A medical university in the southeast had a small team of recruiters who each had 3,000 potential students in their regions. The recruiters were doing a great job with outreach, but marketing was time consuming and slow to get materials out. This school was able to more that double the number of applications generated in each region with marketing automation.
School
Medical universityServices
Marketing automation
CRM management
MarComs
The challenge
A CRM without automation was a burden to regional recruiters who had to manually write each email
The CRM was lacking automation. The directive given from the VP of Enrollment Services to the recruiters was to engage each lead via email at minimum once every two weeks. Every two weeks the recruiters were expected to email every lead, but they had over 3,000 leads each. The expectation wasn’t too much, but at this volume the manual process of sending emails was just impossible.
Marketing automation was a must if the VP’s request was to be met.
Tools
CRM (Slate)
Constant Contact
Fun fact to know about Marketing Automation
Marketing automation can be added to any common CRM used in higher education (Banner, Slate, Salesforce / TargetX, HubSpot). Some of these have automation built in while others require another platform that can easily be integrated:
- Constant Contact
- MailerLite
- MailChimp
- Brevo
The solution
Add marketing automation that is simple, effective, and helps recruiters generate more applications
The university’s CRM subscription already included marketing automation and customer journeys, which meant the university was already paying for the tools but they just needed to be set up.
We worked closely with the Director of Marketing and the Director of Recruitment who both reported to the same VP. We set up bi-weekly meetings to provide updates and discuss any roadblocks throughout the 3-month process.
01 Map out automation
Design the automation required for the ideal customer journey
02 Enable automation
Enabled the automation function in the CRM at not additional cost
03 Email design
Worked with the MarComs team in the marketing department to design emails being sent at each stage of the process
04 Set up automation
Turned on automation with emails, triggers, workflows, and a clear call to action
05 Measured results
Measured results including deliversy, engagement, and conversion
The results
Double the application without adding more recruiters
Marketing automation was a huge success and it doubled the number of applications the following intake. We created a dashboard and an automated report in the CRM that tracked the effectiveness of the automation:
- Emails delivered
- Open rates
- Click rates
- Lead scoring
The recruiters loved the fact that they didn’t have to spend hours each week creating a list and sending emails, knowing it was all being done automatically. The recruiters also loved that with lead scoring they were able to see which students were actively engaging with the emails. This allowed the recruiter to reach out those who were actively engaged and assure they applied.
The VP and directors were happy with the results and the fact that they didn’t need any additional licenses or software.
200
application volume the next intake
12
more recruited students that intake vs previous year
0
Spent on additional licenses and software