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Every marketer dreams of linking a dollar spent to a customer acquired. That dream is no longer a far-fetched ideal. Open Colleges, Australia’s leading online educator, is proof that if you put the right infrastructure in place, you can optimize your marketing engine for maximum revenue.
Milton Smith, Head of Websites at Open Colleges, shared a fantastic business app success story about how they’ve leveraged Salesforce and Bizible to build a very intelligent bridge between sales and marketing—increasing understanding of prospects, close rates, and lifetime customer value. Bizible is a marketing analytics app available on the AppExchange leveraged by hundreds of Salesforce customers.
“If you plan to grow at Internet speed, make sure your systems are built for constant iteration. Testing and optimizing our web presence, digital marketing, and sales engagement systems is like painting the harbor bridge… something we do over and over as a discipline, not a project. This is the driving force that led to our decision to shift to the Salesforce1 platform and partner apps like Bizible–it gives us scalable infrastructure to do things like double student numbers.”
Open Colleges has a rich 100-year history in education, and they’re definitely on the technology fast track–with 3X growth year over year for the past three years. This growth has landed Open Colleges on the prestigious Deloitte Technology Fast 50 in the Asia-Pacific and Business Review Weekly’s Fast 100 Companies lists.
The company’s direct sales team, a complex group that is structured along faculty lines, has doubled each year since 2011, and they progressively rely on inbound marketing leads to succeed. To support their rapidly growing business, Open Colleges switched over to Salesforce two years ago. “Salesforce now drives absolutely everything we do, from inquiry management and student records to ERP and reporting,” says Milton.
“Understand the potential lifetime value of your customer and optimize for total revenue. You have to look beyond the point of sale and think about how your customer engages with your content and what will make them stick around.”
When Milton joined Open Colleges over a year ago, bringing extensive digital savvy from Orbitz and other online companies, he was tasked with streamlining web and marketing systems. At the time, the marketing team was using several different tools to measure marketing effectiveness. While each tool provided important insight, “we had to make marketing spend decisions based on approximations,” says Milton. “We didn’t have visibility into conversion to enrollment rate through the career contact center, and we couldn’t see the cost of acquiring customers.”
Milton set out to find a business app that would integrate with Salesforce to combine marketing and sales data, and he discovered Bizible with the help of a former colleague who knew about AppExchange apps. “The integration into Salesforce was remarkably simple, and suddenly we were able to see exact lead source, campaign, keyword, user history and session history,” says Milton.
With Bizible, Open Colleges now has the ability to see across paid and organic search to filter and ascribe value to know what brings people to the site. Bizible also provides an understanding of visitors’ search history and the average number of times people visited before completing a lead form. “There are things that lead people to drop out or cancel, and we now are able to prove our theories based on online behavior. Certain keywords are showing themselves to be better lifetime revenue generators.” Through better insights and better targeting, Open Colleges has been able to “grow inquiry volume by over 100% while reducing cost per lead acquisition by 15%.”
“See the full picture of your marketing activity by tying everything you spend back to revenue. If you can estimate the total return, you can decide to stay the course, up-spend, or pull back spend. It’s extremely valuable.”
Once prospects or students engage with a keyword or campaign, Open Colleges can view their online profile (including what channel they came from) and match them with the best advisor to help them find the right course.
Since implementing Bizible nine months ago, Open Colleges has been able to cut back on underperforming campaigns and spend more on the ones that work well. “We can now project the potential ROI,” says Milton. “Bizible has given us not only visibility into historic data, but also the ability to project out.”
Open Colleges is currently running a classic digital marketing mix, including hundreds of thousands of keywords through AdWords, and continually optimizing based on analytics from Bizible. When asked if he had any last pieces of advice for his peers, Milton exclaims, “Do it now; don’t die wondering if your marketing spend is efficient! The support we receive from the Bizible team is outstanding.”
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