The fellas at Sparkroom sponsored a benchmarking survey put together by forprofitedu.com, which I believe is run by the founder of CUNet, which just acquired Sparkroom. The report surveyed 102 marketing professionals in the for-profit EDU sector and asked a number general questions that reaffirmed the evident speculations most industry insiders have been making.

The survey found that almost 70% of the respondents plan on increasing their budgets. Not all too surprising being that EDU industry could easily be considered counter cyclical to the economy. People are looking to go about to school to increase their chances of earning more income in today job market. Once the economy begins to improve, not instantaneously, but soon after those same people will remove themselves from the continuing education market. It is also my speculation that many will begin to drop out or end their schooling prior to completing their degrees because of their secure job situations. They simply will not have the need and will find something better to do with their $1k+ per month. Regardless of this speculation, schools are doubling down on the current boom. No brainer there, but they should be cautious and have a close eye on key market indicators. On the same token, and I think I mentioned this before, but if Obama’s efforts continue on to completion and provide funding for citizens looking to go back to school through the state school system, which is making the same strides of bringing classes online, could bring a market turn quicker then expected. So it makes sense that schools are looking to spend more money on leads. They are currently raking in money hand over fist.

The survey also noted that schools using third party call centers were able to achieve the shortest lead to contact times compared to those schools not using call centers. You can also also assume that the schools using call centers are also seeing a higher conversion rate then their counterparts. Speed to contact time is the most important factor to successful lead management, in my opinion.

The survey also pointed out that most respondents from larger schools used in-house lead management systems. I am not too sure if “in-house” means proprietary systems or 3rd party software that is simply not provided by their agency. The underlying  issue here is that most of the LMS’s that schools use are horrible, especially proprietary systems. They are so strongly ingrained into the schools processes they becomes extremely difficult to break away from.

Surprisingly, 35% of the respondents, about 36 people, claimed that social media is an effective source of leads. I think that is surprisingly high and my guess these respondents were being a little optimistic about their current social media efforts. Do I think Social Media can be effective? YES, but in general I would have thought a far lower percentage would have agreed with me, let alone realized actual results. Frankly, I think a larger sample would have been more inline with my speculation.

With most schools spending a large percentage of their revenue on marketing, especially online lead generation, it makes sense that almost 90% believe their most significant concern is lead quality. Not knowing the choice of answers that were given for this question it would be nice if they were also concerned about the lead management process, something they have the most control over, rather then just lead quality.

You can check out the more specific finding of the survey here and form your own conclusions. Maybe if we are lucky they will reveal more data from the survey. I would like to thanks to both forprofitedu and Sparkroom for putting the survey together. It is always great to see numbers that back up all the industry speculation. I am sure the next survey will be even better and provide more data.

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