Growth hacking in online education: 5 practical strategies with revenue forecast

This is the best time for online education. 

More and more people strive to start a new career or boost their current skills. Yet, prospective students are under the constant stress of decision-making: “Which course is worth my time and money? 🤔”

To help prospects fight hesitation and increase your own enrollment rates, you need to create a consistent and relevant system of interactions. Because only with communication you can learn more about your audience, dispel their doubts and create trust to your brand.

So today, I’ll give you five practical hacks to:

• Generate more leads on your website without increasing your traffic;
• Increase conversion to signup and demo;
• Bring you more paid students.

To do all of that, you’ll need a single conversation marketing tool. A chatbot. 

Step 1: Proactively engage in the conversation

Always make the first move. 

A silent position deprives businesses of opportunities to connect to their audience and pave the way to people’s loyalty and trust to the brand. According to the Statista research, around 70% of American customers and 66% of consumers worldwide prefer business to reach out to them with proactive messages. 

And conversational marketing helps you with it. 

A chatbot is a perfect tool to automatically start a conversation with a prospect and collect their contact data 24/7. The chatbot will find out the primary info about visitors and offer some useful content at the end of the chat. 

💡 Offer some valuable content in exchange for visitors’ contacts. It can be a free career guide or a checklist with tips to achieve your academic goals.

The chatbot can also recommend a program based on user’s answers, and route them to the relevant course page. 

Dashly expert calculated how many leads this chatbot can bring monthly:

Dashly customer, online video production school, collected 1,152 leads with this chatbot. You can achieve the same results and even top them!

Don’t miss a chance to know prospective students better. Check out the marketing copy for chatbot messages and settings for this campaign in the article.

Step 2: Qualify prospective students

Personalization is another key point of a successful conversational marketing strategy. Qualification will help you achieve it.

Users that go to your academic program pages are already interested in your school. It’s your chance to get to know them better.

Set up a proactive chatbot on your course pages. Let it find out about user’s academic goals, interests, and previous experience. Don’t forget to collect the contact in the end! The hottest leads can be directed to the sign-up page.

💡 Record user’s answers in the lead card to store all the info about prospects in one place. It will help your sales reps prioritize leads, personalize their offer, and avoid repetitive questions in the conversation.

Here are the results you can get if you launch a chatbot on your course pages:

The chatbot on course pages brought +$145k of revenue to our customer E-Learn. Our practice shows it’s one of the most effective automation campaigns. 

You’ll find marketing copy for chatbot messages and recommended setting in the article about chatbots on course pages.

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Step 3: Create seamless journey

Surely, you have different lead generation channels. And leads from different channels require different approaches. Again, personalization is the key.

Do you host webinars? It’s a great way to raise awareness about your brand and attract more prospects. 

Let’s say you had a webinar “First steps in the IT industry”. Afterward, participants go to your website and the chatbot offers them a checklist to start a new profession or a program of your course “Coding 101”.

This way, you continue the same topic the lead is interested in, building a smooth and relevant customer journey.

💡 This chatbot will help you if you invest in paid traffic or SEO too. When visitors get to your website by ads or searching certain keywords, you have to capture their attention (and contact!) with a relevant offer.

It’s hard to predict the exact revenue you get since webinar or paid traffic campaigns differ from one business to another. But take a look at a real-life example 👇

One of our customer, an online academy, launched such chatbots to learn more about webinar participants, share course programs and talk about pricing. They brought +109 successful deals and resulted in 16,000% ROMI. 

This chatbot is a must-have to ensure a smooth way down the funnel. Get the marketing copy and recommended settings in the article about a chatbot scenario for visits by UTM links and ads.

Step 4: Deal with doubts and provide self-service opportunities

Now, let’s get back to the pain of decision-making. Prospective students are torn, trying to pick the best option. Your job here is to answer any questions they have and dispel their doubts.

Stay ahead of the curve. Put together all the main questions your prospects ask and let a chatbot deal with them automatically. Here’s an example 👇

This is a Welcome bot, and it activates only when a user clicks on the chat widget. That’s what differs it from all the other bots in Dashly. If you’re afraid of being annoying with pop-up messages, the welcome bot is the perfect fit for you. 

And it’s very versatile too. It will:

• Deal with FAQs;
• Capture and qualify leads;
• Route conversations to relevant agents automatically.

Thus, the Welcome bot helps both the marketing and support teams. But mind that conversion into the conversation here will be less than in other campaigns:

This chatbot popular among online schools and services too. Our customer LeadGen App launch the chatbot on the pricing page to deal with FAQs and deliver product benefit over competitors. The result was a 30% increase in sales.

Offload your support agents and deal with customer hesitation with the Welcome bot. Check out the marketing copy and settings for a sign-up conversion chatbot here.

Step 5: Ensure user activation

Your chatbots and sales reps finally led users to signup. Congrats 🎉

But the work doesn’t stop here. It’s time for your aspiring students to get the tangible value of the platform and finally make a purchase decision.  

Onboarding will help you with it. In other words, the introduction to the main features of your platform. And again, the chatbot comes in handy here. 

• If the introduction to the platforms implies self-service, the chatbot can answer all the main questions and share tutorials and guides that will help your student achieve the first results.
• If you arrange demos for new users, the chatbot can qualify a student to collect all the necessary data for your manager. 

One way or another, your prospects won’t have to face a new platform alone. 

The conversion of this chatbot campaign is pretty high since it’s targeted to the most interested leads. Here are the benchmarks:

Our customer with a tricky learning curve launched a chatbot to convey the value of the product and encourage newcomers to actually use the platform. As a result, the chatbot sped up user activation in 2,5 times and increased conversion into targeted action to 33%.

If you want to provide high-quality onboarding and raise user activation, check out this onboarding chatbot campaign with marketing copy and settings.

The bottom line

So, what’s the key to hacking your funnel and raising the enrollment rates? Proactive communication, personalization, and in-time assistance. 

Dashly experts will help you choose the best chatbot campaign to reach your business goals and boost growth

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