Conversational Ai- 5 Impressive Admission Marketing Strategies

Mohit Dua
AI Timey
Published in
9 min readMay 2, 2020

Is there some technique or strategy we haven’t yet explored in marketing which can boost our Admissions? Is Conversational Ai is the thing we should go for? These all are the questions I usually get from Digital Marketers working and giving their best in the Education sector to skyrocket the conversions and sign-ups. And I always suggest each one of them to go out there and bet everything on Conversational Ai.

Conversational Ai

For all those who have no idea about the term, please don’t worry. You will not only understand the term but also its immense use in various areas such as conversational ai marketing, conversational ai chatbot, etc.

If I have to explain it in one line then it would be the use of messaging apps, chatbots, voice bots to guide the students or prospective students to be precise, in a very personalised manner and building the conversation parallel to the students need.

To get an overview of Conversational Ai click here.

It’s well known that every Founder needs a Co-founder to run a company and similarly, Conversational Ai marketing needs a partner as well which is a Conversational Ai chatbot. The Conversational Ai chatbot is a separate hub for boosting admissions and increasing conversations exponentially in itself and when it is blended with marketing techniques which we are going to discuss, it impressively multiplies the results and conversions.

To know how conversational ai chatbot acts as a funnel to boost admissions, click here.

Conversational AI Chatbot

A chatbot is a term that every industry is quite familiar with. It guides your customer by solving the basic queries and generates a lead. We’ll not go deep into that. Rather, we must concentrate on that one thing which differentiates Conversational Ai chatbot, let’s name it Jenny, from a regular Chatbot? The answer is the same as what differentiates a human agent from a bot? Yes. You guessed it correct. Personalisation it is!

The human tendency is to acknowledge people who remember something about the other person from their previous encounter. Even if it is as basic as a name. The person tends to fall towards the other person because of the personalisation he felt. Similarly, if the chat assistant remembers the customer’s name, the course he was looking for, the entire conversation he had, such level of personalisation surely boosts the conversions and gives you an upper hand in the Industry.

I know you must be curious to know how we can use it in marketing and admissions. So let us directly hop onto that!

For all those peeps who wanna know more about skyrocketing conversions through chatbots, click here.

Conversational Ai Marketing

1. Social Media- Facebook & Instagram

Industry gets saturated on the ideas of graphics they advertise on Social Media such as Instagram and Facebook. This situation arises because they have nothing left to showcase. Right from the courses they promote, to the placements and packages their students grab, they have done it all. Knowing the conversion rate of such graphics from past experience, they are pretty much sure that they will be getting fewer conversions because of the marketing competition which isn’t saturating rather, increasing. So what one should do in such a situation? What content one should create that engages with potential students?

Chatbots

The idea is quite simple and yet massively effective i.e. creating personalised social media graphics and videos introducing the conversational ai chatbot Jenny for your followers and viewers. This won’t be a regular graphic where one university or college is flaunting about itself but will be the one which will pass a message that we care for our students first. It will be like Hey Rohan! You were a little confused between Mechanical and Electrical Engineering during our last conversation. Let’s sort that out for you when you are free!

It is experimentally proven that these kinds of graphics and videos increase the Click Through Rate by 37%. Also, it doesn’t require fancy ideas and vectors. Just think of a conversation between an Admission Counsellor and a prospecting student who wants to take admission and Boom! There you go. Simple and quick as it sounds!

2. SMS Campaigns

Let’s be honest for once and admit that we all ignore a plethora of emails and SMS that are not from our people or acquaintances. Every company, university, services, etc emails go down in our scrolling list unopened. I would rather say, we bluntly ignore them! But if we ponder over it for a while, we can surely crack the algorithm of this ignorance. And again, you will realise that it is all coming down to Personalisation. We reply and show interest to the SMS and emails from our acquaintances because of solely one reason, Personalisation. They have a piece of prior knowledge about us and we have theirs.

Conversational Ai Marketing

Now imagine, a student visits your website and interacts with the Conversational AI chatbot. Let us assume the best in the industry currently AI Timey. You have the entire record of the chat and you know that he left the conversation after asking Fees of the course. You know that is a hot lead and the student seemed interested in the University. Now the role of Conversational AI marketing comes in. You can send an SMS to him that Hey Sparsh! Your personal admission assistant Jenny (of course not forgetting the personal touch) wants to discuss the scholarships that our university provides. And Bang On! That will seem that you are not selling anything but actually helping that kid out.

Not in the education sector? Wondering if it is beneficial for your sector? Got the best suited article for you! Click here.

