With the internet going public in 1994, the world saw a significant shift in learning behaviors. Search engines became a significant source of information, and the concept of anywhere, anytime learning appeared for the first time.
Fast forward 20 years and Ed-tech industry comes to life with instructional designing and specialized learning resources becoming dominant among the online learners. Even at that time, the concept of eLearning was not broadly adopted, and neither had it acquired recognition as a formal learning methodology.
However, after pushing education hard to formal establishments through print and classroom lectures for centuries, the sophisticated technologies made online learning a reality. Ed-tech businesses became independent commerce activities and started collaborating with educational institutions to bring Massive Online Courses (MOOC) to the masses.
In this article, we are going to discuss how a recent innovation in the marketing technologies –web push notifications –proved expedient to the Ed-tech businesses. We will comprehend the usage of personalized push notification marketing for eLearning businesses, and how can they improve on both marketing and learning methodologies grounds at the same time.
Before that, let’s understand the segmentation in Ed-tech business arena and how different eLearning maneuvers exist in the same market. It will let you segregate your business activity from the rest and adopt certain push notification marketing strategies suitable for your industry.
EdTech Market and its segmentation
Today, the global eLearning market is valued over $176.12 billion. It has been expected to grow into a $398.15 billion market by 2026 following a CAGR of 9.5%.
The Ed-tech business sphere has a very old history of continuous developments and introduction to modern learning technologies. Today, we can segment the learning market based on four major aspects:
- Segmentation based on technology:
- Corporate E-learning
- Packaged Content
- Learning Management System (LMS)
- Mobile Learning
- Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and
- Game-based Learning
- Based on Learning modes:
- Instructor-Led
- Self-Paced
- Based on Learning objectives:
- Academic
- Training
- Based on the scale of application
- Small and Medium Businesses
- Large Enterprises & corporations
- Education System and Government
There is a race going among all kinds of eLearning businesses. Particularly among those who are selling the expensive MOOCs. It’s alone is an 8.50 billion dollar market and retains a CAGR of 36.0%. Learners purchase MOOCs for both academic and training purposes. In fact, most of the Fortune 500 companies like Google and Yahoo use MOOC to train their employees.
The whole point behind elaborating this story is to let you realize that a lot of things are happening in the Ed-tech sphere and it’s not an easy market. There are challenges, opportunities, and even churn rates. If you are offering eLearning as a business, you need a marketing strategy to increase engagement and reduce the churn rate. And what could be a better option than using the mighty web push notifications itself?
How web push notifications are suitable for EdTech Business?
Well, web push notifications are the newest channel in the digital marketing arena. They have been around for quite some time now, but it has been only a few years they have started pocketing the fame in the eLearning industry.
How can I say this confidently?
Traditionally, Ed-tech businesses have been using emails marketing for so long. However, we have now reached saturation, and customers these days are not only ignoring the marketing emails, but they have also found many ways to filter marketing emails from their regular inboxes. Shockingly, you can’t expect a typical email marketing campaign to receive more than 3-4% click-through.
Whereas, when you notice the same CTR data for the push notifications, it is optimistically way handsome than the CTR stats for email marketing. Given below is a data from research done by Pushcrew to know average CTR of push notifications.
What we can see is a proven fact that even the big push campaigns with 100k+ subscribers don’t get a CTR less than 4.25%. Interestingly, even the small and medium-sized businesses with around 5000 subscribers acquired an impressive CTR of 10.85%.
Why push notifications receive better CTR than email?
I can see two possible reasons for push notification marketing acquiring bigger CTR values than the email campaigns:
- Consent of the receiver: Email marketers mostly acquire the email list through various in-house and sponsored lead capturing methods. In all this, hardly a few of the users are aware that they would receive emails from the brand. As a result, most of the marketing emails come as a surprise to the users.
On the other hand, marketers cannot send push notifications to anyone without their permission. They must ask the users to subscribe to their notifications and give consent through an opt-in box. That means, push notification marketing hardly surprise the subscribers and only interested users receive them.
