With hundreds of thousands of nursing students entering school every year, your nursing program needs to stand out. This competitive, attractive industry offers ample opportunities, benefits, and a lifelong, impactful career for high-achieving nurses. And your nursing school wants to attract and retain the best nursing students. Over 2,600 colleges offer a nursing degree program, and nursing school marketing should be top-of-mind for all of them.
Attracting and retaining nursing students starts on day one with your first interaction. Whether they visit your website, talk to a recruiter, or hear information from a friend, lead nurturing emails step in to help you build a relationship with potential students. Lead nurturing for nursing students is incredibly important, as students have many choices. Warm up leads, stay top of mind, and radically increase the chances of students joining your program with a well-constructed nurture program.
What Is a Nurture Email?
Nurture emails help you warm up leads, stay top of mind, and increase students’ chances to join your program. They’re highly effective and easy to set up, but many nursing programs often don’t bother because it feels time-consuming. However, a simple way to create a strong lead nurturing program is to repurpose existing content. For example, take a website page, and turn it into three emails. Then, use the copy from a whitepaper or e-book on applying to nursing school and drip out the content over several weeks via nurture emails. You probably already have tons of content created to help nursing students, so it’s just a matter of repurposing them into email format.
How Do Nurture Emails Help Retain Nursing Students?
1. Share Information
Students want to know why they should join your program. Use an email nurture sequence to highlight your unique differentiators, program details, testimonials, and more. You probably have tons of information you want to share, so a spaced-out nurture email sequence helps deliver large amounts of content over time.
2. Build Rapport
Nursing students are more likely to finish their education when they feel personally connected to a school or program. In your email nurture sequence, focus your language on empathizing with them and understanding their unique challenges and pain points. If potential students feel like you genuinely understand them, they will know, like, and trust your program, helping them stick it out when courses, exams, and labs get tough.
3. Encourage Application With Call-to-Actions
A good nurture email always ends with a call to action. Using a single call to action in an email increases clicks by 371%, helping potential students apply, talk to an administrator, or request tuition information. All emails should drive towards a specific action, getting prospective students used to doing more than passively reading your emails.
4. Guide Prospective Students to the Right Decision
Students have a variety of factors to consider when choosing a school, and a strong email nurture sequence helps guide them in the right direction. For prospective students, focus on 8 to 10 emails per sequence over several weeks. Towards the end, increase the spacing to help give students time to make their decision. This step-by-step guidance helps hold their hand through the process.
5. Move Prospective Students in and Out of the Email Nurture Sequence
Many prospective students will decide before the end of your email sequence. If they enroll, immediately move them to a new student nurture email campaign, which will help get them excited about school. If they get rejected or drop out, consider moving them to a long-term nurture sequence where you only email them every few months. They might change their mind and want to switch schools, and you want to still be considered.
Nursing School Marketing Must-Haves
Every nursing program should use nurture emails to attract and retain nursing students. Nurture emails for nursing schools help deliver information, build rapport, encourage application, and guide prospective students to make the right choice. Springer Publishing helps guide healthcare students into the right program by working with institutions to develop their email nurture campaigns. Contact us for more information.
