In the past, we’ve talked a lot about increasing your school enrolment applications, by implementing tactics that capture the interest of a broader net of prospective families. After executing a cohesive enrolments strategy, you'll likely start to see more and more applications come through your enrolment portal — great!
Once this is happening, it’s time to start sorting out which families are the most interested in your school, and which are simply shopping around and applying to all of their available options. You'll also likely be trying to determine which students are the best fit for your school, and which families will be best served by your unique offerings. It can be a time-consuming process to determine who your ‘ideal applicants’ are to offer them a place at your school. That’s where lead scoring can help.
Lead scoring is traditionally used by B2C and B2B businesses to rate the quality of relationships and interactions between a business and a prospective customer (or lead). You assign “points” based on various attributes that are determined by your company, including demographic information, company information and online engagement.
Schools can similarly use lead scoring to weigh certain attributes of an application to determine the best fit or ‘ideal applicant’ for the school. For example, you may assign points to an application if:
You can also assign points based on interest, such as the number of quality interactions that the family has had with your school — this might include attending a tour or engaging with the email communications that you send them.
Each school will have a different way of assigning value to an applicant. A common method is to analyse data from past enrolments to see what they had in common. For example, you might find that most applications that turned into enrolments were located in a particular area, or had a parent who had previously attended the school. You might also find that parents who attended a school tour prior to applying were more likely to finalise the enrolment process compared to parents who attended an open day.
Another helpful method is to talk to current families themselves about why they enrolled in your school. You might be surprised at what you learn! A good tip from HubSpot is to talk to parents who had a short enrolments process as well as those who required significant nurturing before they completed the enrolments.
Once you have a list of these attributes, you can start assigning points based on what is important to your school.
There are two ways that you can start using lead scoring when analysing an enrolment application. The first is to manually analyse each lead, assigning points based on the attributes that you’ve deemed most valuable to your school. This can be a time-consuming process, as you will need to go back through all of your interactions with the parent and manually score the application.
The second way is to use the lead scoring functionality in your school customer relationship manager (CRM). A CRM is a system that allows you to track and score customer data, giving you the opportunity to monitor every enrollment.
Many CRMs, including Digistorm Funnel, offer clients the ability to create lead score profiles. You enter the attribute and then assign a certain score to the attribute (either a positive or a negative number). You can then determine a strong lead score, and filter only applications that meet that score or above, to see the strongest applications first.