A lead score serves as a valuable tool in the education industry, providing a numerical value that reflects a potential student’s readiness to pursue a course or program. Also known as a “lead,” this score is determined by considering various factors, including demographics, behavior, and engagement with an educational organization’s marketing materials. At Meritto (formerly NoPaperForms), we understand the importance of lead scoring in effectively prioritizing and nurturing leads. In this blog, we will delve into the significance of lead scoring and explore how it can help educational organizations identify and focus on high-potential leads, leading to improved conversions and enrollment rates. Stay with us to discover the power of lead scoring and how Meritto can assist you in maximizing your marketing efforts.

The higher the score, the more likely the lead is to convert. Lead scoring is a key feature of Lead Nurturing in an Education CRM for Admission Marketing Teams. It enables them to prioritize and focus their efforts on the most promising leads, and to determine when a lead is ready to be passed along to the sales team for further follow-up.

Setting up Lead Scoring 

Lead Scoring typically works by assigning a numerical value to leads based on a set of predefined criteria and here’s how it is done exactly:

1. Define the criteria: The first step in lead scoring is to define the criteria that will be used to assign a score to each lead. This typically includes demographic information, such as job title or industry, as well as behavioral data, such as website visits or engagement with email campaigns.
   
2. Assign a value to each criterion: Next, a value is assigned to each criterion based on its perceived importance. For example, a lead’s engagement might be assigned a higher value in a educational organization’s CRM.
   
3. Score the leads: Once the criteria and values have been defined, leads can be scored by adding up the values of each criterion that they meet.
   
4. Prioritize the leads: Leads can then be prioritized based on their score, with the highest-scoring leads considered the most promising.
   
5. Regularly review and adjust: Lead scoring is not a one-time process, it should be regularly reviewed and adjusted based on the changing business needs, and the performance of the leads on the scoring system.
   
6. Automation: Lead scoring can be automated using marketing automation software or CRM system, which will help to track leads behavior, and score them automatically.

While this is how lead scoring works in most CRMs, Meritto’s purpose-built Education CRM for educational organizations goes a step further and allows you to keep a track of the Lead Strength, an industry-first feature, that shares the relative intent of the prospect compared to the pool of enquiries so you know whom to reach out first.

Leveraging Lead Scores to Enrol More

Now that you know what a lead score is and how it is configured, here’s how it can benefit educational organisations:

1. Prioritizing enrolment efforts: Lead scoring can help educational institutions prioritize which prospective students to follow up with first, based on their likelihood of enrolling.
   
2. Improving targeting: Lead scoring can help institutions identify the characteristics and behaviors of the students most likely to enroll, allowing them to create more targeted recruitment campaigns.
   
3. Measuring lead quality: Lead scoring can also be used to measure the quality of leads generated by different recruitment campaigns or channels, helping institutions optimize their lead generation efforts.
   
4. Forecasting Enrollments: Lead scoring can be used for forecasting enrollment for the upcoming semester or year.
   
5. Identifying at-risk students: Lead scoring can be used to identify students who are at risk of dropping out, allowing institutions to intervene and provide support.
   
6. Better allocation of resources: Lead scoring can help educational institutions allocate resources more effectively by focusing on the most promising leads, rather than wasting time and resources on leads that are unlikely to convert.

So overall, a lead score can help educational organizations prioritize and identify which of their prospective students are most likely to convert and enroll. However, lead scoring or nurturing alone wouldn’t help make an impact if it’s not used in sync with a Campaign Management and Marketing Automation tool that Meritto’s Education CRM provides altogether.

Loss of leads is equivalent to loss of revenue. Indeed, for any organisation, lead management is regarded as the backbone of their business. But often companies underestimate the importance of this process and stick to the traditional method like Excel sheets in managing their leads. This straightaway leads to a greater loss in revenue because of duplicate leads, lead leakage, and so on. 

For this industry-wide problem, we have the right solution!

What is Lead Management? 

