About The Independent Institute of Education
The Independent Institute of Education (The IIE Pty Ltd.) is a private higher education institution and ADvTECH (Ltd) subsidiary. The Institute operates across 20 sites and offers more than 70 registered and accredited higher education programmes, ranging from Higher Certificates to Masters Level on its Varsity College, Vega, Rosebank College, and DSSA campuses.
The Business Challenge
The IIE needed to timeously and effectively communicate to prospective students using email and SMS, with the goal of converting them from prospective leads to applicants and then to registered students.
“We were looking to better manage and build on our prospective student relationships as part of our sales and marketing business processes. Prospective students were identified and captured as leads into our MS CRM system and would be automatically updated according to which stage of the sales cycle they were in from lead, to application, to registration. The challenge was around introducing email and SMS marketing campaigns aimed at these conversion stages”
– Michele Du Rand, IIE Systems Innovations Manager
The Business Solution
Everlytic’s Drip Campaign feature (which has since been developed into a more advanced automation feature called Workflows) was the perfect solution for the Institute. Drip campaigns typically consist of a series of emails and SMSs sent to contacts over a period of time. These sequential messages are triggered by recipient behaviour. Everlytics MS CRM integration also means that the solution is seamless and automatically sends messages to new leads, applicants, or registered students as IIE updates their MS CRM system.
How The IIE uses Drip Campaigns (aka Workflows)
As part of their lead nurturing, the Institute set up different messages to go to prospective students in various stages of the sales onboarding cycle:
| Student Sales Stage | Drip Campaign |
|---|---|
| Lead status set as new | Send message 'A' to new contacts in this stage |
| Consultation with student advisor completed | Send message 'B' to new contacts in this stage |
| Application payment is pending | Send message 'C' to new contacts in this stage |
| Application payment is paid | Send message 'D' to new contacts in this stage |
| Upon conditional Registration | Send message 'E' to new contacts in this stage |
Drip Campaign Sales Stages
| Lead status set as new | Consultation with student advisor completed | Application payment is pending | Application payment is paid | Upon conditional Registration |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Send message 'A' to new contacts in this stage | Send message 'B' to new contacts in this stage | Send message 'C' to new contacts in this stage | Send message 'D' to new contacts in this stage | Send message 'E' to new contacts in this stage |
“We had not done anything like this before and didn’t have an existing solution, so this was a completely new initiative for The IIE. We researched a couple of solutions and also looked at overseas applications like Act-On, but decided on a reputable South African provider both for cost as well as for regulatory reasons regarding email.”
– Michele Du Rand, IIE Systems Innovations Manager
The Results
Stakeholders have sent more than 306 000 emails and 2.5 million SMSs since the start of the sales and marketing process in 2015 for the student registration year of 2016. The IIE tertiary users are heavily invested in the solution simply because it works, as evidenced by their results.
“A number of factors influenced our 20% growth in student numbers in 2016, including improved sales and marketing processes, revised website designs, and integrations with our own APIs and applications. However, we have definitely seen an improved successful sales and marketing cycle this year after integrating our MS CRM system with Everlytic. Using the drip campaigns has made all the difference in communicating more effectively and timeously with our prospective students”
– Michele Du Rand, IIE Systems Innovations Manager
The IIE Benefits
Synchronised and automated marketing are the pillars of time saving, efficient, and accurate communication. By synching their MS CRM data with Everlytic, the manual drain on sales and marketing teams has been reduced and their campaigns optimised.
Using Everlytic has allowed the Institute to:
- Send automated emails and SMSs to prospective students as part of conversion marketing.
- Use effective campaign templates to standardise communication to prospective students.
- Synchronise data between Everlytic and their CRM for accurate, optimised communication.
- Generate user-friendly, comprehensive reports for measuring campaign success.
- Ensure compliance with digital marketing regulations.
“We’ve thoroughly benefited from working with Everlytic’s developer integrations team right down to the readily available support from their client services. Support and training from Everlytic was exceptional and they are continuously helpful. It’s worked so well that Thandiwe Mkalipi (The IIE Marketing BPA) is currently working with Everlytic to implement a similar automated communication process from a Graduate/Alumni perspective, and integrating MS CRM system with Everlytic’s one-on-one transactional SMSs”
– Michele Du Rand, IIE Systems Innovations Manager
