Growth

Best Practices to Follow in Customer Life Cycle Management in Ed Tech

By Ashutosh Kumar

Customer life cycle management is becoming increasingly important in Ed Tech. Here are some ways to use it well for your company.

A business is a lifetime commitment to taking care of your customers. Analysing the customer life cycle allows you to do so efficiently. It helps you prepare better marketing and sales pitch.

The customer life cycle is a vital part of Ed Tech companies. It is because Ed Tech companies deal with the most promising assets of any country – students. Therefore, these companies need to adapt to customer success strategies. They must aim to provide the best for their customers.

If we go by statistics:

68% of customers leave because they think you are indifferent to them.
56% of customers considered brands where personalised incentivisation was prioritised.
Customer life cycle management systems can increase retention rates by 25%.
Even a 5% increase in retention rates can result in a 75% increase in profits.

These statistics show how important personalisation can be for a brand. This level of personalisation can be achieved, especially in Ed Tech, through a robust customer life cycle management system.

The key is to let your customers know you care about them. Growth Jockey can help you unlock the potential of your business growth through this level of personalisation. Keep reading to learn to keep track of your customers’ life cycle.

Understanding Customer Life Cycle

A customer life cycle generally refers to making your prospects your company’s lifetime customers. It can be defined as a process that is divided into three steps- Understanding, Managing and Analysing customer data.

A customer life cycle helps improve the relationship between a company and its customers.

In Ed Tech, the customer life cycle refers to a student's complete process with a platform. It entails a student learning about the venue and developing a solid relationship with it.

Ed Tech in India is a booming industry. Ed Tech startups are changing the pace of education. Hence, they must make their students' customer lifecycle journey as smooth as possible.

Stages of Customer Life Cycle Management

A typical customer life cycle management considers consumer buying behaviour. This helps to divide it into various stages. Every customer life cycle management has six crucial stages.

Awareness

In this stage, a customer searches for a product to address a pain point. In other words, after becoming aware of an issue. From an Ed Tech industry analysis point of view, it can be a student searching for the previous year’s sample papers.

During this stage, you need to acquire customers by getting their attention. That is why this stage is also called “Reach.” In this stage, you reach out to your potential customers. You can do so through social media or email marketing. Advertising and content marketing are good options as well.

This stage aims to get the students' attention and make them aware of your brand or product. This stage involves comparing products across competing brands and carrying out research.

Acquisition

Customers can interact with you on your social media or through your website. When this happens, you will have officially entered the acquisition stage. This stage might look different for different companies depending on the acquisition channel their customer has used.

In the acquisition stage, you convince your prospective customers (students) to buy your products. Every Ed Tech startup in India has its customer acquisition funnel. These funnels help increase awareness and acquire new customers by addressing their pain points.

You can also acquire new customers by providing valuable information about your product. You can do so by answering questions on social media or writing blog posts.

Conversion

Conversion is the most crucial part of customer life cycle management. This is the step where a student has taken an interest in your Ed Tech startup's products. Hence, it is the point where you provide them with all the purchase information they need to decide. Thus, you convert them from a prospect to a customer.

In Ed Tech, successful conversion strategies include:

An easily navigable website
A distinct proposition that makes you stand out from your competitors.
A strong call to action
A funnel to capture leads.
A solid mechanism to pursue these leads.

Retention

Retention is the bridge between conversion and loyalty from the customer’s viewpoint. Ed Tech includes students continuing their educational path with your company.

The first step of this stage is to know how a customer feels. Check-in with the students enrolled in your programs (product) to see if they are enjoying it. You can also conduct customer service surveys to know how your students feel about your programs.

Leveraging this information, you can make improvements to your products and services. This will improve the customer service experience and promote loyalty. 24/7 support and exclusive perks, like scholarships, can go a long way to keep students (customers) happy.