Before we move on to understanding how to manage leads efficiently, let us understand what is lead management. The process of acquiring, organising, and managing potential customers until they make the purchase refers to Lead Management. The process usually involves capturing leads from varied sources, stacking their information, checking their authenticity, allocating them for nurturing, communicating with them, and tracking their journey.  Some steps of the Lead Management process are: 

• Generating Leads: Involving a wide range of marketing and offline activities, organisations generate multiple leads
• Capturing Leads: Potential customers respond with their interest and their details are captured
• Organising Leads: On the basis of their response and probability of becoming a customer, leads are bifurcated on the basis of their intent and various other factors
• Nurturing Leads: Potential leads are allocated to the nurturing team for nurture and conversion process

Lead Management Process

Now that we are clear with what is lead management, let us quickly dive into and learn more about the process of lead management: 

Step 1: Lead Capturing

To get the whole process of lead management started, the most crucial step is to generate leads effectively. One needs to critically understand that this step does not only include running marketing and sales campaigns for lead gen, but also collecting and centralizing them. Lead management ensures that your leads from various sources are bind on a single platform for your teams to effectively work on them. 

Step 2: Lead Tracking

The whole concept behind lead management is to remove the manual dependency of the sales and marketing team so that they do not invest their time in tracking back the journey from where the lead has come. Lead tracking is an essential part of the management process as it helps in keeping a track of activities like which page has the user come from, which link did they use, and which product/ service they are interested in. It also helps in stating how easily the lead can be converted. 

Step 3: Lead Qualification

Non-qualified leads are a major cause of lost deals and sales. Thus, one must emphasize on qualifying the leads through a lead manager, to ensure that the intent, interest, and fitment must align while it pushes leads through the sales funnel. 

Step 4: Lead Distribution 

When done manually, lead distribution can be a total mess! Thus, automating the same through a lead manager, makes the whole process streamlined. The automation in LM allows you to build lead assign workflows as per your own preference and you can simply allocate leads as the way you want to. This also ensures an equal work opportunity for all the admission counselors or sales reps. 

Step 5: Lead Nurturing 

It is at this step that the final result of a lead manager can be seen. The above-mentioned steps, set a wholesome ground for the counselors and sales reps to effectively nurture and build relationships with them. With the right information and higher lead intent, counselors can nurture more and more students on the go.

Why do Educational Organisations Need to Manage Leads on an Education CRM?

It is apparent that loss of leads is equivalent to loss of revenue! Educational organisations acquire tonnes of leads from varied offline and online sources and end up capitalising on only some of them. A major reason for this is managing leads on multiple spreadsheets, tools or point solutions. This broken approach to lead management results in lead leakage and higher duplicity rates, enhancing marketing spending and excessive loss of opportunities. To combat this industry-wide problem, educational organisations need a purpose-built solution that works wonders for them – Meritto (formerly NoPaperForms) Education CRM. 

Designed exclusively as a B2C CRM, Meritto’s Education CRM works as a laser-focused solution to seamlessly manage and scale the entire admission process, from candidate enquiry to their enrolment. The CRM system is equipped with an in-built Lead Manager that centralizes all incoming leads/ enquiries on a unified platform, ensuring no loss opportunity with zero lead leakage and zero lead duplicity.

It seamlessly captures your leads across different channels and sources, be it your website, online advertising platforms, education fairs, social media, education platforms, marketing agencies or direct walk-ins. Be it any offline or online mode of acquisition, as the CRM centralises all leads, it maps their initial touch points/ instances as primary, secondary and tertiary. It empowers admission teams/ counselors/ sales representatives to easily monitor the lead source performances, verify leads, prioritise engagement, optimise lead nurturing workflows and drive conversions seamlessly. 

How to Convert More Leads into Enrolments: The Right Way!  

As we have discussed how important it is to manage leads on a unified platform, below are some advantages of managing leads through Meritto’ Education CRM-

Ensure Zero Lead Leakage

With every lead, comes a great business opportunity. The powerful one-view dashboard centralises all leads/ enquiries across multiple sources or channels, enabling you to manage them seamlessly. The CRM capture primary touch points of all the leads/ enquiries from social media campaigns, marketing agencies, website, education fairs and walk-ins, ensuring zero lead leakage and optimising cost. 

