English ZoneOne, a leading provider of English language learning solutions, has selected Student Experience Management to implement an integrated student recruitment, admission, and registration solution utilizing the Zoho One platform. The solution encompasses Zoho CRM to manage all parts of the student recruitment and admission processes and also extends into Zoho Social and Zoho Campaigns for marketing automation throughout the student journey.

As Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) face mounting pressure to improve student outcomes and meet the changing needs of students and the job market, effective Academic Quality Management (AQM) has become more critical than ever. AQM is a systematic approach that ensures that the academic programs and services provided by HEIs meet or exceed standards of quality and integrity, ultimately leading to improved student success and satisfaction. However, implementing effective AQM strategies can be challenging, especially for HEI leaders. In this article, we will explore some of the common challenges faced by HEI leaders in implementing effective AQM strategies.

One of the most significant challenges faced by HEI leaders in implementing effective AQM strategies is the lack of resources, including funding, staff, and time. AQM initiatives require a significant investment in terms of staff, time, and resources, and many HEIs struggle to allocate the necessary resources to these initiatives.

One of the most significant challenges faced by HEI leaders in implementing effective AQM strategies is the lack of resources, including funding, staff, and time. AQM initiatives require a significant investment in terms of staff, time, and resources, and many HEIs struggle to allocate the necessary resources to these initiatives. A survey conducted by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) found that only 25% of surveyed institutions had a dedicated AQM staff position, and only 40% had an AQM budget. The survey also found that the majority of institutions did not provide sufficient time for faculty to engage in AQM activities, with 64% of faculty reporting that they spend less than 5 hours per week on AQM-related tasks. 

This lack of resources can impede the implementation of effective AQM strategies, leading to a lack of progress in improving academic quality and student outcomes.

AQM initiatives require the involvement of all stakeholders, including faculty, staff, students, and administrators, to be successful. However, some HEIs lack the necessary institutional support, such as support from the Board of Trustees or senior leadership, to implement effective AQM strategies.

Effective AQM strategies require data-driven decision-making, and HEI leaders may face a challenge of insufficient data. HEIs may lack the necessary tools and systems to collect and analyze data effectively, leading to a lack of actionable insights for improving academic quality.

Higher Ed leaders may face a challenge of inadequate communication. Effective AQM strategies require clear and consistent communication among stakeholders, including faculty, staff, and students, to be successful. However, communication breakdowns can occur due to various factors such as silos, lack of shared vision, and ineffective communication channels.

Implementing effective AQM strategies is critical for improving student outcomes and meeting the changing needs of students and the job market. However, HEI leaders face various challenges in implementing these strategies, including lack of resources, resistance to change, lack of institutional support, insufficient data, and inadequate communication. Addressing these challenges will require HEI leaders to prioritize AQM initiatives, build a culture of continuous improvement, and create a shared vision and buy-in from stakeholders at all levels of the institution.

The concept of the "student as the consumer" has become increasingly important in the higher education landscape, as students have become more discerning about their choices and more vocal about their expectations. In this blog post, we'll explore how this concept should influence practices in student recruitment and registration, as well as what institutions should consider during the student journey to enhance the perceived value of the chosen qualification.

The concept of the student as the consumer refers to the idea that students are no longer passive recipients of education, but active consumers who make informed choices about their educational experiences. According to a survey conducted by Hanover Research, 94% of college-bound students consider themselves to be consumers, and 70% view higher education as a financial investment. This shift in perspective has implications for how institutions approach student recruitment and registration, as well as how they provide support and resources throughout the student journey.

In order to attract and retain students as consumers, higher education institutions must be responsive to their needs and preferences. This means investing in marketing and communication strategies that resonate with prospective students, such as personalized messaging, social media outreach, and interactive campus tours. Institutions should also prioritize transparency and accessibility in the registration process, providing clear information about program requirements, costs, and financial aid options.

The concept of the student as the consumer has important implications for how higher education institutions approach student recruitment and registration, as well as how they provide support and resources throughout the student journey. By prioritizing transparency, accessibility, and student engagement, institutions can enhance the perceived value of the chosen qualification and attract and retain students as informed and empowered consumers.

The higher education enrollment process involves a complex decision-making process for consumers (students and their families) as they evaluate the different educational institutions and programs available to them. Here are some consumer behavior principles that higher education institutions should consider during the enrollment process:

Students and families assess the perceived value of a college or university based on a variety of factors, including the quality of the academic programs, the reputation of the institution, and the perceived return on investment. Higher education institutions need to ensure that they are communicating the value of their programs and services effectively to prospective students.