This marketing tactic will boost your conversion rate of SMS campaign like it used to work initially. A grand leap of Click Through Rate by 2.5 times.

3. Landing Pages

Well, these are the pages which are purely meant for conversions. End of the conversation! They are made in such a way that funnels down the student for lead generations or maybe direct admission in few cases. But the sad part is that it isn’t converting up to its full capacity. After gathering the CPL (Cost Per Lead) data of numerous universities, we found out that on an average, a single lead costs around 350–400 INR for the universities in India. Moreover, the lead isn’t qualified as well.

You must be thinking what else we can do other than building a good landing page? First of all, let us discuss why the landing page isn’t that much converting. Do you guys are providing any information there? Or directly asking the details of the prospecting student? Do you have a long contact form which is to be filled by the student? Or is it interactive?

Conversational Ai Chatbots

I believe by reading those questions aloud, you must have realised where some work needs to be done, on making it more interactive and providing value first. The first step towards that would be replacing the conventional contact form with an interactive and student-friendly Conversational Ai Chatbot.

Go and check out how Landing Pages can be improved by introducing a Chatbot, click here.

Next thing coming up is the crux for greater conversions and a revolution to the landing pages strategies. Yes! A Revolution! And it is called UTM Personalisation. Personalisation to such a degree is an achievement in itself. Let us get down to it straight.

To understand how it works, let’s consider an example. Suppose a student is searching for best mechanical engineering colleges in India and he lands on your Website or Landing Page. Now just consider this, what if your chat assistant greets the student by saying, Hey! I know you are looking for Mechanical Engineering? Don’t worry. I’m right here to guide you!

I know it sounds crazy to get into such a level of personalisation but it is possible. You just fetched the intent of what he has previously searched and used it as a mean of initiating conversation which is any day better than a cliché start.

Trust me, such a small initiative can boost your conversational signups to 3 times generating qualified leads.

4. WhatsApp Ai Chatbot

According to Larry Kim, CEO of MobileMoney, WhatsApp is the most popular and widely used app for messaging with over 1.6 billion active users. Every single person is consuming WhatsApp today and it has an audience for all. Moreover, it is the right platform for such smooth conversations having multiple options such as sharing documents, pictures, media, etc.

Whatsapp Bots

But the question is that despite knowing such facts, a very few Universities in India are using this application correctly. Also, all those using it aren’t using it to its apex. They are using very basic and standard chat assistant which rarely solves customer queries and focuses on Lead Generation instead. But as we have discussed in the entire blog that personalisation is the key to boost lead generation!

You all must entirely believe that now is the time for introducing your Whatsapp Conversational Ai Chatbot if you want to sustain and improve in the digital marketing and admissions area amongst peers. This is the right technique if you are looking for the easiest lead generation and the rate entirely depends on how well you are funnelling down your traffic to WhatsApp.

5. Browser Push Notification

Up to what extent you can trust on a chatbot for answering the queries of the students looking for admission? It is obviously not 100%. Even if you train your Conversational Ai Chatbot for every possible intent and questions, still there would be some questions left unanswered. In that scenario what one should ideally do? Should one think that this is the best we can go for. It is implausible to solve every query. There will be some queries left unsolved. It is inevitable! Or we should look for some alternative mean.

Voice Bots

We know that every single product isn’t 100% complete. There is always a scope of improvement. This applies in this situation also, and the improvement is done by introducing Browser Push Notification. Well, the concept is simple yet impactful.

Let’s understand it by taking a small example. Suppose you own a restaurant in your city. A multi-cuisine restaurant! You have every possible dish on your Menu Card and you provide your customers with the dishes they ask. But what if, on some unfavourable situation, the customer asks for the dish you don’t keep. Just as the case with the Chatbot. Will you let the customer leave unsatisfied or you’ll propose some similar dish to offer. Every sensible person will choose the latter one if he is passionate about his work and wants to successfully run a business.

I believe you must have related the entire scenario with the Chatbot up till now. So what is the other choice you should provide to the student rather telling that you can’t help? A choice which will decide that this student will return satisfied or not. And for that matter, you just ought to answer the query again but not at that point of time, but via a browser notification which can be answered by any Admission Counsellor after getting an approval to send notification by the student itself.

This is going to increase your Click Through Rate massively by 23% straight.

Now is the time for your brand to flourish in the field of Admissions and Marketing. To test out the entire use of conversational ai, go and schedule a consultation for the demo by clicking here.

Stay tuned for more such blogs on Conversational Ai Marketing.

Cheers!

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Mohit Dua
AI Timey

Chief Business Officer at Triny | Helping brands connect with customers effectively using AiTimey & AiSensy