Simply Centralise All Leads in a Unified Platform

As you capture leads from walk-ins or other offline activities across campus/ branches/ centres and cities, simply centralize them on the Lead Manager with a quick upload. In real-time, capture all your online and paid lead generation sources, incoming calls, social media, digital agencies and more. The CRM eliminates duplicity and helps you visualize complete student history in real time. Admission heads/ Branch heads can access data across campus/ branches/ centres automatically without any manual data exchange. Teams from different campuses/ branches/ centres can also upload offline data directly to the Lead Manager.

Eliminate Lead Duplication

Similar leads/enquiries can be received through online and offline sources as well. Candidates often submit their information on multiple websites, hence, the lead is circulated throughout the whole industry. Meritto’s Lead Management System, eliminates lead duplicity as the CRM captures instances of enquiries/ leads up to 3 sources- primary, secondary and tertiary source attribution. Easily monitor lead source performances, optimize nurturing and ensure that no two admission counsellors/sales representatives are nurturing the same candidate.

Innovative Source Tracking for Zero Lead Duplicity

The industry-first, non-editable source attribution by Meritto brings complete transparency and accountability to your admission process! The Education CRM captures lead/ enquiry sources on a real-time basis for all the online channels and automatically maps them. As it captures the very first touch point, it attributes them dynamically as Primary source followed by other sources- Secondary, Tertiary, and so on. This entirely eliminates lead duplicity and empowers organisations with authentic data to work on. The right source attribution helps you identify your top-performing channels and optimise your marketing ROI.

Auto Verify Leads to Optimise your Efforts

Counsellors/sales representatives waste their efforts on junk calls, ultimately hampering efficiency. The Lead Manager enables you to enhance your team’s productivity by providing them with only quality leads/ enquiries through the exclusive ‘Student Intent Verification’. All the leads in the Education CRM are auto-verified either through email or SMS. Thus, high-intent genuine leads/ enquiries from the pool are allocated for nurturing. This optimises the nurturing team’s efforts and boosts conversion rate. Low-intent leads can be allocated to-and-within branch/centre-level nurturing teams for advanced nurturing.

Ensure Quality Lead Flow from Marketing Agencies/ Publisher APIs

Improve the quality of leads/ enquiries flowing into your system with the Dynamic Lead Flow Algorithm. Meritto’ Lead Manager allows you to set up a minimum verification rate of leads as a benchmark and experience the quality of your leads/ enquiries improving dynamically. Get the accurate authenticity rate of the leads shared by marketing agencies/ Publisher APIs and customise the number of leads shared as per their quality. 

Manage your leads on the go with Mobile App

Whether your team is working from home, on the ground, at education fairs or on campus, they can easily upload all the leads/ enquiries by adding a quick lead or getting a QR code scanned by candidates. Meritto’s mobile app enables you to take complete hold of your admission activity on your mobile phone.  

Companies envisioning growth, must understand the importance of lead loss and eventually, opportunity loss. As stated above, Lead Management is the backbone of businesses, thus, organizations must rely on a CRM that helps them streamline lead management and enhance conversion rates. Meritto’s Education CRM enables you to achieve exactly the same! Schedule a demo with us!

Meritto (formerly NoPaperForms) understands that many educational organizations rely on Excel sheets for their admissions process. While Excel is accessible and cost-effective, it’s essential to acknowledge its limitations. Choosing Excel may compromise the effectiveness of your counselors and impact conversion rates.

While Excel sheets are suitable for certain activities, they are not designed for comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM). In this regard, specialized Education CRM solutions offer distinct advantages that Excel cannot provide. Education CRMs deliver a superior experience and functionality, empowering businesses to optimize their admissions process and enhance conversions.

Join us as we explore the shortcomings of using Excel for admissions and delve into the benefits of adopting a specialized Education CRM. Let’s navigate the realm of CRM solutions and help you make informed decisions to propel your educational organization’s success.

What is a CRM and how is it Different from a Spreadsheet?

This question has obvious answers that almost every business is aware of. But since many small business owners are still sceptical about making the switch from Excel to CRM, let us try to put an end to this confusion and dilemma for good.

