3 EdTech Experts Explain How They Increase Visitors-To-Paid Conversions

Have you noticed the increasing amount of free content from info bloggers, companies, online schools these years? This is only one of the factors increasing the difficulty of lead conversion when you sell knowledge. EdTech marketers are in continuous search for new ideas on converting the traffic they bring to the website into registrations/sales.

To help you find more insights into how EdTech companies work with website conversion we interviewed three experts. Pragya Mirsha, Victoria Lee, and Steve Whitley shared the strategies they use to get the attention of target leads and turn them into customers. 

Steve Whitley
As a founder of EdTech Consulting he has spent more than 36 years working in EdTech. Initially spending nine years working within a local education authority, before moving onto commercial organizations selling products into the education sector. 
For 26 years, Steve managed worldwide sales, marketing, and development teams within a vibrant EdTech company, that designs, manufactures & supplies products that enhance the STEM education of K-12 students, all over the world. 
Contact Steve on Twitter

The combo of channels to attract school reps to your website

• Advertising/posts on Social Media. (Twitter, LinkedIn & Facebook)
• Produce blog/comment posts on Social Media.
• Build a Twitter following.
• Traditional email shots, but only to small groups of carefully targeted groups. The track opens and follows with a call or a more detailed email.

Read also: Getting 10% more orders with catch-up email campaigns

• Encourage word of mouth & online recommendations.

A short path to target leads in EdTech

I advise my clients to do their research, find the correct person in the school or MAT, and use specific email addresses (not info@ or hello@ etc.). 

Wherever possible, I advise my clients to offer Zoom calls, Webinars & even good old-fashioned phone calls.

Making personal connection with the potential client
is the best way of securing a sale.

Be very wary of on-line purchasable databases, they are often out of date or simply wrong (and potentially break GDPR rules). There are exceptions, and these are usually easy to identify:

• They are not ‘cheap’!
• They have an active team of staff constantly updating the database.
• They provide an online subscription service, not a one-off sale of data.

How to qualify leads when you work with schools?

Select the potential route into a School or MAT carefully: Are they looking to engage classroom teachers and ‘work up’ the buying chain? Or would they be better starting with a more top-down approach, engaging the head or SLT? (Senior Leadership Team). The answer is often dependent on the type of product being sold, as a generalization, if the product is curriculum specific, (i.e., a Maths App) start with the subject teacher.

If, however, it is a more ‘whole school’ product, (i.e., MIS, Timetabling, etc.) then a top-down approach is better. Sometimes a combination of both in a pincer movement is appropriate.

If the correct contact is targeted initially, lead qualification is sort of self-fulfilling — especially when the focus is on a niche market such as Education, basically, if they work in a school, they are probably a good lead!

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Methods to take into account when you qualify EdTech leads:

• Track click-throughs from Social Media adverts/posts to landing pages.
• Track sign-ups to webinars.
• Generic website traffic.
• Ask the customer how they heard of us!

Victoria Lee
Victoria is the Director of Marketing and Outreach at Elite Medical Prep, a leader in private test prep services for the MCAT, USMLE, and COMLEX exams. As a part of a company with a 100% online business model, Victoria is an experienced international marketing and communications professional who currently resides in Tel Aviv.
Contact Victoria on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube

The power of word of mouth in lead generation

Our leads typically come from word of mouth or students who found us on Google. Our word-of-mouth leads are important because they result from our positive relationships with current and former students and our reputation as a trustworthy test prep provider among medical schools.

A basics of leads qualification on a website

Our leads are all routed through one of the contact forms on our website but in order to maintain our flow of clients, it is necessary to offer (and we pride ourselves in) a top-of-the-line service that is genuinely beneficial to students. 

Offering genuinely helpful services attract genuinely interested leads. As such, lead qualification becomes very simple. When a potential student completes a contact form in its entirety explaining to us their needs as a student and why they are seeking out tutoring, it is clear they are interested.

Leadbot will help to qualify leads and focus your team on the hot ones

One step further is when students directly schedule a time to speak with us, providing all their contact details and RSVPing to the call invite, we know they are a legitimate lead. 

Is there a “magic way” to increase visitor-to-paid conversions?

No. There is no “magic way” that’s ethical to increase conversions on a product or service that just isn’t quality.

Once you have an amazing product or service that truly will solve a given problem that an individual has, it’s important to make sure it’s clear on your website what prospective clients are getting, the extent to which it can help them, and why your product or service is different from the competition.

