Seasonality in the education project
Everyone has heard about the seasonality in e-commerce: when your traffic goes up and sales start growing rapidly. A deeper understanding of seasonality could give you additional insights that you have at least two different trends: the first one for traffic growth and the second one for sales. How is it possible?
1. Seasonality in industries with examples
Seasonality could be more or less conspicuous in different industries. While planning the marketing strategy, specialists ought to take into consideration how seasonal factors influence the traffic.
Here are the examples of the industries with periodical effect:
- Fashion indicate great results during the Christmas sales;
- Tourism is popular during the summer/winter period depending on the region;
- The medical industry and related services.
(source: https://www.criteo.com/insights/2019-holiday-marketing-planning-tips/)
Industries with the lower periodical effect:
- Real-estate sales depend on the market state more than on the particular season;
- Food Delivery;
- Fin-tech.
(source: https://towardsdatascience.com/which-is-a-better-investment-real-estate-vs-stocks-f89649c3d580)
(pic: comparison of the American real-estate prices versus market stability)
Regarding the education industry, it consists of two market parts:
- Student;
- Teacher.
School year
Every participant of the educational process has their own workload and it is radically different within the school year and even the day of the week.
The workload is distributed differently within the school year. It ends with the exam. In fact, the volume of the tasks remaining to do grows as the exam date is getting closer.
The workload of the teachers and students might be different. It depends on the region where they are working or studying. The common practice in the United States is studying during school hours and not taking the homework home. The situation in Europe is absolutely different. Students receive homework to do after school hours.
The teachers’ workload is higher on Sundays and Mondays, said Aleksey Kolupaev, co-founder and CTO of the Lehrermarktplatz.de — the methodological service for teachers in German-speaking countries(Germany, Austria, Switzerland). Nowadays, teachers prepare new materials for students and create programs.
Students’ workload accounts for working days, mostly morning hours at the beginning of the week.
This information may easily be gotten from the Google Analytics account by seeing the Users at the time of the day, based on the standard reporting data.
Regional seasonality
Every region has its own specific plan for the school year depending on the climate, school program, bank and church holidays. It’s good to have the holiday calendar at fingertips while planning the market strategy. However, some countries (such as India), could have different holiday calendars for every year as well as various importance of the same holidays in different parts of the country. The prediction based on the time series becomes challenging.
Best practice prompts users to interact not only with the sales funnel but with the brand itself.
2. How the seasonality influences the business part
Traffic uplift doesn’t necessarily imply a high conversion rate for e-commerce projects. Depending on your monetisation model you could try to leverage the seasonality effect. One of the monetisation models which could help you to mitigate the periodicity is a subscription.
Convincing your user to buy the subscription of your business is a way to win the client’s loyalty for a certain amount of months or even years.
One of the examples when the offer of your e-commerce shop consists of:
- On-demand goods;
- Monthly subscription;
- Annual subscription.
On-demand (or one-time purchase) enables a user to get to know the product and understand its value. The challenge is to transfer a customer from the one-time buyer category to the subscriber status. Regular marketing routine in the low-season could activate the customer database.
3. Cases & examples
- Tutoring in educational products
Before the tutoring project starts the seasonality is unknown. The only prediction which we might easily make is that the workload is expected to be higher prior to the exams. To scale with the experts could be challenging during the hot exam period. Therefore, the process of recruiting experts ought to be planned in advance.
2. Traffic to the same content
Grouping of the content in the cohorts by the creation date in the educational product reflects a circle trend. Interestingly, the next year, the traffic regarding the content will be higher than it was before. Analyzing the trends, cohort grouping is the right approach.
3. Monetisation
The art in e-commerce is to find the right moment for monetisation. For different categories of users, this time might vary. The loyalty of the users towards the product doesn’t necessarily equal monetisation. Willingness to pay might be postponed and needs to be cherished additionally.
The intersection of the supply and demand for students is magically located within the pre-exam period. Teachers are facing challenges while organising the learning process. Parents under the student’s influence more eagerly invest in education as the academic year is nearing to the end than ever before as they anticipate the upcoming gratification — the success at the exam.
Conclusion
Brainly help kids to study more and encourage them to increase the duration and the sustainability of their studying.
Empowering students to put a constant effort regardless of the school year calendar has far-reaching positive consequences. On the one hand, education gains sustainability and then shapes itself as a market. Subsequently, innovations can be brought up to the market by companies such as Brainly. On the other hand, students quit applying the approach like ‘study for the exam and forget afterward’. Therefore, learners adopt a more constant attitude toward education, work, and life. They will be unlikely to become adults who only work hard enough just not to get fired.
Students don’t merely obtain the knowledge but develop a unique mindset. They get in charge and place themselves into the driver’s seat of their education and career.