GET MORE RUSSIAN STUDENTS FROM RUNET

Educational travel as a business started in Russia approximately 15 years ago, and most of well-established educational agencies have been operating on local market for 10 to 15 years. Most of them are based in Moscow, St. Petersburg and major Russian cities like Ekaterinburg, Rostov-on-Don etc.; they have got their market shares in these cities and supply the majority of Russian students traveling abroad. However this market is already in stagnation period and you can hardly expect any considerable growth in student numbers in the near future. There are no new players in this field – if you have worked with Russia for the last 10 years, you know all reliable agents by names, no matter what agency they are currently working for.

Well-established agencies have their preferred partners, which can expect to receive the same amount of students annually in case the situation does not change. If your school is only approaching Russian market it is almost useless to contact established agents unless you offer unique services, well-known location, extremely high commission or considerable advertising budget (please see AGENTS’ BEST KEPT SECRETS). It is also useless to look for newly established agents like tourist agencies which are not professionals in the field, unless you have Russian-speaking staff and can offer simple, easy to deal with product like a low cost 2-weeks' courses on fixed dates. In any case you take a risk that you may get 1 or 2 students per year and a lot of trouble due to the lack of professionalism of tourist agents, visa problems, late payments and unjustified high expectations of your Russian students which did not get full information about your courses, accommodation etc. and are not happy with the services you offer only because they expected something else.

However some markets for educational travel in Russia still keep growing steadily and offer good opportunities for educational providers. The richest regions of Russia (after Moscow and St. Petersburg) are small towns in Siberia and Far East, where big companies exporting oil, gas and other natural resources are residing. You definitely heard about Russian billionaires buying British football teams, but there are also hundreds of thousands of professionals getting European-level salaries who can afford to send their children abroad for language courses or academic studies. The problem is that there are no specialized educational agencies in these regions, no qualified consultants etc.

If you decide to create a network of your representatives all over Russia it will cost you a fortune – it is almost impossible for a small or middle sized language school to invest so heavily in their marketing activities in one country.

The mission may seem impossible, however there is a solution: you can use the rapidly growing potential of Russian Internet (called usually RUNET). The number of Internet users in Russian language zone (including former USSR countries) is growing very quickly and a specialist may easily discover that this number equals to the number of wealthy well-educated businessmen or professionals who are looking for the best education for their children (including education abroad) and who are ready to pay for it. Your potential students may live anywhere from Nizhnevartovsk and Tyumen to Magadan and Chukotka (which is the most remote North-Eastern part of Siberia governed by the Russian tycoon Roman Abramovich, who has to fly 10hours one-way on his private air jet every time he wants to attend a game by Chelsea).

How can a British language school reach these potential students? Some of them speak English quite well already – they can, in theory, find your English language website, get all the information, book on-line and come to your courses. I suspect, however, that you receive not so many e-mail requests from Russia, and I’d be quite surprised if you ever got at least one student from Russia booking on-line. Why? There are numerous reasons, the most important being: they don’t speak (and read) English, they cannot find your site, they don’t trust Internet, they need advice regarding visa issues etc.

Most of your potential students don’t speak English (and this is the reason why they do need your courses). Sometimes the decision is made by student’s parents (which is typical for Russia), who do not speak English at all. If your site is in English only, they will never visit it.

Some schools add web pages with general information, translated into different languages, including Russian. Does it help? I’m afraid not. The reason is simple: most of Russian users of RUNET send their enquiries to local Russian search engines like Rambler and similar, using Russian letters! Robots are permanently searching RUNET for Russian keywords like “English in Britain, education abroad” etc. – but they will never find your site!

What do you need to get Russian visitors to your school’s website?

You need to have a working, regularly promoted Russian-language website in .ru zone

What do you need to turn your website visitors into paying students?

- You must have a Russian-speaking manager dealing with enquiries, who will be able to determine whether requests are from genuine students or from people who just cannot afford to pay or who send circular letters to hundreds of language schools looking for the cheapest courses

- You must convince the clients that your courses are very good and your prices are competitive

- You must address the problems your clients might encounter, such us money transfers from Russia, collecting documents for visa application, preparing for the interview at the embassy etc.

OR, alternatively, you need a reliable agent dealing with all internet enquiries from .ru zone and arranging everything using modern technologies like conventional agencies arrange everything when a potential student comes to their office.

We will be happy to establish your virtual office in Runet and help your students come to your school.