The culture of upskilling and reskilling nudges workers and companies to have their finger on the pulse of new technologies and approaches. It also boosts the growth of online courses, training events, and educational webinars.
For instance, over 20 million new learners came to Coursera in 2021.
However, the online education industry is a battlefield. There are many competitors there, including the Ivy League players such as Yale and Harvard.
Educational institutions and businesses employ a variety of methods to attract new students. Some use time-tested marketing techniques, such as discount coupons. Others go further to in-depth analysis to reveal student needs, expectations, goals, and jobs to be done. The latter use student customer personas and journey mapping as a reliable method to analyze their educational programs in terms of learners' demands.
Both personas and maps are based on the data obtained from customer surveys, interviews, and open market research. It turns mapping into a super helpful tool for finding new business opportunities and better understanding your target audience.
If you want to apply this approach and create a student customer journey map for your business, follow these instructions.
Contents
You can’t start creating a customer journey map for every student on the planet. Primarily, determine who your target audience covers. Break these people into groups according to their behavior, interests, goals, etc. Here are your personas.
Come up with a name for each persona you describe. Additionally, you can use fictional photos to bring your personas to life. It enables you to think of your customer segments as real people (they really are).
Now add all the information that makes each persona stand out from the crowd: skills, backgrounds, frustrations, motivations, etc. Use your analytics and stats to get it right.
Besides, you can turn to discoveries from education-related research. For instance, the Pearson and The Harris Poll survey describes five types of learners ages 14-40:
Now, you can think about the scope of a journey your personas take. It is up to you to build an end-to-end journey or map out just some part of it, such as the learning process.
Say the first option works best for you, then you need to break down the journey(s) stage by stage.
As a quick point, you can create several maps for different personas. It will get you a deeper understanding of your target groups.
Here is how the sequence of stages of a student customer journey map might look like:
However, the final number of stages your student customer journey map includes will depend on your case.
Finally, it is about time to add more details to each stage of your map.
Here are some map sections to be included:
Pro tip: Think of questions your students may have during the journey. It enables you to pinpoint their goals and intentions.
When you believe your students are rational people, you are wrong. Our emotions influence decision-making processes because we are humans, after all. And you cannot lose sight of it when mapping.
For this reason, it is also a great idea to include an experience graph to your student customer journey map.
How can you benefit from depicting customer emotions?
First, it gets you a better understanding of how your personas feel at different stages. Disappointed people tend not to show brand loyalty or convert into your regular customers. So, you need to find and reveal anything that upsets or angers them.
Second, treating them as real people helps you put yourself into your student’s shoes and understand how you can improve their experience with your institution.
Third, an experience graph is more visible than the conversion rate or the number of applicants. Not all your colleagues grasp the language of statistics and metrics at a glance. With the emoticon graph, it will be easier for your staff to perceive your students' problems and needs.
When your journey is finished, it’s about time to act on the map! At the end of the day, you didn't make it out of curiosity, did you?
Discuss all discoveries with your team during a student customer journey map presentation. It helps prioritize what you need to do first and develop an action plan.
For journey maps to be helpful for your business, they should keep updated. That is why it is a great idea to revise them regularly.
There are many occasions when it makes sense to do it:
Updating your map can be a personal or a teamwork initiative. The thing to keep in mind is to include mapping in your regular marketing toolkit. Otherwise, it could all come down to a waste of time.
Let’s turn all this theory into practice!
Since mapping is a fascinating yet quite complicated activity, you need something to inspire and guide you. For example, here is a ready-to-use template:
It embraces the experience of Chloe Cote, a fictional head of sales at an insurance company who wants to grow her consulting business. For this reason, she searches for suitable training options for online business courses.
Take a look at her end-to-end journey from the Awareness to the Feedback stage.
Grab a free template to adjust and use at your educational institution!
P.S. Do you want to learn the journey of a real online student? Check out our blog post about transitioning to CX, or give a use case for creating a student journey map a look.
