Stoffer's Soapbox

Maximizing conversion with the right lead contact strategy

In the online education, online mortgage and other related industries, leading companies have hundreds of thousands or millions of leads in their database. This begs the question: what is the contact strategy that optimizes conversions in the long-term.

Of course speed to contact is one of the biggest drivers of conversion (the source/quality of the lead is the other biggie). Jeff Soloman posts about speed to contact in the mortgage industry, observing that leads contacted in the first 15 minutes are 70% more likely to convert than leads contacted thereafter.

It is not that difficult to get even a large salesforce to call back customers quickly .

Gen Y and the Changing Contact Center

There is a great new presentation from Nortel called "Multimedia Means Money" which discusses the rapid evolution of call centers into contact centers. This has huge implications on the outbound call center world, especially those companies in my world whose traffic is driven from Internet advertising: e.g. post-secondary for-profit education companies with a large online presence, and online mortgage, brokerage and financial services companies. Typically these companies market in four steps:

Education Blog Contest

The site edublogs.org is sponsoring the Edublog Awards 2006 for the best education blogs. I am going to do my own research over the next few weeks, looking at blogs from the top couple hundred colleges in US News. I am going to select the best in my own categories - which have been crafted to help me figure out best new media marketing practices in the education world and apply them to my own company. Categories are as follows:

(1) Best Blog from a University President/Faculty to promote the university
(2) Best use of blogs/podcasting/new media for marketing a university to potential students

(3) Best student blog on a university hosted site
(4) Best blog about student services (e.g. admissions blog, financial aid blog)

Evolution of Dance

This is the funniest video I have seen in a long time! This guy does a cheesy medley from Elvis to today (think Twist and Running Man) and just nails it...

How do I Blog?

As I try to learn more about new media, I have begun to read a number of blogs each day. I read Fred Wilson’s “AVC”, Brad Feld’s “Feld Thoughts”, John Battelle’s Searchblog and Ray Schroeder’s Educational Technology blog .

I do this in the hope that several months from now I will be able to point you to blogs from across my company (which remains anonymous for now).

What I primarily want to accomplish through this effort is to increase conversions of our marketing leads through a focused blogging effort. What if casually interested potential students could subscribe to an RSS feed from our school’s existing students so they can learn the experience of an online student? What if they could subscribe to blogs from faculty members or the school president? What if potential students could get free podcasts of professor lectures each week in their area of interest? By pushing content that describes our school out to the casually interested potential student, we could differentiate ourselves from the competition and show these students exactly why our school is the right school for them.

All these ideas are great, but the first step is to learn more about blogging - for that, I just ordered from Amazon The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right (Hardcover). The author, Debbie Weil, seems to get some good reviews from readers.

A New Media Strategy for Universities

My name is Jason Stoffer and I am a former venture capitalist and recent Wharton MBA ('05) who decided to get some real operational experience in the strategy group of a for-profit education provider. With former classmates populating Wall Street and the ranks of traditional Fortune 500s, my chosen profession is unique amongst my peers. But what a great opportunity I have - to help transform the traditionally stodgy ivory tower of education.

The post-secondary education landscape has changed dramatically in the past 10 years. For-profit providers like University of Phoenix, Laureate, DeVry, Capella, Career Education and EDMC have became first movers in online education - creating billions of dollars in market capitalization as a result. But traditional universities are fast playing catch-up. Universities worldwide now offer online and hybrid education to students, with platform providers like Blackboard and eCollege acting as enablers of this trend. And the for-profit providers have seen their growth slow as traditional schools have invested in online education.

So the for-profits are at a crossroads. They need to differentiate themselves, build brand and convince students to attend their school. The for-profit providers traditionally provide a higher level of service and are often more aggressive in marketing, but they also charge significantly more than an in-state public school and lack the brand equity of the local provider.

What better way to differentiate these for-profit online schools than by developing a comprehensive new media strategy that highlights exactly how these career oriented schools meet the needs of potential students. What mix of social networking, blogging and podcasting can both engage current and potential students while mitigating the substantial legal and regulatory risks educators face? I will continue to post here and share my journey with all of you as I explore what new media strategy is best for an online school …