Loyalty

As the name suggests, this is the stage where your customers commit to your services. Loyalty initiatives are how companies try to retain customers and win their trust over time. These initiatives provide incentives that make customers stay with a company.

This can be in the form of discounts or other benefits. In Ed Tech, it can translate to fee waivers and scholarships.

Advocacy

This is the stage where your customers spread the word about your company. The Ed Tech industry in India works on word-of-mouth marketing. This is why advocacy is a bonus for any Ed Tech startup.

Your customers (students and parents) recommend and praise your products or services at this stage. They can do so by sharing positive experiences or sharing success stories.

Advocacy draws more students to try out a company’s products and services.

Best Practices for Customer Life Cycle Management in Ed Tech

Being an Ed Tech company, employing the best practices for CLM is vital. The key is to focus on increasing engagement instead of just acquiring. Here are a few pointers that can help you do so:

Creating a Student’s Persona

In the general sense, it means to create a buyer’s persona. A buyer’s persona helps companies predict what kind of customers their products and services will attract. It helps reflect the roles and pain points of your users.

However, in Ed Tech, the type of customer is defined. Yet, it can be challenging to know a student's pain points. This is where creating a student’s persona becomes essential.

You can create a student’s persona by:

Defining the ideal student group which will benefit from your product/service.
Define the type of Ed Tech company you are.
Segmenting them based on age, geography, parents’ income and aptitude.
Addressing the pain points.

Creating a student’s persona is the first step towards personalising your services for your customers. Creating these personae is imperative for your Ed Tech product to succeed. Like a student’s persona, you can develop personae for teachers, parents and organisations.

Leveraging the Power of SEO

If you are an Ed Tech with a defined customer pool, you must invest in SEO marketing. This will make your company more discoverable. With more discoverability, you can reach out to more students. This will help you offer them your services and products.

For effective SEO marketing, you can follow these points:

Optimise your website.
Provide solutions to important competitive exams on your websites.
Add schema markup.
Make your site mobile-friendly.
Increase site loading speed.

Build Campaigns

Building campaigns can help you nurture lost customers. It is imperative to understand that the customer life cycle does not end after you have made a sale. It is a lifelong process where you must keep up with your students.

This helps build loyalty and improve retention rates. For Ed Tech, building campaigns can entail sending out important updates to your students throughout the year. Sending personalised emails also goes a long way.

Collecting Feedback

Collecting feedback is the best practice you can employ to keep your customers happy. This helps you track what works for you and where you need improvement. Ed Tech industry in India is a stiff competition. Hence, collecting regular feedback is essential.

Vying for regular customer feedback is a sign of a good organisation. Research shows happy customers will tell 9 others about your company’s services. In contrast, unhappy customers will tell 9-15 people how dissatisfied they are.

Therefore, use customer feedback to your advantage as it fosters loyalty.

Priority Customer Care

Students are a fragile asset. They can lose interest in your products or services if you do not give them the care they deserve. For Ed Tech startups, they must provide priority customer care for their students. This will help clear any academic or administration-related query quickly.

With priority customer care, students and parents feel important and stay loyal to your company. This also leads to significant advocacy benefits.

Without proper customer care, your customers will stop employing your services. As per research, 96% of consumers leave a brand because of poor customer service.

Therefore, prioritising customer service is the key to building an effective user experience.

Wrapping Up

Optimising a student's entire customer life cycle journey is the utmost priority for any Ed Tech. It makes sense to engage heavily in client acquisition. However, concentrating only on lead creation obscures other important aspects.

Ed Tech startups can better succeed if they guide the students from awareness to retention. This is possible only when businesses prioritise customer experience milestones above transactional benefits. Growth Jockey can help you navigate customer success and the customer life cycle for your company. Contact our team today to get started with your marketing campaigns.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What does customer life cycle management mean in Ed Tech?

As used in Ed Tech, the customer life cycle describes a student's whole process when using a platform. It teaches students about the platform and helps them build a solid rapport.