Case Study

INTO fine-tunes online campaign effectiveness with first degree results

Brief

INTO is a UK-based company providing foundation programmes for international students to bridge the gap between school and university in the UK and the USA. The company relies heavily on its website - www.into.uk.com – to support the sales & marketing activities of its network of 600 agents and 40 full time staff in 20 countries promoting its services to young people all around the world. One of INTO’s main objectives was that the website had to serve as the main sales tool to fuel their next phase of growth. The brief demanded that the new website should contain features and functionality that would allow them to connect with 17-21 year olds from backgrounds as diverse as South America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, through to Central Asia, China and the Far East irrespective of their culture or native tongue. This also meant that INTO needed a way of testing the appeal of new website content in different geographical regions and adapting it quickly according to the response.

Strategy

In order to achieve key objectives INTO had to bring its site right up to date. They began searching for a state-of-the-art Web Content Management System (CMS) that could provide ready access to the latest social media tools as well as comprehensive analysis features to help them measure the effectiveness of various marketing campaigns. INTO eventually selected Web CMS vendor Sitecore – a leading provider of .NET CMS software - along with their Solutions Partner 3Sixty and asked them to build a site that is rich in features and functionality. The ability of Sitecore’s advanced Web CMS to simplify and unify content changes coupled with Sitecore Online Marketing Suite (OMS)’s rich array of Web marketing and analytics features would help INTO increase efficiency, improve performance and achieve substantial cost savings.

A key part of the strategy was to ensure INTO’s sales & marketing team had much greater access to tools such as social media, photography and video to help them engage successfully with young people around the world. The system also had to deliver substantially improved ease of use and performance for partners and employees. This meant developing a more unified platform that could allow non-technical people to update content without having to waiting for the design team.

Perhaps just as importantly INTO wanted to be able to quickly extract information from the new site about visitor behaviour and responses to marketing activities. The web analytics and marketing automation capabilities of Sitecore OMS were harnessed in order to allow INTO to compare the effectiveness of its marketing campaigns in different regions. Website content is displayed in different ways according to the visitor’s home country to test variations in its appeal between one geographical region and another. The system automatically changes content on the fly to suit the local language and culture.

Execution

INTO’s new site was developed using Sitecore’s advanced Microsoft .Net-based Web CMS platform. Sitecore’s feature-rich and easy to use structure keeps underlying presentation quite separate from content allowing non-technical staff to maintain a robust, up-to-date website without having to learn the underlying technology skills.

In addition Sitecore’s comprehensive range of pre-built connectors and data abstraction layers helped improve integration and workflow issues between the various parts of the site. One of the key elements to be integrated was a central MySQL database used for storing applicant data and course availability information.

Next, Sitecore OMS was deployed to provide INTO’s sales & marketing teams with web analytics, visitor profiling, segmentation analysis, real-time personalisation and campaign management within a single, easy-to-use applications’ suite so that they could test and measure the effectiveness of their online marketing initiatives.

The integration of Sitecore OMS allows INTO to personalise content on the fly, track behavioural changes and profile individual visitors as they continually seek to test and fine tune the effectiveness of marketing ideas. INTO uses the Akamai high speed delivery network to ensure content is rapidly updated and differentiated in different parts of the world. Multi-variant testing of this content helps the marketing teams measure its impact and make continual adjustments to maximise student engagement levels. The site also makes use of off-the-shelf applications such as Newsweaver for creating newsletters and social media tools such as bookmarking, RSS, blogs, podcasts, twitter feeds along with improved visual content through increased use of photography and video to make it as student-friendly as possible.

INTO also makes full use of Sitecore’s multi-language support capability to present content in the local language. It was central to INTO’s strategy that site content should be readily understood by young people all over the world even though their first language may not be English.

Result

The new website has enabled INTO to pass all of its targets with flying colours. Website statistics since the new website went live provide demonstrable proof that INTO is succeeding in connecting more closely with young people across the world. Within just three weeks of launch traffic to the site increased by 300 percent – equivalent to more than 1,000 student enquiries out of which over 20 percent converted into course applications. More than the old system had delivered in the previous 12 months. In its first month the site delivered 250,000 page requests to over 50,000 users reducing the cost of each student recruited by 50 percent in the process.