Best education CRM for schools and universities

Use cases of an educational CRM

1. Manage student admissions and enrollment

An ed-tech CRM should be able to seamlessly manage the enrollment process from lead generation, application, acceptance, and enrollment.

2. Communicate with all stakeholders through various channels

When managing an educational institution, there are multiple stakeholders to interact with. These include current students, parents, alumni, and donors. And all these stakeholders may have different preferred communication channels. Your CRM should be able to communicate with all of them across multiple channels simultaneously. 

Choose a CRM that offers communication via email, phone, chat, social media, web forms, and more.

3. Provide a complete view of the student database

Modern CRMs provide a comprehensive overview of the student database with advanced list-view features. You should be able to customize columns, sort and filter based on specific criteria, and export list views into various formats (like a spreadsheet).

You can also perform bulk actions to send bulk emails and update a field in multiple contacts. Get more done with instant access to import, automation, and integration capabilities.

4. Support academic advising

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system can play a crucial role in supporting academic advising for educational institutions. You should be able to create  360-degree student profiles—aggregate comprehensive student data, including academic history, courses taken, grades, attendance, and extracurricular activities

It should also have early warning systems to track poor performance, appointment scheduling for providing guidance, collaboration features for well-rounded support, and segmentation features to categorize students based on factors like academic performance, career goals, and interests.

5. Manages alumni relations

Maintaining strong ties with alumni is essential for any educational institution. A robust CRM should help you nurture and engage your alumni network effectively. Look for features that allow you to track alumni engagement, capture their career progress, and facilitate communication.

Your CRM should enable you to create profiles for alumni, automate alumni event management, such as reunions and networking sessions, send personalized newsletters and updates to keep alumni connected and track alumni donations and fundraising efforts.

Test out the Education CRM recognized with the "Best value for the price" Award

6. Automate repetitive tasks  

The ideal education CRM can significantly improve efficiency by automating repetitive tasks within an educational institution. The major purpose is that you can automate certain communication—Sending welcome emails when a student enrolls, reminder emails for upcoming events and deadlines, and more. 

You can use sales dashboards and lead generation dashboards to keep track of a set of reports that you use often regarding students or prospective students. You can use these insights to adjust your strategy and grow revenue for your organization.

Some CRMs in the market also come with AI features that help you find potential customers, create personalized emails, and provide insights to help you close deals faster.

7. Customizable and easy to adapt

A CRM for educational institutions should be customizable because you will need to track and manage multiple custom activities. Administrators should be able to define and customize data fields and attributes according to the institution's requirements. This flexibility ensures that the CRM can accommodate diverse student information.

The CRM should offer options to rearrange and customize the user interface elements and have their own personalized list views, reports, and dashboards for custom sales activities. 

If you’re a global institution, choose a CRM that will be able to help you function across different regions with multi-currency and multi-language support.

How do schools and universities benefit from an education CRM? 

In the fast-paced world of education, schools and universities are increasingly recognizing the value of utilizing CRM systems tailored for the education sector.

To expand your horizons, you need clear insights into where your leads are coming from, attribute them to the right sources, store all their details in an easily accessible place, identify the most interested leads, make quick sales, and ultimately boost your revenue.

1. Comprehensive student profiles

An education CRM centralizes student information, creating 360-degree profiles that include academic history, enrollment details, performance metrics, communication history, and more. This holistic view empowers educators to better understand each student's journey and tailor support accordingly.

2. Efficient communication

Education CRMs facilitate effective communication by automating emails, reminders, and notifications. This ensures that students, parents, and staff stay informed about important events, deadlines, and updates, leading to better engagement and satisfaction.

3. Automated task management

With education CRM platforms, repetitive administrative tasks such as appointment scheduling, follow-up reminders, and data entry can be automated. This frees up staff time, allowing them to focus on more meaningful interactions and strategic initiatives.

4. Personalized advising

Education CRMs enable academic advisors to access student data and track progress. Advisors can offer personalized guidance, recommend courses based on interests, and intervene proactively if academic performance shows signs of decline.

