Marketo Award and Big Conversion Gains for Client Algonquin College

DemandLab client Algonquin College has a lot to celebrate this month, including a major marketing award.

DemandLab and Algonquin College developed a Marketo email engagement campaign that significantly increased conversion, and this month, the campaign was recognized with The Engager Award for 2014 at the Marketo Marketing Nation Summit.

The win was especially sweet for Algonquin College because of the challenges they face as education marketers. Those challenges include a prospect list made up of young, unsophisticated buyers, a sales cycle that can stretch to 12 or more months, and a product that’s intangible and very expensive.

Using Marketo’s lead management tool, we were able to help Algonquin College optimize a complex lead lifecycle that combined both B2C and B2B marketing elements.

Like any B2B marketer, Algonquin needed to support a “big-ticket” product with a sales cycle that could take a single day or stretch to over a year. That required a constant flow of relevant, influential and branded content throughout a long, intensive customer journey. But as a publicly funded academic institution, the college had minimal financial and staff resources, so they needed to scale their engagement efforts to B2C proportions.

We used Marketo’s automated tools to send personalized, highly targeted emails; rapidly create landing pages; automate lead score assignment and prioritization, and track lead-specific web behavior. As a result, we were able to develop a targeted, automated process that engaged prospective students on a more personal level and offered meaningful, timely content that is mapped to their pain points and decision criteria.

Most importantly, the campaigns used automation to deliver highly individualized engagement experiences in a cost-effective way. Instead of having to add staff to meet campaign requirements, Algonquin College has actually been able to reduce staff and re-assign them to higher priority projects.

Creating an automated campaign in Marketo to manage this complex lead lifecycle paid off: year over year, Algonquin saw a 5% increase in overall lead generation, a 104% increase in emails sent, a 22% increase in return visits, and a 135% increase in prospects converted to applicants.

Stay tuned for a case study that takes a deeper dive into the details of this highly successful engagement campaign.

In the meantime, you can find the lead lifecycle management presentation here that Eric Hollebone of Algonquin College gave with Rhoan Morgan at this year’s Marketo Summit.