instead, you wish your student to keep learning with you, thus buying even more packages or courses. In recent years, student retention has quickly become one of the key factors for a successful language school.
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At this stage, your existing customers may invite friends or colleagues to join your school classes, advertising for free your services. Nothing is more efficient than a positive word-of-mouth referral.
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Now, how to implement all of this and scale online? At Edugo.AI we have created specific marketing funnels based on the model above described. Our platform supports your school in every step of the funnel.
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We provide our technology as white-labeled solution. Fully customize your online platform with all your school’s branding elements – logo, colors, domain as well as the landing page, welcoming pre-existing and prospective students to your online school as intimately as possible.
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With brief introductions to each of your professors via accessible profiles and to the variety of courses you provide, enhance your brand awareness, and guide students to quickly familiarize with the platform - in short, a student receives immediate access to a school’s platform (dedicated to online-learning) and instantly gets the value of the practical experience – from the click of a button.
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‍Together with the platform, we help schools achieve maximum visibility, with strategic consultation dedicated to boost your marketing efforts and Search Engine Optimisation (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, YouTube video etc..).
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Whether the call to action on your landing page is to book a trial lesson, take a placement test or find the best course for you, students first need to sign-up – here you collect the user email, which will be displayed in your School Manager interface integrated in the platform.
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Now you can keep track of the users' behavior and even trigger automatic email campaigns to activate students.
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With the aim to make the users' experience as easy as possible, we have designed our platform to facilitate students’ enrolment; in fact, they will naturally and quickly follow the user journey, thus completing in a few passages what suggested by the call to action.
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Once acquired, students will get a full-online experience of your school offer. No matter if the new user attends a live lesson with one of your teachers or enroll into an asynchronous language course; the Adaptive Technology integrated in the platform will automatically generate interactive exercises personalised to him/her immediately after each lesson.
This way, students master all the skills needed while learning a new language and feel engaged with the content since the very beginning.
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‍The sooner students perceive the value of the learning experience you have to offer, the more likely and quicker they’ll enroll.
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The process is also facilitated by a smooth user experience, as everything happens inside the same platform: from the lesson booking, to the purchasing until the live lesson itself.
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Engaged learners express strong satisfaction in their learning experience, while demonstrating excellent results in class – this is essentially what keeps students going.
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Thus, offering students such a valuable learning experience (with interactive and personalised language content) will make them eager to learn more with you. Students will naturally buy further packages, ensuring constant income to your language school.
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By keeping your students engaged throughout your online language courses, they naturally become active promoters of your brand and services within their network. Inevitably, a positive word-of-mouth recommendation process begins to happen. This results in a more effective marketing strategy in contrast to costly online advertising.
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