5. Enhanced enrollment management

CRMs assist in managing the student enrollment process from application to enrollment. Automated updates, application status tracking, and document submissions streamline the admission process for both applicants and administrators.

Use cases of an educational CRM

1. Manage student admissions and enrollment

An ed-tech CRM should be able to seamlessly manage the enrollment process from lead generation, application, acceptance, and enrollment.

2. Communicate with all stakeholders through various channels

When managing an educational institution, there are multiple stakeholders to interact with. These include current students, parents, alumni, and donors. And all these stakeholders may have different preferred communication channels. Your CRM should be able to communicate with all of them across multiple channels simultaneously. 

Choose a CRM that offers communication via email, phone, chat, social media, web forms, and more.

3. Provide a complete view of the student database

Modern CRMs provide a comprehensive overview of the student database with advanced list-view features. You should be able to customize columns, sort and filter based on specific criteria, and export list views into various formats (like a spreadsheet).

You can also perform bulk actions to send bulk emails and update a field in multiple contacts. Get more done with instant access to import, automation, and integration capabilities.

4. Support academic advising

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system can play a crucial role in supporting academic advising for educational institutions. You should be able to create  360-degree student profiles—aggregate comprehensive student data, including academic history, courses taken, grades, attendance, and extracurricular activities

It should also have early warning systems to track poor performance, appointment scheduling for providing guidance, collaboration features for well-rounded support, and segmentation features to categorize students based on factors like academic performance, career goals, and interests.

5. Manages alumni relations

Maintaining strong ties with alumni is essential for any educational institution. A robust CRM should help you nurture and engage your alumni network effectively. Look for features that allow you to track alumni engagement, capture their career progress, and facilitate communication.

Your CRM should enable you to create profiles for alumni, automate alumni event management, such as reunions and networking sessions, send personalized newsletters and updates to keep alumni connected and track alumni donations and fundraising efforts.

Test out the Education CRM recognized with the "Best value for the price" Award

6. Automate repetitive tasks  

The ideal education CRM can significantly improve efficiency by automating repetitive tasks within an educational institution. The major purpose is that you can automate certain communication—Sending welcome emails when a student enrolls, reminder emails for upcoming events and deadlines, and more. 

You can use sales dashboards and lead generation dashboards to keep track of a set of reports that you use often regarding students or prospective students. You can use these insights to adjust your strategy and grow revenue for your organization.

Some CRMs in the market also come with AI features that help you find potential customers, create personalized emails, and provide insights to help you close deals faster.

7. Customizable and easy to adapt

A CRM for educational institutions should be customizable because you will need to track and manage multiple custom activities. Administrators should be able to define and customize data fields and attributes according to the institution's requirements. This flexibility ensures that the CRM can accommodate diverse student information.

The CRM should offer options to rearrange and customize the user interface elements and have their own personalized list views, reports, and dashboards for custom sales activities. 

If you’re a global institution, choose a CRM that will be able to help you function across different regions with multi-currency and multi-language support.

Why a data processing tool like a spreadsheet cannot become your education CRM?

While tools like Excel and Notion are versatile and widely used, they may not be ideal for serving as a scalable and efficient CRM system tailored to the needs of educational institutions. Here are some reasons why they might fall short in this role:

1: Limited data centralization and accessibility

Excel lacks the structured data architecture of a dedicated CRM. In Excel, data is often stored in separate spreadsheets, making it challenging to maintain a unified view of student information.

2: Lack of automation

CRM platforms are designed to automate repetitive tasks, such as sending automated reminders, updating records, and triggering workflows. Excel requires manual input and lacks the automation capabilities to streamline administrative processes, which can be crucial in the education sector.

3: Inadequate communication tools

Education CRMs offer built-in communication features like automated emails, reminders, and notifications. Excel does not provide these features, making it challenging to maintain consistent and timely communication with students, parents, and staff.

4: Scalability challenges

As educational institutions grow, the data volume and complexity increase. A tool like Excel or Notion might struggle to handle large amounts of data, leading to slower performance, increased risk of errors, and difficulty in maintaining data consistency.