If you have to hard-sell your product or service in order to get conversions, something is wrong.

There is always room for improvement in the lead to the conversion process

Customer experience trends are always changing, and it’s our job as marketing professionals to not only keep up to date on these standards but also anticipate what could improve prospective client experience.

You could try to search average conversion rates within your industry to get a ballpark of what’s “normal” but in my experience, efficient conversions come when your sales team is really in tune with what prospective clients are looking for.

Nobody likes high-pressure sales, but everyone likes to be an informed buyer and feel respected and heard when asking questions about your product or service. 

Sales and marketing teams work very closely on the leads quality evaluation within our company. The marketing team is constantly asking the sales team questions like, “What is the most common reason prospective clients choose not to proceed with tutoring?” or “Do you get the sense the given lead may have gone with a competitor of ours or after talking to you did they just decide tutoring wasn’t the right option for them?”

If something unusual is going on with the quality of leads like an influx of incomplete contact forms or spam forms, sales will also report it, so we can check with our developers if there may be a technical problem.

Communication is very important to optimize your product/service, your lead to conversion rate, and the quality of your leads!

Pragya Mishra
A Social Media Marketer with a specialty in EdTech and B2B. She started her career as a Subject-Matter Expert for Business Studies, and later turned to marketing and mentoring after finding her interest in the same field.
Currently, Pragya is associated with different companies from around the globe as a freelancer, Social Media Marketer, and also works as an Education Mentor (for the subject Branding and Marketing) at Great Learning. 
Contact Pragya on LinkedIn, Pragmarketo.com, and Great Learning

Top 3 marketing channels to collect leads

Affiliate/referral, LinkedIn marketing, and email marketing are the major ways based on the current offering and the clients I’m working with. Affiliation and reference work like a charm if your strategy is strong and has a satisfied customer base. LinkedIn and email marketing will help you if you are using them mindfully and patiently.

The base you can’t qualify leads without in EdTech

Well, we have created a proper guide to what our idle looks like, and accordingly, we reach out to the desired audience. Having a buyer persona not only helps to understand how your idle clientele looks like, but it also helps to understand what your customers want to know about you and how to present that information to them.

Apart from that, we also assess the data that we get to reach the prospects having features of our idle customers.

Trial-to-paid conversion growth methods  

We work on understanding how our idle ‘client’ looks like, and we approach the prospects accordingly. Having a buyer persona and the data of what triggers them to perform a particular action not only helps to understand the clientele base but also helps to understand what your customers want to know about you and how to present that information to them. Further, I also encourage leveraging the following ways to maximize the percentage of trial-to-paid conversions. 

• Give away something for free.
• Conduct live informative webinars on different platforms. 
• Leverage influencer marketing.
• Invest in productive partnerships with trade associations and tech companies.  

How to improve lead conversion in EdTech?

I believe in doing lots of A/B testing, discussing our plans with the sales plus other concerned teams, and finding out where we can improve further. Creating well-researched and moderate aggressive plans helps to push more and find where we can improve our current work process and maintain proper consistency to garner better results.

In marketing, there is no one size fits all solution. So, you need to continuously experiment and try out new ways to click the right chords to create a perfect melodious song that your customers can happily sing with you.   

It is of utmost importance to keep experimenting, exploring the data and new possibilities to entice customers. Also, I would like to highlight five important ways to improve lead conversion by:

• Add multimedia content to your content strategy. 
• Work on creating purposeful and catchy email subject lines.  
• Focus on personalization. 
• Place text CTAs in your blogs.  
• Create to the point, goal-specific, effective landing pages. 

There is no opportunity in marketing to get rid of manual work on 100%. But it is possible to automate part of processes and focus on high-priority tasks. Communicate with people you attracted on the website to capture their contacts, qualify and pass them to sales without a human touch!

Capture, qualify, and hand leads to the right team automaticaly with Dashly’s Leadbot!

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Read also:

• How to implement user tracking on website: guide, tactics, and tools
• Acquisition funnel marketing: Grow customer conversions at each step of user journey
• Top 12 lead qualification tools to deliver your sales hot leads only
• 20 AI sales tools: Boost your sales strategy with revolutionary technologies
• Top 13 follow up email software to elevate your email marketing strategy
• 10 best predictive lead scoring software to boost your sales funnel