We’ve gone to great lengths in recent years to educate sellers to schools about the importance of building their marketing campaigns on clean, accurate, and up-to-date education data.

And it’s clearly paid off because most clients we talk to these days are extremely savvy and ask all the right questions about our database. In fact, many are like wine connoisseurs who are able to spot a corked claret with just the merest swish of their glass and the lightest sniff of the air!

This is great. However, buying the best quality data is only a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Purchasing accurate data is only the first step…

To be frank, if you’re not using the right software to send your education marketing then it makes little difference how good your data is – it simply will not reach teachers’ inboxes.

Let me explain; there’s absolutely nothing wrong with MailChimp or any of the other email broadcasting platforms out there, it’s just that when you’re marketing to the UK education sector they fall short in a number of key ways.

That’s one of the reasons we created Campus; we realised that no matter how accurate our data was, if our clients didn’t have the right technology at their fingertips then we simply weren’t solving their education marketing needs.

A seamless interface between database and emailing platform…

Anyone who uses MailChimp will agree that having to export data from one system and upload it into another is a bit of a faff. However, more importantly, it also increases the likelihood that you’ll end up sending your email campaigns to incorrect contacts.

This is because once a send list has been created in MailChimp it basically becomes static data and starts going out of date (unless you’re a coding whizz who can use APIs and webhooks to sync your databases with your MailChimp lists!). As a result, if you were to re-use the send list in 30 days’ time, you would be sending your email to incorrect email addresses and addressing them to outdated contacts.

The beauty of Campus is that it is an integrated system, so as soon as you create a dynamic send list in either the Education Data Module or the Campus CRM, those send lists are already sat there waiting for you when you go to the Emailing Module.

Actually, ‘sat there’ is the wrong expression as it implies that your send lists are static, when in fact they are being constantly refreshed in real-time as our team update the Education Database and as you update the contacts in your CRM module. This means that when you want to send another email to the same list 30 days later, you’ll automatically benefit from the 11,000 updates we’ve made in that period – there’s no need to re-create a send list ever again!

In tune with the needs of a UK education business…

The biggest issue many sellers to schools have with their email broadcasting platform is that it simply won’t allow them to upload many of the email addresses they’re trying to send to. Pretty big drawback huh?

This is because sending platforms like MailChimp are designed for businesses that market to consumers (where opt-in consent is required) and use an artificial intelligence system to approve all email data before it is uploaded.

Of course, as you’re using public sector data (and not marketing to consumers) you don’t require opt-in consent in order to market to your list. However, MailChimp doesn’t know this and will therefore incorrectly judge that you don’t have the required permission to email some of the contacts in your list.

With Campus of course, you don’t have any of these issues as it has been specifically designed for UK education businesses.

Open rates 80% higher than the education sector average…

Being able to upload your send list is only half the battle though; how many of the emails that you send to schools and teachers actually reach the recipient's inbox (instead of falling foul of schools’ super-sensitive filter systems)?

Thanks to our top-spec Linux Servers (which lead a free range life in the beautiful Gloucestershire countryside) we can ensure that emails you send through Campus enjoy a first class flight into an inbox! It also helps that schools are used to receiving emails from the IPs we own and that we are THE recognised safe sender with many UK schools.

But there is so much more to Campus…

Campus will save you time, money, and ensure that more of your emails are opened; however the Education Data and Emailing Modules are just two of the powerful features that make up the Campus software.

Ultimately, Campus has been designed to provide education businesses with all the tools they need to grow their business; from generating more leads (the Forms Module) right through to converting those leads into customers (the Quotes & Money Module) and then nurturing those relationships so customers become brand advocates (the CRM Module).

But the icing on the cake is that Campus also gives you an automated sales funnel; one that is completely unique to your business and enables you to automatically move contacts through your sales journey. It does this by tracking and logging every single interaction a contact has with your business in real-time (you will even see a pop-up message on your screen when a teacher is visiting a page of your website or interacting with one of your marketing emails).

It then uses these insights to rank your contacts by awarding ‘funnel points’ based upon rules that you set up in your Campus account. So, you might want to award 5 points for clicking a link in a marketing email, 10 points for visiting the prices page on your website, and 20 points for requesting a quote. It’s completely up to you and there are no limits to the number of rules you can create.

You can then set up points thresholds so you can effectively pinpoint where a contact sits within your sales funnel. This is incredibly powerful as it enables you and your team to instantly identify those teachers that are ready to buy from you and those that require a different type of marketing message to move them through your funnel.

Steal a march on your competitors…

Campus has already been adopted by many of the UK’s most forward-thinking education businesses (including us of course!).

Why don’t you stop by Sprint HQ for a Live User Experience and see how Campus will enable you to close more leads than ever before? Our sales rocketed by 24% in the first 6 months of using Campus and I’m sure it could do the same for you.

You can book your Live User Experience via our website or just give us a call and we’ll be happy to arrange it for you!

Tags
Marketing to Schools Selling to Schools Email Teachers Selling to Teachers How to Sell to Schools

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