This year more students than ever before will be heading “back to school” online. And just like countless other businesses, e-learning companies are in a great position to win loyal students who are flooding the online space. But, unlike other companies, there’s something especially delicate about a student’s journey with an e-learning brand — it’s not always as straightforward as a traditional customer journey. Each student has their own unique path, there’s a much larger catalog of content to recommend and more. It requires the correct tools to get just right. Here’s our list of back to school “must-haves” for marketers looking to make the grade with new e-learners this year.
How E-Learning Brands Can Transform Student Experiences
Unify catalog and customer data for a deeper understanding of your students’ preferences
The key to truly understanding your students lies within your data: like the country where the student is attending from, courses the student has taken/expressed interest in, and degrees the student has, etc. It’s important that your martech is able to understand both student data and catalog data in tandem to determine your student’s needs, interests, and unique learning path.
Blueshift’s platform collects both catalog and student demographic and behavioral data into Single Customer View, which provides real-time insights into how your students are progressing and interacting with your classes. These profiles power self-driving learner journeys that are shaped by students as they interact with your brand. These 1:1 journeys deliver course-specific material, suggest new courses based on user interest, send personalized course offers, like discounts, based on that user stages, just to name a few. Messaging times, content, and more reflect where each student is in their learning journey — no two students are the same, so their marketing shouldn’t be either!
Use the power of AI to motivate learners
Blueshift makes it easy for e-learning brands to leverage all of their student’s real-time behavioral, historical, and transactional data in a unified single customer profile, it becomes extremely easy to deliver 1:1 recommendations that will drive results for your team. Build recommendations unique to your goals, your students’ needs, and more that guide them down their learning path. These recommendations can be totally customized to your business needs and course-specific for your students to be leveraged and adapt throughout their learning journey.
E-Learning Success Story: Skillshare
Skillshare, an online learning community of millions of students and thousands of classes, had struggled to recommend new classes for its students as its class catalog rapidly expanded and their in-house solution could no longer support their dynamic catalog and thus, personalization became a manual, extensive effort. They turned to Blueshift to power its personalization strategy because of the platform’s robust, flexible personalization options and marketer-friendly interface. The platform’s out-of-the-box segmentation and recommendation engines were turnkey and easily customizable to fit Skillshare’s business requirements.
As a result, Skillshare saw an 89% increase in enrollment rates from using AI-powered class recommendations and a 33% increase in engagement due to tailored content that truly resonated with their students.
Keep pupils on-track with 1:1 triggered reminders
Students of all ages and situations are notoriously busy — this can make staying self-motivated and on top of coursework difficult. Marketers have a unique opportunity to help their students stay on track and achieve their goals, while also deepening students’ relationship with their brand. Triggered, personalized messages are a great way to guide students through their learning journey and bring them closer to your business.
When e-learning marketers collect and have access to real-time behavioral data, it’s a breeze to set up custom triggers to alert students at key points in their learning path within our intuitive omnichannel journey builder. Our builder allows marketers to be in full control of every touchpoint and bring in any available channels such as email, customer service, and more. Here is a few examples of triggered messages that have performed well for Blueshift customers:
- Class/coursework adjustments and updates to drive student engagement
Notify students as soon as new assignments, chapters, and lessons are posted so they can stay on top of their coursework. Create automated notices of new grades, assignments, comments, and more so students feel engaged with their learning journey and are up-to-date with the information they need to be successful.
- Alerts for new/recommended courses to improve student retention
Message learners with AI-powered recommendations for new classes that fit in well into their learning journey. Optimize these notifications by adjusting the send time to reach students as they are finishing up one course — or use Blueshift’s Engage Time Optimization to determine at which moment a message should be delivered to increase the likelihood of engagement and action.
- Due date reminders to improve course completion/ pass rates
Send triggered notifications for nearing due dates and re-engagement reminders for free-form courses to keep students active and engaged in their classes.
“Thanks to Blueshift, we are now able to dig into our customer journey and launch much more relevant workflows without spamming our users, while we also improve the ROI of our campaigns. Added to that, we’ve also been able to design more targeted and dynamic campaigns, for instance, we are now able to have specific campaigns for free users, for paid users, but also to have a very specific targeting on geolocation.” – Pauline Fumeron, Marketing Automation Manager
