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( votes)Teaching is a calling, but it’s also a business. These concepts are not mutually exclusive and quite frankly, teachers with some entrepreneurship skills have so much more to offer to children they educate.
This is why CRM for teachers is so pivotal. In order to successfully juggle 101 tasks a day (getting a constant stream of students, maintaining an ever-changing class schedule, sending invoices, and keeping those recommendations coming in), one needs a miracle. In the absence thereof, a customer relationship management tool for private teachers and tutors will do just fine.
With nearly 2.5 million homeschooled kids in grades K-12 in the USA alone, there is a growing demand for tutors and teachers who can help parents to impart academics onto their precious offspring.
If you are providing classes at your client’s home or have students attending your private group classes in an educational facility, read on to find out how to drive the growth of your teaching practice with the help of an educational CRM.
What is a Customer Relationship Management tool?
Originally, a CRM had one major function: to keep all your contacts in one database on your PC, neatly organized. It was basically a digital Rolodex. With the development of cloud technology and the emergence of the SaaS [Software as a Service], this is how we can define CRM in 2021:
CRM is a software tool designed for businesses to organize customer contacts and facilitate client communication (often including features like calendar and task management) that are mostly available as a SaaS solution, whereby users can access the system from any device with the internet at a monthly subscription.
Key Features of a modern Client Relationship Management tool
- Contact management module with up to 40 fields in each profile for easy segmentation;
- Email marketing feature with group email functionality that allows to send up to 100 personalized emails a day with a few clicks;
- Calendar and scheduling capability to invite students and parents to meetings, classes, and other pertinent educational or administrative activities.
- Task management to create, assign, delete, and postpone tasks.
- Deal Management to register each client from the very first initial stage to the stage of receipt of a letter of recommendation or review.
- Pipeline Management to move deals along the conversion funnel, whereby a prospect becomes a lead, and then a client.
- Sales intelligence and prospecting feature, like the Nimble Prospector browser extension, which helps to research a contact, add it to the database with one click of a button from social media, and reduces manual workload.
- Social media integration is an optional feature that Nimble considers rather critical for the success of any business, specifically the human-centered educational sector.
- Reporting and analytics help to analyze activities, trends, and diagnose any potential commercial, sales, or marketing threats and opportunities.
Not all of the tools in this category will have all enumerated features, some will have more and some have less. Nimble is designed with SMB in mind, focusing on the system’s intuitive interface, expansive features, and affordable price as the unique differentiators.
Why should you use CRM for homeschooling and tutoring?
Time is money; the more organized you are, the more you will accomplish and the more financially comfortable you will be.
When talking about CRM for education management, a teacher in the third decade of the 21st century is so much more than a teacher. You are also a marketer, an accountant, a lawyer and so much more. Having a roadmap of your activities neatly lines up on a screen allows users to sort out priorities and make time for what really matters.
Ensure your professional network expands not shrinks
With years in homeschooling or private tutorship business, people tend to only mix with a limited number of clients and colleagues.
While sustaining a healthy growth of the network is vital for growing your business.
Even if you are trading hours for dollars, you can always grow your hourly rate when your background and professional experience allow it. CRM for homeschool teachers allows users to add contacts to the tool from social media, email and keep that network growing.
Get a reputation for being digitally advanced
Having a smartphone is not enough to appear digitally advanced. But if you are fluent with technology like Client relationship management tools and easily send invites to conferences and classes, send mass emails and create drip email campaigns, this is when you really start getting that fleur of a digital geek.
This is a chance to impress parents and teach children to use technology for time management and increased efficiencies.
Get ahead of competitors
If you were to pay $20 a month to get ahead of the competition, would you do that? Would they pay $20 a month to get ahead of you?
Buying a subscription for homeschool teachers CRM is guaranteed to make you more efficient than those relying on a notebook or even iPhone calendar to manage their time.
In fact, Nimble users save 90 minutes a day on average due to optimizing their working routine with the tool.
Best Practices & insights on how to use CRM for teachers
Segment contacts & Create custom tags
One of the basic features of CRM for student management is contact database management.
Not only can you filter contacts by city, role, interests, you can also ascribe custom tags for better segmentation. For example, you can create a tag “parent”, “math”, “academics”, “special needs”, “FF” for friends & family, “teacher association” and assign them as needed.
Keep educating yourself: attend conferences, trade shows, webinars
When your job is to educate, you have to ensure your knowledge doesn’t go stale and outdated.
Make sure you have a system for organizing your self-education in your calendar: reading books, attending conferences, and industry webinars.
Keep referrals flowing by nurturing contact with the best performers
Depending upon how many students you need per academic year – one or a dozen, referrals may be of importance to your business formula.
If so, create a tag for those referring business to you and those who you found via a referral, so you can treat them accordingly: invite for a thank-you lunch or tell about the progress of the referee to a referrer once in a while.
Never miss a class or have to apologize for schedule confusion
If you’re trying to juggle a few students at a time, things may get confusing. The calendar feature is a savior for all people with busy schedules that have specific slots of time allocated to different clients.
The best thing is that the calendar is compatible with all major solutions out there, so you can be certain data is flowing from one app to another flawlessly.
Perfect your online reputation management
If you have as much as a Facebook business page for your teaching services, you need to have some kind of social proof going on to raise credibility to your candidate as a potential teacher for your future student.
Yelp also works for online reviews, as this is a highly localized review service, so people are searching by area.
Review analytics regularly
Reports are visual and easy to comprehend. So even if you are not accustomed to seeing trends and understanding the dips and highs of the analytics, all it takes is checking them out systematically in order to start getting the gist.
Once you understand why this or that period was successful/low for your business, you can proactively reinforce the factors that helped you thrive once or avoid those that were detrimental to your educational practice.
Nurture relationships
Any CRM in the education sector is used for maintaining connections with a professional circle, clients, industry leaders, etc.
The social insights tab available in Nimble help teams stay connected effortlessly – users can comment, share, and like posts from inside the contact management system, as opposed to getting stuck for hours in social media.
Why would a teacher want to try Nimble CRM?
Nimble is used by over 140 thousand professionals to plan their day, drive business, increase brand recognition, nurture client relations.
This SaaS solution has garnered a reputation as one of the best CRMs for small and medium businesses due to several factors. These are some of them:
- Affordability. At just $19 per user per month on annual billing, this is so much value for your business at the price of a few lattes.
- Intuitive user-friendly interface. UX is simply exemplary: if you can manage your Facebook page, you can sure wrap your head around Nimble.
- Prospecting tool. Nimble’s Prospector extension is a find for anyone looking to grow their business. Enriched profiles allow for personalized communication.
- The abundance of recorded webinars. YouTube channel is replete with educational videos on how to best use Nimble – from industry experts and company professionals.
- Free trial. Not only it’s easier to start your journey with zero commitment, but it’s also a sign of product quality – as the developers know their product is good enough for people to extend further.
Try Nimble for free for 2 weeks — no credit card required.
Let’s get more students more well-rounded and enlightened quicker, more systematic, and at a cheaper acquisition cost — together.
