WhatsApp is now unquestionably the most popular mobile chat service in the world, with over 2 billion active users each month. There are a lot of factors adding to this enormous engagement. One of the most crucial factors is an open rate of 98%. WhatsApp is the most preferred channel for student engagement and nurturing. Traditionally education sectors used to nurture their students over mediums like bulk SMS, bulk emails, and exhaustive calling sessions by the counseling teams. However, this approach led to choked bandwidth, which further resulted in lost opportunities.  And an answer to this is the WhatsApp Business API

Can WhatsApp improve the education sector by enhancing communication and management?

Instant messaging’s emergence has altered how we communicate in both our personal and professional lives, including in the field of education. Social media and now messaging apps like WhatsApp have overtaken conventional channels like emails and websites. While a WhatsApp chatbot for education is not a new concept, the WhatsApp Business API provides official control and legitimacy to educational institutions, allowing for more possibilities. WhatsApp is a great tool in the education sector from marketing through administration to learning. Benefits of WhatsApp in Education include:

1. Allows instant communication between students, parents, and teachers.
2. Works well even in areas with the poor network coverage.
3. Provides a low-cost option for educational institutions with few resources.
4. Encourages a dynamic learning environment and fosters interactions.
5. Provides a familiar interface that both students and staff are comfortable using.

How can WhatsApp API be helpful for the education sector? 

For educational institutions to empower their marketing and admissions teams having WhatsApp Business API as a touch point empowers you to send rich multimedia messages, attractive gifs, and unlimited stickers to help amplify your brand recall like no other channel. This feature empowers you to improve your counselor productivity, 

enhance the student experience and ultimately, improve the admissions process. You can exchange rapid notifications via WhatsApp, such as reminders of deadlines or the status of applications, among other things.

Using WhatsApp for Education Marketing

As competition increases, educational institutions must use business strategies to survive. These institutions need to create marketing strategies to stand out and attract new audiences. WhatsApp Business API provides a personal and less crowded communication channel for education sectors. We’ve provided a few use cases for WhatsApp in education marketing and lead generation:

Lead Generation via WhatsApp

Prospective students and parents are bombarded with marketing messages on the web and social media. They prefer more personal connections through direct, two-way communication, which makes instant messaging the perfect tool to obtain and share information. Rather than using landing pages or online ads, why not redirect prospective students to WhatsApp instead? You’ll get their phone number and access to them on a channel they check several times a day, allowing you to generate and nurture leads.

Lead Qualification

In the education sector, you must qualify them in order to learn more about your potential customers and where they are in the course selection process. Typically, gathering this data would need the use of a form or a person. However, WhatsApp API allows you to create a bot that can do this work for you conversationally and naturally. These bots can personalize the experience for each individual and save time by not providing information that the prospect already knows.

Engagement Campaigns

If potential customers aren’t ready to buy yet, don’t ignore them. They are interested in your product like courses, workshops, or degrees. Use WhatsApp to keep in touch, send updates about events, and news, or keep their interest with cool media content. This is a chance to be creative and re-engage your prospects in a more personal way than social media marketing campaigns can offer.

Customer Retention

In the education sector, building strong relationships is key. However, quality is not just about objective standards, but also how the student perceives it. WhatsApp can help manage relationships with students, providing personalized services and making them feel heard. This can help prevent dropouts by keeping students informed, engaged, and aware of opportunities and support available.

Post-Study Re-Engagement

Your alumni, or former students, can help promote your organization through their success stories. By staying in touch with your alumni, you attract new customers, assist existing students, receive feedback, enhance your reputation, and even receive financial assistance. Using WhatsApp, you can stay in touch with former students and inform them about events they might find interesting.

Using WhatsApp for Education Management

WhatsApp can help the education sector streamline its administrative and managerial processes, whether online or offline. By integrating WhatsApp Business API, organizations can digitize key processes in a way that is modern, convenient, and natural. 

Application Process:

WhatsApp can help higher education institutions keep applicants informed of their application status, request missing information quickly, and schedule interviews if needed. Smaller organizations like language centers can also use WhatsApp to evaluate applicants’ language skills. They can ask a few questions and have the applicant submit a voice recording of their pronunciation through WhatsApp. This streamlines the procedure and saves both the teacher and the applicant time.

Registration and Enrollment: 

Application acceptance triggers the start of the enrollment process, which also includes registration. As they must finish registration as quickly as possible before the course starts, this can be a difficult moment for new students.

Why should you opt for a WhatsApp API?

Your instructors should be able to make private groups and send out mass emails as required. If not, you’re missing out. 

With the WhatsApp Chatbot solution, you can launch and send campaigns to selected audiences, manage ongoing chats from a centralized dashboard, and empower your organization’s designated staff to direct and manage their communications. API providers offer intuitive, no-code solutions to simplify the process, so you can use WhatsApp as a digital marketing tool, reinvent management and administration processes, or leverage the app as part of the education process itself while staying in control and managing everything at scale.