Online enrolments paired with a CRM (customer relationship management) are some of the most powerful tools your training organisation can use to capture and engage new learners. The process of capturing, marketing and enrolling new learners can be made much easier and advantageous for your business by taking enrolments online while collecting information for compliance and useful CRM data.

Let’s go through how simple yet effective the process can be.

Capture: an engaging, user-friendly website

When prospective learners visit your website, they’ll basically either be guided to enquire or enrol, or they’ll get lost, give up and leave (and probably go to another training provider’s website). Your website is the key place where your future learners make the match of choosing you for their training needs, or decide you're not the right fit. Capturing prospective learners by showing them you’re the training provider they’re looking for is integral.

When it comes to keeping people on your site, engagement, relevance, reputation and trust need to be considered. You can achieve these things through including learner testimonials, success stories, optimising your SEO and more. We’ve also got some key tips on the technical side of how to leverage your website here.

Aside from adding these elements, your website should be designed to guide a prospective learner to enquire or enrol. Essentially, it shouldn’t take 10 steps to find the course listings. Take a look at this example from Expression Australia’s website. Expression Australia isn’t solely a training business, but it’s still easy to find where to go if you want training and the course list page is clearly laid out. Course lists are typically accessed by website users after clicking on a navigation option such as ‘Courses’. Course listings can be chosen from a range of layouts and themes.

Clicking into a course on the course list page will take you to the course details. A course details page provides a website visitor with an outline of the course, qualification or program. Course details can typically include a summary, target audience, content, units to be covered, RPL option, study pathway, and more.

All upcoming course instances will sit underneath the course details, so that prospective learners can enrol from the same page in a few steps.

Market: enrolments and enquiries

When the prospective learner decides to enquire or enrol, it's important you have AVETMISS-compliant forms up your sleeve. Your enquiry and enrolment forms should be designed to collect the information you need to remain compliant while also collecting useful CRM data for your business.

Using your CRM

Your Student Management System’s CRM will allow you to:

• Capture the information you need, including creating contacts (clients, learners, trainers) with key info for each, adding notes for contacts, showing actions completed for a content (such as enrolling them in a qualification), recording all communication and activity for contacts for a full audit trail and more.
• Edit and organise data, including linking contacts to organisations, seeing contact sources (to see which marketing channels are most effective), restricting access to contact info and more.
• Engage with customers, including creating and editing emails with ease, creating follow-up tasks, sending bulk emails and more.

If you’re looking for a more advanced CRM, HubSpot is a world-class system to try out (plus, it integrates with aXcelerate).

Enrol: engaging with new learners

Using your online enrolments and CRM, you’ll be able to have the information you need to effectively communicate with newly-enrolled learners. Your training organisation will be able to analyse CRM data to see how effective acquisition and retention efforts have been, monitor overall churn, and more – leading to more informed strategies and business growth.

If your training organisation is looking for a system that has everything you need to manage your business all in one, find out more about how aXcelerate can help here. Alternatively, request a demo with one of our friendly sales executives here.

Want to learn more about engaging learners? Check out these helpful articles:

• 8 Key Tips to Leverage Your RTO's Website
• How students choose training providers and how you can get them to choose yours
• Why your RTO should use a CRM
• Why RTOs using an LMS have an advantage over those who don't
• What should your RTO be posting on social media?
• How to increase adult learning participation in VET
• 5 Tips for How to Optimise the Student Experience
• How to create the educational environment you want
• aXcelerate Online Enrolments
• aXcelerate Student Management System Essentials