Yes, Excel has several capabilities and it can handle large amounts of data as well. And all of us are well aware of the fact that although it’s a great data management tool, relying on excel sheets is not the answer! As traditional operational approaches like excel or pen-paper management results in stagnant growth of the organisation.

As a result, spreadsheets are not as powerful as CRM software dedicated to managing customer relations. For those who aren’t familiar with CRM, it stands for customer relationship management. The phrase often describes a kind of software which empowers you to grow your business ultimately.

An Education CRM is specifically designed and built for the education industry. It understands the nitty-gritty of the enrolment process and serves as a centralized platform that empowers your teams to grow your enrolments systematically.

Meritto’s (formerly NoPaperForms) Education CRM is a de facto choice for anyone in education looking to scale – be it Higher Education or Online Degree Programmes, Coaching Institutes or EdTech, K-12 or Preschools! This purpose-built CRM for education allows you to centralize leads across sources and allocate them further to different team members, from personalized marketing automation to counsellor/ sales rep productivity mapping, from campaign tracking and optimization to real-time reporting and analytics, you can do it all through plug-n-play solutions. All your scattered approaches and silos in the admission department are brought together, allowing you to attract, engage, and grow enrolments effectively.

CRM vs Excel: Detailed Comparison

What do you Need in an Education CRM?

Among all the benefits offered by a good Education CRM, some cannot be compared to Excel as they simply do not exist in Excel. This is why you can find the below-mentioned features useful:

Centralising Your Data

To seize every opportunity, to end the widespread problem of lead leakage and lead duplication, you can now centralise, manage, and distribute all incoming leads obtained from various sources with a CRM. It allows you to improve the quality of leads, verify them, and prioritise engagement as per the lead score of the candidate.

Know more about Lead Centralisation

Ensure 360° Engagement

With an education CRM you have the liberty to create targeted, personalized communication through a variety of channels. Use emails, SMS, WhatsApp, outbound calls, and more to interact with your prospects wherever they are. You can also track everyday progress with real-time analytics and optimize your communications that bolster a candidate’s decision to join your organization.

Know more about 360-degree communication

Maximise ROI

Run progressive, data-driven campaigns rather than allocating funds based on assumptions. Meritto’s Education CRM allows you to track, measure and optimize the efficiency of all your campaigns in real-time to maximize the ROI from your marketing spends. You can track conversions, be it enquiry to application or course purchases with a configurable and powerful dashboard.

The Strategy that Can Boost Your Admission Marketing ROI!

Ensure Optimum Security for Users

Manage permissions and establish a user’s authorisation to access secure resources. To organise users and teams based on multiple hierarchies or geographical regions and distribute data among team members according to permission, define teams and a hierarchy. Further, with Meritto’ advanced data masking feature, safely store, and securely manage your candidate data.

Know more about User Management

Provides in-depth Reports & Analytics

With insight-driven Dashboards, obtain total 360° visibility. With powerful Reports & Analytics, you can keep track of your team’s performance. Take strategic conversations in real-time while identifying the bottlenecks and top-performing representatives.

Know more about Reports & Analytics

Conclusion: Growing teams Don’t use Spreadsheets

The use of conventional spreadsheets has many drawbacks for managing your admission process. Excel gets increasingly challenging, as your organisation grows.

If you’re finding it difficult to function inside the constraints of spreadsheets, it could be time for a change. A better approach to managing data about your clients, prospects, and finances is provided by true CRM software.

Additionally, it makes it much simpler to communicate data between teams. Your efficiency increases as a result of these advantages, which will ultimately increase your conversion rate.

If you want a scalable, error-free, and hassle-free solution to manage all your customer data, an easy-to-use CRM such as Meritto is a better choice any day. As it saves time, improves focus, boosts productivity, assists in sales strategy, keeps your data secure, and allows for in-depth reporting.

Start Your Journey With Meritto(formerly NoPaperForms)

Also Read –

• What is the Difference Between Admission CRM and Traditional ERP?
• Why Do Institutions Need an Education CRM?
• How is B2C CRM Different from B2B CRM?
• What is CRM: CRM Full Form and Benefits
• What is CRM: Top 10 Myths About CRM Systems For Educational Institutions
• Preschool CRM: Supercharge Your Admissions with Preschool CRM