- No open-rate in push notifications: Emails don’t get CTR so easily because they have to cross through two extra layers before finally making it to the user’s inbox: Delivery, Open, and then Click-through. While many emails die in the spam filters, the rest of them wait for the users to open, and then they can expect a click on the CTA after reading.
Whereas push notifications do not have any spam filters and they get delivered instantly on the subscriber’s device. A click on the notification takes the subscribers directly to the intended web-page, as it is considered as a click-through. Hence, there is no need for open activity.
Apparently, the people haven’t yet gone faded from the push notifications. There are still many people who opt-in and consider push notification marketing as useful.
Unique challenges in Ed-tech Business need unique solutions
It’s a fact that people have been choosing online courses more than ever and the number of registrations has increased dramatically over the past few years. However, only a few have actually completed their enrolled courses.
In fact, 55% of the students opting for MOOC drop out even before the course starts. The main reason for students dropping out in huge numbers is the lack of engagement. The crowd is heterogeneous. And it’s a big challenge for the Ed-tech companies to cater to every learner.
Companies are unable to segregate the learners based on their behaviors and learning interests. Moreover, the mass email and SMS prove obsolete as users can easily sniff out the irrelevance.
However, many eLearning companies are trying their bests to establish interactions with not only the learners but also the instructors. They are encouraging them to join webinars or participate in live discussions, but this should also be backed by a real-time notification system.
I mean, they won’t come until they are notified in advance about it. Also, most of the online platforms allow learners to access their courses 24×7 and complete at their own pace. However, it is still essential to keep the learners updated by offering timely notifications.
Web push notification marketing makes a perfect solution to these unique challenges of the EdTech platforms. With micro-personalization and unique customizations, marketers can create highly targeted segments based on time-zones, locations, and interests. Web push notifications can easily trigger the required engagements by sending relevant notifications to the learners and prospects.
Different ways to use push notification marketing in Ed-tech business
Web push notifications are cross-platform marketing tools, which work seamlessly across all kinds of devices. Be it a desktop, mobile, and tablet, you can engage the users from all kinds of platforms.
1. Re-targeting customers and prospects
There is a lot you can do to re-target learners. Once they are done with a course, there is a higher chance that they won’t visit back for some time. However, there is a way greater chance they would be back for a higher level of the same course or related courses.
You need not wait for them to come back. You can re-target such users personally and encourage them to take a related course going live in a few days. It will muster an interest in inactive customers and they would want to try out new courses.
2. Content marketing and engagement
It’s not always about selling the courses. Many a time, just engaging the learners to your business brings greater value and better sales indirectly. Don’t forget the inactive users. You can still engage them by giving out interesting free content to read.
For example, send updates on the new blogs posted, give out free-books, invite them to attend a webinar, or just let them take a mock test.
3. Cross-selling and Upselling courses
Sell more in lesser efforts. While selling a new course, you can bundle some other relevant guides or courses along with it. There is a more chance an already interested user, who is purchasing a course will also be interested in a related course.
For example, you can bundle a discount on the overall purchase to add extra value in a combo purchase. This will eventually increase your overall revenue by increasing the value of an average shopping cart.
4. Convey running offers and discounts
Offers and discounts are always the best ways to attract attention. Use web push notifications to update your prospects of the new offers and discounts running on the platform. Such kind of notifications has more chance to get desired attention as they offer win-win situations.
You can either send a one-to-all notification or can use various other data to personalize the offers. For example, you can send a discount on registration to all the subscribers enjoying their free trial periods. Or, you can also simply trigger a mass notification for site-wide offers running on the site.
5. Course updates and bulletin board
Re-engage the learners by sending updates on their registered courses. There could be many ways to send notifications about an array of stuff about the courses. You can notify them of live classes, new study material available, update in the course structure, or an itinerary to complete a module on time, etc.
There is a lot one can do with web push notification in Ed Tech business. Businesses can boost their marketing as well as learner engagements at the same time. It all depends on your creativity to create amazing notifications. It’s time to put your best foot forward and get a good push notification tool for your eLearning platform. Prepare a push notification marketing strategy and engage your users. They will spread the words about pleasing learning experience on your platform.
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