Consumers are influenced by the opinions and experiences of others, particularly family and friends. Therefore, higher education institutions should encourage positive word-of-mouth recommendations from current and former students, as well as leveraging social media to showcase their programs and achievements.

Consumer decisions are often driven by emotions, such as feelings of belonging, prestige, and excitement. Higher education institutions should create an emotional connection with prospective students by highlighting the unique aspects of their institution and programs, such as research opportunities or study abroad programs.

Prospective students may experience cognitive dissonance, or a sense of discomfort, after making a decision to enroll in a particular institution. Higher education institutions should provide information and resources to alleviate this feeling and reinforce the value of the decision.

Consumers use a variety of decision-making processes, including rational, intuitive, and impulsive. Higher education institutions should provide information in a variety of formats to appeal to different decision-making processes and to facilitate informed choices.

By taking into consideration these consumer behavior principles, higher education institutions can create effective enrollment strategies and attract and retain a diverse and engaged student body.

The process of onboarding new students to higher education institutions can be a time-consuming and labor-intensive task for universities. From enrollment paperwork to academic advising, the onboarding process requires a significant investment of time and resources. However, recent advances in chatbot technology have created an opportunity to streamline this process, reducing the burden on university staff and providing new students with a more efficient and personalized experience.

As you work to prepare for the upcoming academic year, one of the most important tasks you can tackle is creating a warm and welcoming environment for incoming freshmen. Whether it’s their first time living on campus or attending classes online, being welcomed by students and faculty can make all the difference in helping your newbies get settled. Let's look at some great ways to make sure everyone who steps foot on campus feels right at home in 2023!

The first thing you can do to make your freshmen feel welcome is to get to know them. Learn their names and what they’re interested in. You can also start a conversation with them about their life and experiences so far.

Make sure to include your freshmen in activities and events, both online and on campus. This will help them feel like they are a part of the community and that they belong.

Help your freshmen connect with other students, both online and on campus. This can be done by introducing them to people with similar interests or by helping them find study buddies or friends.

If your freshmen are having a tough time, be there for them. Listen to what they have to say and offer any advice or support you can give. Sometimes just knowing that someone is there for them can make all the difference.

Finally, make sure you give your freshmen a good first impression. Be friendly, helpful, and welcoming, and let them know that you’re happy to have them here. A positive first impression can go a long way in making someone feel comfortable and welcome in a new environment.

Creating a warm and welcoming environment for your freshmen is one of the most important tasks you can tackle as you prepare for the upcoming academic year. By following the tips we’ve listed above, you can make sure that everyone who steps foot on campus feels right at home in 2023! 

What are you doing to welcome your 2023 freshmen? Tell us in the comments!

Marketing is evolving at a rapid pace. Various tools have made data easily available, and this has changed every aspect of how you as a business interact with visitors, prospects, leads, and customers. If your institution has a digital marketing strategy, you should already know that B2B and B2C marketing are miles apart in the higher education landscape and require different approaches. B2B customers’ buying behavior and decision-making are bit more complicated. The buying cycle is longer, and there are various factors to evaluate that are specific to each business requirement.

Understanding the exact needs of those B2B customers and engaging with them is a big challenge, and this is where marketing automation can help. Let’s take a look at four automation strategies your B2B business needs across the customer journey funnel.

B2B Marketing and Sales teams have a range of strategies to advertise programmes and short learning programmes to potential customers. Institutional landing pages can say all the right things and have the perfect resources, but how do you get the right visitors to notice? That is where automation comes into the picture. A study conducted in 2017 showed that 59% of marketers reported better lead quality with automation. Let’s see how automation helps in curating leads.

Using pop-ups is an effective way to build your email list. However, visitors are known to dismiss pop-ups that are thrown at them at random. By automating pop-ups, institutions can ensure that they are shown at the right moment according to visitor behaviour. For example, by triggering a pop-up with a targeted message when visitors are leaving your website, you can get their attention. If you find visitors spending time on a particular page, throw out a pop-up with targeted educational content, and get them to sign up for your mailing list. Increase content reachability as well as leads with automated pop-ups.

With marketing automation, institutions can send responses based on buyer interactions across channels. A fringe benefit of omnichannel marketing automation is the ability to initiate immediate response in whichever channel the lead is active on. It could be an SMS, an email, or even a blog- or social post.

Lead nurturing is a strategy to engage with leads and build relationships with prospects evaluating qualifications from your institution. The key is to attract, educate, and lead them to conversion. Automating this process has proven to be a huge help for more than 65% of B2B marketers. Let’s look at a few lead nurturing automation strategies. 