5: Reporting and analytics limitations

Education CRMs offer reporting and analytics features that help institutions gain insights into student performance, engagement, and enrollment trends. Excel and Notion require manual data manipulation for generating meaningful reports, which can be time-consuming and error-prone.

Get started with an Education CRM that grows with your business Try Freshsales for Free

What's in Freshsales CRM?

Boost productivity with Contact Management

Your sales reps need to manage an extensive contact list of student information. In this process, they may miss out on important contacts that may convert into customers. With list views in Freshsales, they can organize customer data the way they want and perform daily tasks faster than before. With an education CRM like Freshsales, they can:

• See where each contact stands and spot roadblocks

• Visualize and manage your contacts in a list, table, or Kanban view and work the way you like 

• Use drag-and-drop cards and group fields to keep track of contacts’ progress

• View tasks, notes, and multiple contact field values in one place

Learn more about customizing contact management

Get complete context on leads

Your salespeople must be empowered with the intricate details needed to engage students and handhold them in finding their perfect course. A student management software like Freshsales can help you have those meaningful conversations by 

• Unifying every record across the prospect and customer lifecycle in one place

• A quick summary of emails, phone records, and engagement history with prospects and customers

• Displaying quick summary of primary contact information, notes, tasks, and appointments

• Laying down their chronological timeline—page visits, email engagement, the courses offered to them, and more

• Identifying and prioritizing leads who are most interested in the courses based on their interactions with your website and email, using AI-based contact scoring

Learn more about lead management

Automate and reduce data entry

An average sales rep spends about 20% time entering data in the CRM. As a leader, you would want your sales team to focus most of their time on selling, but you also want an up-to-date CRM database to manage your operations. Achieve that balance with an education CRM that takes care of data entry for you. With Freshsales, you can

• Automatically capture and save information of prospects who reach out to you via email, live chat, and web forms

• Automatically enrich prospect profiles with their social media information and save your sales reps’ time that is spent on research

• Migrate data from other CRM systems effortlessly and do away with the hours of manual data entry

• Import and export customer and business details from spreadsheets

Find out how web forms can boost your sales 

Stay on top of your tasks

Studies show that sales reps spend 64% of their time in activities that do not generate revenue. Automate repetitive tasks to save time and boost their productivity using intelligent workflows. You can automatically

• Send reminder emails of upcoming courses

• Send welcome and birthday emails

• Update CRM fields

• Assign prospects to the right sales reps using territories.

An education CRM like Freshsales offers predefined workflow templates that can make routine business tasks easier. 

Sounds interesting? Learn more about workflows

Get the word out about your courses 

As you keep adding new courses to your library, some could turn out to be very popular, while some may not do all that well—one reason being people haven’t heard about it enough. 

Spread the word about the lessons by sending out bulk emails to students. But don’t just stop there—set up follow-up sequences with more interesting courses or offers based on their engagement with your emails. 

With sales sequences in a course management software like Freshsales, you can

• Create sequences based on activity or time-based triggers

• Decide from a list of email templates, device follow-up cadences, schedule email delivery time and select when leads exit the campaign

• Track how your emails are performing and create the perfect outreach for your audience.

More on sales sequences

Gain insights with Analytics 2.0

Scale your business by tracking and optimizing your sales process end to end. Using sales reports, you can also cut through the noise and understand precisely where your sales stand and measure

• Which channel brings the most number of students

• The performance of your sales team

• Popular courses that are driving revenue and ones that need a push.

You can create reports and export them as CSV or PDF, create new reports in a single pane, and view underlying data right from the reports page. You can navigate instantly between reports and schedule these reports to be mailed to you at regular intervals with a single click. 

Check out more details about our advanced reporting

Enjoy a one-stop solution

Reduce the sales hassle by bringing in multiple applications under one window. Freshsales brings the three most used channels together—email, phone, and live chat—connecting this data in one screen with the convenience of a sales mobile CRM.

It brings together internal teams—sales, support, and marketing—around a single, shared view of customer data.

With Freshsales, you can improve collaboration, align your teams, break internal silos to deliver tailored customer experiences, and build deeper relationships with your customers.

Check out our endless integration possibilities