5 advantages of using WhatsApp in the education sector

All these changes affect any industry that needs to use channels to communicate with its users. And, any academic institution needs to reach its students effectively.

WhatsApp is the way to do it.

Read on to discover 5 advantages of using WhatsApp in the education sector to improve your processes.

Conversational generations

In addition to the organic increase in online education, the pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation. And, many of these institutions choose to use email as a standard communication channel with their students.

But what if we told you that email is no longer the best communication channel?

You’ve probably already witnessed (or been a victim of) the accumulation of unread emails in your inboxes. The fact is that the younger generations have email as a last resort and use other platforms.

The emails have an open rate of 20% and an interaction rate of just 4%

We are increasingly turning to social networks and instant messaging applications such as WhatsApp. Unlike channels such as e-mail or phone calls, it offers:

• Immediacy
• Asynchrony
• Proximity

WhatsApp Cloud API for education

Among the three existing versions of WhatsApp, the Cloud API is the version designed for companies that need tools to automate and scale their processes.

And what makes it the most powerful version?

Let’s look at the tools that make it stand out:

Push notifications

Your institution may send reminders and invitations by e-mail, but as we have mentioned, it is very likely to get lost in the sea of messages to be read.

With push notifications you can send messages directly to the students’ mobile screen and provide them with the information they need at that moment.

WhatsApp push notifications have a 98% open rate and a 60% click-through rate, so your students won’t miss a thing and will receive important information on their favorite channel.

Chatbots and automations

Part of the teaching process is questions.

Students have hundreds of questions that go unanswered and it can be for a variety of reasons. But the result is the same: they don’t get answers and that impacts their satisfaction.

A chatbot can solve all these problems and more:

• It is available 24/7, so your students can get answers at any time
• You can configure it with different languages to make it accessible to all types of students
• Pass-to-Agent option for those queries that need human assistance

What can you do with a WhatsApp chatbot in the education sector? The limit is your imagination, but here are some examples:

• Frequently Asked Questions
• Daily challenges
• Rewarding quizzes
• Registration for events and webinars
• Data collection

We have more than 100 ready-to-use templates that you can adapt to your needs.

Pro tip: you can adapt our FAQs level 3 template for education to have a ready to use assistant in a few minutes that will ease your workload.

5 Advantages of WhatsApp in the education sector

1. Higher interaction rate

Chatbots allow them to resolve incidents quickly, easily and conveniently.

2. Better institution-student relationship

With WhatsApp, much of the processing can be done conversationally and automatically.

One way to ease the workload is to automate the simplest processes with the help of chatbots and send reminders with push notifications.

3. Easy communication

Good communication, better interaction and better results also contribute to the students’ sense of belonging to the educational institution.

This can bring you great benefits, for example:

• Loyalty of your students, which will increase the chances that they will purchase a new course.
• Increased satisfaction, so they are more likely to recommend your institution.

4. Increased interaction

But not only this, being a medium they already use to communicate with friends and family, they feel more comfortable sharing information and their doubts in a WhatsApp chat than talking on the phone.

Which translates into more people replying to your messages and interacting with you in a WhatsApp conversation.

5. Higher open, click and conversion rates

As we have been saying, new generations do not communicate as they used to and want to talk to educational institutions on the channels they use and prefer.

One of the advantages of WhatsApp over other communication channels is its high open rate. Just think about how many times a day you open WhatsApp versus how many times you open email.

On the other hand, WhatsApp also has a high click-through rate.

Interactive WhatsApp messages call to action in a direct and timely manner. They don’t have to scroll down to the end of the message to learn the information; instead, the short format of WhatsApp messages tells them what they want to know in a nutshell.

If we add these two advantages together, we obtain a higher conversion rate than with other channels, which translates into more sales and more students coming to your institution.

Let’s look at some figures that illustrate these results:

To sum up

And not only that. WhatsApp is here to stay in the education sector and offers multiple benefits that will be reflected in the results of any educational institution.