How to Improve Trade Show Follow-Up Emails With an AI Assistant

Higher education institutions rely heavily on lead generation tactics – events, social media, web, and print materials – to recruit the right students to their schools. Part of the recruitment process is providing a positive and engaging experience, which starts the moment a lead initiates contact with the school. This entails promptly responding to lead capture forms, answering questions with relevant information, and helping each lead feel that their individual needs are being addressed.

Lead Follow-Up Efforts

In this Sales Effectiveness Report, we take a closer look into lead follow-up efforts in the education industry. Are educational institutions promptly responding to lead inquiries with personalized answers? Or following up with each lead to make sure they’re satisfied with the information they received?

The Four P’s of Lead Follow-Up

Conversica commissioned independent researchers to make direct inquiries at undergraduate and graduate schools across the U.S., then evaluated their responses using four metrics we call the 4Ps:

• Promptness: How quickly did a school respond the prospective student’s inquiry?
• Personalization: To what extent was the response personalized? Did the response provide an opportunity to keep the dialogue going?
• Persistence: How many attempts did the school make to follow up with the lead?
• Performance: What was the likelihood that the follow-up email landed in the lead’s inbox (rather than the spam folder)?

In 2017, 27% of leads did not receive any response to their inquiry. This is a significant decline in lead response efforts compared to the two previous years.

There was also a significant decline in overall grade performance – over 70% of schools scored B or higher in 2016, compared to only 40% in 2017:

Deciding which school to attend is one of the biggest (if not, the biggest) decisions a prospective student has to make. Educational institutions need to optimize their lead follow-up efforts to convert those leads into enrolled students.