Challenges
With campuses in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, and across the Ottawa Valley, Algonquin College has over 19,000 full-time students and more than 36,000 continuing education students. To generate student leads, the organization operated essentially in batch and blast email mode, leaving the college in the dark in terms of tracking the effectiveness of its marketing content. In addition, because of the diverse student base — from graduating high school students to mature adults taking continuing education courses — the sales cycle could range from four years to just a few days.
Understanding the importance of the financial decisions being made by their prospective students, the organization knew it needed to modernize its interactions and communications with prospects. It was clear they needed to leverage the power of B2B technologies to shift from “hope marketing” to true conversion marketing.
Solution
Algonquin College considered several marketing automation products before they ultimately selected Adobe Marketo Engage based on its ease-of-use and Salesforce integration, which were at the top of the requirement list. However, the college was particularly impressed with the ability of Marketo Engage to provide first-hand insight into how customers progress through the website, interact with landing pages, and respond to marketing campaigns in real time.
The marketing organization is now in a position to move from basic nurturing to what they term “advanced nurturing” where they use a set of elaborate campaigns and triggers to launch relevant, targeted content at the instant the prospect expresses interest. This will allow Algonquin to further refine lead segmentation and help ensure they deliver the right message at the right time.
Benefits
With Marketo Engage, Algonquin College has gained deep, actionable insight that enables precise measurement of which campaigns are most valuable in terms of closed business. In addition, they now have an understanding of what is required to move perspective students from consideration to buying.
As a result, they have improved deal flow and are able to move prospects through the buying cycle faster. In fact, the College has increased click- through rates to over 10% in some cases, improved lead generation by 71% year-over-year, and increased sales by 18%. They have accomplished all this while lowering the cost of distribution and marketing, which has allowed print fulfillment costs to drop by 50%. Finally, their ability to measure ROI has dramatically improved with Marketo Engage, allowing marketing to take a leadership role in driving higher revenues.
