Our client is a Switzerland based business school that offers innovative business programs integrated with state of the art sustainability knowledge. They focus on delivering high academic standards for students and provide advanced and intellectually challenging undergraduate and graduate programs.

What they needed

Providing an exclusive education for students; enrolment costs at the school are substantial and so the value of each learner to the business school is incredibly high. As places at the school are limited, our client needed to re-design their current application process to guarantee an efficient and streamlined prospective learner journey and in turn, a number of relevant applications.

Up until now, our client didn’t have full visibility of the demand for genuine places at the school other than the number of people who had downloaded their brochure online. As advertisements for this are available on external educational directories as well as their official website, although the number of downloads were continually increasing, not all downloads were relevant or eligible applicants, meaning that our client had a false idea of their potential pool of learners interested in enrolling.

To ascertain a realistic view of the number of applicants for the coming year, as well as an understanding of which platforms were driving the most relevant applicants that they could support, they needed to classify the backlog of downloads, redesign their current learner journey and understand trends to help inform a future marketing plan.

What we did

With candidates downloading the prospectus from across Europe and the Middle East, to Asia and the Americas, naturally the differing time zones meant there was often a very small window of opportunity to speak to potential learners. Therefore, it was essential to schedule engagement based around learner origin. The functionality to calculate time-zones was not currently supported in our clients CRM, so we designed a sophisticated scheduling system to determine the most opportune time to contact individuals and increase our engagement.

Due to exclusivity of the school, strict eligibility criteria checks were necessary to ensure all potential learners matched the school’s requirements which included checking validity of visas, competency of the English language and awareness of fee structure. This was a valuable exercise which enabled us to refine the data, classify learners correctly and reduce the administration time for the internal team.

Throughout engagement we found that several applicants had already taken places at other schools, demonstrating how essential timing was in the prospective learner journey. To reduce the likelihood of this affecting enrolment rates, we developed an alert system for the most recent downloads, enabling us to contact potential learners within 48 hours of download and ensure no potential opportunities were missed.

In addition to this, to ensure a steady stream of relevant enquiries for our client, we managed all scheduling, call backs and live transfers to the admissions team in real-time to maximise engagement with potential learners.

What we achieved

Since we first started working with our client, the campaign has evolved and we are now responsible for all live downloads. 35% of relevant conversations have been identified as high potential learners and have been passed straight through to the team, with the other 65% forming a healthy pipeline of relevant potential learners for follow up in the coming year.

We were able to classify 94% of the data held in our clients CRM so that any further activity can be prioritised to focus on those most lucrative areas which will bring in the most return on investment for the business school.

Both phases of the project have led to a vast increase in the number of credible applications and our client was able to fulfil the full number of student places at the business school for that academic year. We are now focused on maintaining this steady stream of applicants, whilst also implementing a more integrated lead nurturing programme which encompasses the CRM, a more developed and forward thinking marketing strategy and on-going learner journey.

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