Taking advantage of customised integration potential.

Auckland University of Technology bolsters international enquiry management and enriches the prospect experience.

Established

1895

Auckland, New Zealand
https://www.aut.ac.nz/

Triggered Consulting
https://triggered.co.nz/

13%

Education New Zealand enquiries converted to applications

Products:

Adobe Marketo Engage ›

Objectives

Automate email marketing and data capture

Improve the quantity and quality of international leads

Promote transparency and reporting

Track pipeline conversions

Results

Secured additional information from 62% of students submitting an enquiry via the Education New Zealand website

Converted 13% of Education New Zealand enquiries to applications

Introduced integrations to improve user experience across international and domestic markets

Used personalised strategies to target each audience at various stages throughout their lifecycle

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Targeting domestic and international audiences

Auckland University of Technology (AUT) has used Adobe Marketo Engage, launched in 2017, to communicate to prospective students, applicants, current students and alumni at various stages of the customer lifecycle in a personalised, behaviour-driven manner. AUT’s centralised marketing department, within the Brand and Marketing Services division, manages the marketing efforts for several stakeholders across the university’s three campora, each with different requirements.

The robust integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 delivers real-time syncing with Marketo Engage contacts, including any enquiries, applications and qualifications. With the support of AUT’s strategic partner, Triggered Consulting and its Director, Daniel Carroll, AUT has implemented a lead lifecycle, scoring model, programme infrastructure and a robust content stack to target both domestic and international audiences across different study areas and study levels. Automating these processes has allowed AUT to place more emphasis on engaging more with contacts at all stages of the customer lifecycle.

Improving marketing efforts through consolidation and integration

Prior to implementing Marketo Engage, a variety of email platforms were employed by different departments across the university, requiring significant manual execution and siloed reporting. When the university looked to update its technology stack, it wanted to identify the best marketing automation platform to boost its marketing efforts, provide flexibility for different processes and stakeholder requirements and integrate well with Microsoft Dynamics 365.

“We were using other products, but they didn’t have the level of complexity or granularity that we needed to send targeted and personalised communications to leads,” says Margot Killoran, Marketing Automation Manager, Brand Strategy and Capability, Auckland University of Technology. “We were also manually uploading data to batch and blast our emails. It was time and resource-intensive to turn around larger campaigns and we weren’t able to scale the way we can with Adobe Marketo Engage.”

High on the team’s to-do list: improve lead capture and nurturing of international students, a vital income stream for the university. To achieve this, the team required the marketing technology to automate emails, better understand the lifecycle and behaviours of their cohorts and improve reporting to optimise campaigns and transparency with their stakeholders.

“The ENZ API is a customised-integration with Adobe Marketo Engage. It allows us to automatically sync enquiries submitted via ENZ’s website in real time.”

Margot Killoran

Marketing Automation Manager, Brand Strategy and Capability, Auckland University of Technology

Education NZ opportunity boosts international prospects

In 2020, Education New Zealand (ENZ), a government-funded organisation focused on helping attract overseas university students to New Zealand, approached AUT with the opportunity to use its API to immediately engage with international prospects who matched with the university via the ENZ website.

“The ENZ API is a customised-integration with Adobe Marketo Engage,” says Killoran. “It allows us to automatically sync enquiries submitted via ENZ’s website in real time. As soon as an enquiry is received from the ENZ website, we can communicate to the lead and send them relevant information about their interests. We are also able to automatically provide ENZ with particular milestones as the contact moves through the customer lifecycle, which allows both organisations to communicate with their audiences effectively.”

Marketo Engage functionality allows the integration to update existing leads in the database and create new ones, providing updates as leads move through different stages: submitting an enquiry, lodging their application, receiving an offer, accepting it and finally, becoming a student. Likewise, ENZ notifies the team if a prospect takes up an offer from another institution.

“Through this integration, AUT can pull data from Education NZ enquiries in real time, qualify them through pre-set-up nurture campaigns, create them as contacts in the CRM system and, if appropriate, action follow-up from Marketo Engage for the CRM team,” says Daniel Carroll from Triggered. “This is a great addition to our overall set of integrations we have running in the AUT Marketo Engage instance.”

“If an Adobe Marketo Engage instance is well integrated with a natively connected CRM like Microsoft Dynamics 365, this is the bedrock of good data for Marketo Engage.”

Daniel Carroll

Director, Triggered Consulting

Winning personalisation strategy

Since implementing this two-way API integration, 62% of those who submitted an enquiry via the ENZ website have provided further information to AUT around their study interests and 13% converted to an application. These results highlight the importance of a timely and personalised response, with international student recruitment offering a healthier profit margin.

To improve their engagement with candidates and students, Carroll helped overlay status tracking for the team with the customer lifecycle to monitor the ongoing performance of this programme. “We’re using a functionality of Adobe Marketo Engage called advanced journey analytics, which allows you to map lifecycles,” says Carroll. “The fully-automated function moves people through stages as they become prospects, applicants, students and alumni.”

A personalised strategy helps target each audience at various stages throughout their lifecycle. Since implementing the ENZ solution, AUT has introduced several other integrations to improve the user experience across the international and domestic markets. These integrations include CVENT, ON24, Drift and some additional custom third-party integrations.

“An accurate and reliable set of well configured and managed integrations with the Adobe Marketo Engage platform is critical to AUT having a real-time view of data to trigger, activate and manage customer journeys,” says Carroll. If an Adobe Marketo Engage instance is well integrated with a natively connected CRM like Microsoft Dynamics 365, this is the bedrock of good data for Marketo Engage. Using additional customised integrations to push data points to Marketo Engage enhances the visibility of real-time data for Marketo Engage and gives it more depth of data triggers - a great example of this is the integration AUT set-up with the Education NZ API.”