A lifecycle program spanning webinars, brand launch and beyond

No two students take the same path to enrolment, and university purchase windows rarely match when customers are actually ready. Universities are inherently complex organisations, and Charles Sturt’s technology stack spanned teams with different platforms, data practices and expectations. The conversion experience needed redesigning around the student, from enquiry through to orientation, including proactively catching applicants at risk of deferring or declining.

The webinar series set the pattern: lead generation and management through an omni-channel campaign across Marketo, social, web and content, reaching thousands of prospective students with 36 email variants, 6 SMS sends, 7 landing pages and 6 webinar projects, all integrated with GoToWebinar for a seamless experience with live analytics. From there, a technical audit and cross-team workshops designed the customer-first future state: five elastic nurture programs keyed to CRM stages, moving leads automatically as their status changed, however long conversion took.

The 2019 brand relaunch leaned on the platform: a branded campaign and landing page with a three-week nurture and three event-based sub-campaigns, delivered to over 22,000 contacts under strict deadlines. For attrition risk, behavioural triggers alerted the call centre when an offer-holder visited the deferral page without deferring, with Marketo sales alerts, a live dashboard, and data flowing back to the CRM automatically.

The webinar series beat industry benchmarks on open and click-through rates, with 23% of registrations going on to apply; the career expo campaigns added over 230 new tracking contacts with 6% registering for an event; and the brand launch exceeded forecast on both open and click-through. Deeper still, marketing automation now runs across the business units of the student recruitment process, from the call centre’s at-risk dashboard to dynamic ad audiences built from Marketo data.