In an automated marketing system, triggered campaigns are activated once a lead meets predetermined criteria. For example, institutions can trigger an outreach email for visitors who download any content from your site. With this simple step, higher education institutions can keep the momentum going and increase the chances of prospects being convinced to click, interact, and eventually requesting a quotation for programme delivery.

With each visitor’s or lead’s online activity, a marketing automation system groups them into a segment based on the pages they visit, forms they complete, links they click, their demography, and more. Targeting your content through segmentation is one of the best ways to be relevant.

Lead scores provides insights into a lead or a prospects buying intentions. The higher the score, the more likely they are to buy. Automating the lead scoring process lets institutions see where leads are in the sales cycle and allows for strategic follow-up without the guesswork. Parameters can be set up to assign scores to leads so that once they reach a cut-off, they become qualified. You can then set up automatic notifications to your sales team that trigger whenever a lead qualifies.

Personalisation has gone way beyond just “first names” in salutations. Running on data-driven insights and tracking intent signals, marketing automation can achieve the long-sought ideal: the right message to the right person at the right time. Depending on the target audience and your business goals, marketing automation can help you effectively personalise your marketing messages based on: 

• Industry: Personalised content for a specific industry vertical.
• Account: Personalised content for a specific prospect organization
• Stage: Personalised content for individual stages of the buying process.

Improving customer retention rates starts with a comprehensive retention strategy built on continuous engagement. By automating your strategy, you can proactively engage with customers while encouraging brand loyalty.More than 50% of B2B marketers use marketing automation for customer retention. Below are three ways automation can scale your retention:

Despite the high-touch sales process in B2B transactions, a welcome email series can leave a good impression on your customers’ minds even before your actual work begins. Onboarding messages are more than just one welcome email. For example, when you close new deals, you add the points of contact to an email campaign. You automate the campaign by sending initial welcome emails to customers. Intermittently, you could follow it up with emails that contain educational content, your contact information, and so on.

As your customer base grows over time, it’s normal that some customers may grow inactive. Automation helps you decide how to nudge such customers back to business. Marketing automation lets you set up triggers that automatically note inactivity and establish relevant touchpoints. Offering an exclusive discount, a gift with a purchase, or a coupon are some effective examples.

Automation lets you pick up points of friction in your customer experience from customer feedback and address them before they recur. For instance, let’s say you receive multiple feedback from customers. For a neutral or negative response, an automation system could trigger a notification to a customer support rep to intervene and take control. Similarly, a positive response could trigger a request to submit a testimonial.

These are just a few of the ways Higher Education Institutions can use marketing automation to have personalised and relevant touchpoints with prospective- and existing customers. An added benefit of this technology is that marketing automation is now promptly available to mid-size and even emerging institutions. Build a strategy, and marketing automation will do it for you!

The way that prospective students make decisions when selecting courses and education providers is messy - and it has recently become even messier. There are things that student experience designers know about how these purchase decisions are made. We know that what happens between trigger and purchase decision-making is not linear. We know that there is a complicated web of touchpoints that is unique to each person. What is less clear, is how prospective students process all of the information and choices they discover along the way. And what is even more critical, is how this process influences what students ultimately decide to buy or sign-up for. 

As the internet has grown, it has transformed from a tool for comparing prices across comparable courses and qualifications, to comparing everything in the student experience. Specialists from Google have been tracking this data across a recent research project across consumers from other industries by evaluating consumer behaviour changes over years on Google Search. An interesting finding from this research was the evaluation of search terms such as "cheap" or best. Their study indicates that worldwide, search interest for "best" has far outpaced search interest for "cheap". The same dynamics hold true in countries around the world like Germany, India and Italy, when the same data is anlaysed through searches for local translations for "cheap" and "best" in search data. 

We’re excited to announce the launch of Zoho Contracts—Zoho’s take on contract lifecycle management (CLM). With this launch, we’ve reached a new milestone in Zoho’s journey of providing software solutions to run an entire business on the cloud. To our already impressive arsenal of functions, such as sales & marketing, finance, and HR, we’re now adding a whole new category: legal.

Contracts govern every penny that enters or leaves a business. If businesses are equipped with the right contract management software to manage them, they can transform contracts from static documents into strategic assets.

In a business landscape that keeps rapidly changing with the evolution of technology:

• Regulatory measures are cropping up more often,
• Global supply chains are becoming increasingly complex, and
• Sales models are growing more diverse.

This state of flux demands digital contracts that can be easily accessed and amended. A powerful contract management software lets you automate and streamline contract processes and unlock the real potential within them. With CLM, legal teams can save a significant amount of time that can then be invested in high-value tasks.

In addition to delivering efficiency in legal operations, a contract management software should also facilitate better business outcomes. To be able to achieve this, any contract management software should comprehensively address the following aspects of legal operations:

• Streamlining the entire contract lifecycle
• Improving governance
• Mitigating business risks
• Promoting cross-functional integrations

Authoring: Our extensive library of predefined contract templates, and the ability to create custom templates in Zoho Contracts, makes contract authoring a breeze. Contract type templates and the clause library in Zoho Contracts brings a structured approach to contract authoring. It saves a significant amount of time at the authoring stage and ensures language consistency across all your contracts. Our document editor boasts advanced document assembly capabilities, in addition to all the collaborative editing, contextual commenting, and fillable field features available in Zoho Writer.

Approvals: Contracts are legally binding, so their content needs to be clear, concise, and accurate. An approval process can improve compliance and reduce risks by ensuring that the stakeholders are aware of the contract’s scope before they’re executed. In Zoho Contracts, admins can set up approval workflows—both sequential and parallel—and associate them with contract types. Approvers can add contextual comments in the documents and approve or reject them.

Negotiations: Unlike the traditional approach, where you send contract documents back and forth as email attachments, Zoho Contracts allows you to provide controlled access to counterparty contacts, via password-protected links. Counterparty contacts can collaborate in real time, suggest changes to the document, make contextual comments, and set visibility for them. The Negotiation history tracking and Compare changes features come in particularly handy when there are multiple rounds of negotiation.

Execution: Zoho Contracts comes pre-integrated with Zoho Sign (esignature software), making this crucial stage of the contract lifecycle quick and effortless. Eliminate the email, print, sign, and fax cycles and reduce turnaround time drastically. Sign and secure legally binding signatures in minutes. You can also specify a signing order that pans across the signer groups: organization signers, counterparty signers, and other representatives such as witnesses.

Post-execution management: Zoho Contracts supports the post-execution stages, as well: amendments, renewals, extensions, and terminations. It comes with predefined letter templates that are customizable for each of these stages. Conventional templates only provide a skeletal structure of the document, where members can contextually edit the content to make it complete. Whereas in Zoho Contracts, when a user amends a contract by making changes in the contract, the amendment letter that gets generated automatically captures the current changes along with the entire contract history. This near elimination of human intervention in document generation makes the lifecycle management of post-execution contracts refreshingly straightforward.

Analytics: Admins can make well-informed decisions by arriving at actionable business insights gleaned from a plethora of diverse contract data. Zoho Contracts comes with 30+ standard reports across different aspects of contract management. The personalized dashboard gives a high-level overview of your business contracts at a glance.

Activity tracking: Zoho Contracts has activity tracking on three different levels:

• Contract level
• User level
• Stage level (approval, negotiation, signature)

All activities performed by users on these levels are tracked chronologically. The stage-level tracking presents the contract owner with information on whether the people involved in that stage have received the email notification, viewed the document, and performed the intended action along with the time stamps.

Admin settings: Admins can structure the contract lifecycle process by configuring the clause library, contract type templates, contract letter templates, and approval workflows for contract types. The activity, access, and audit logs provide better visibility over organization-wide activities.

While adding appropriate clauses, such as indemnity and limitations of liability, can alleviate risks at an individual contract-level, only a holistic contract management process designed with risk mitigation in mind can make your business truly risk-ready.

Zoho Contracts, with its peer-review and approval workflow capabilities, provides better transparency over contract terms to all the stakeholders involved. Setting up a clause library with legally approved languages and contract type templates will act as guide rails for contract authors. The governance settings mentioned above give admins better control over the contract process, thereby improving compliance.

Contextual obligation section: Not fulfilling contract obligations is one of the critical risk factors for a business. Failing to fulfill obligations can result in adverse regulatory and financial consequences, and also leaves the organization with damaged business relationships. In Zoho Contracts, all the obligations related to a contract can be tracked and managed right from within the respective contract’s obligations section. The contract owner can assign obligations to the respective business owners and set reminders for them. Admins can stay on top of these obligations’ real-time progress with the help of obligation-based reports.

Contracts are dynamic documents touching every part of your business. The growing significance of the role of contracts necessitates cross-functional visibility and collaboration over them. In our first version, we support Zoho CRM integration. Sales agents can initiate a contract from the related section of a deal record in CRM and track the contract’s status from CRM. We have multiple third-party integrations and integrations with other Zoho apps in our roadmap. Zoho Contracts will also be a part of the Zoho One bundle.