305 new leads. 45% past the goal.
A vocational college whose conversion rate was suffering as COVID-19 arrived. It had three months to turn it around.
- Client
- Project lead
Trav WhiteFounder and Head of AI Engineering
- Industry
- Vocational education and training
- Platform
- HubSpot, Google Ads and Facebook
- Scope
- Campaigns, pipeline, chatbot, nurture
- When
- Three months, from May 2020
01 The briefA three month lead generation campaign, a sales pipeline automated to handle the routine emails, a chatbot for visitors with questions, and lead nurturing to lift conversion.
Leads going cold, and no time to wait.
Sarina Russo Institute is a Registered Training Organisation, a provider accredited to deliver nationally recognised qualifications. It teaches vocational and English language courses to Australian and international students.
Its conversion rate was suffering, and in May 2020 COVID-19 was about to hit education providers along with everyone else. SRI wanted a marketing, sales and service setup that would carry it through, and it wanted it quickly.
It had stayed that way because there was little to build on. Past advertising had run as CandleFox campaigns, so there was no historical data to plan paid media from, and the sales team was sending and answering emails by hand.
Where it started, May 2020
- 10,000+ students a year. Australian and international, in vocational and English courses.
- No ad history. Nothing from past campaigns to shape the paid strategy.
- 1,000 old leads. Sitting in the CRM, not yet worked.
Three months, built in stages.
The project was split so each stage set up the next, and so SRI could see wins early, which mattered in an uncertain market. A shortened HubSpot onboarding and a basic sales pipeline came first.
Paid media and a cold leads campaign
Reaching new students, and waking up old ones.
- Google Ads and Facebook Ads, with remarketing
- A cold leads campaign to 1,000 old leads in the CRM
- Emails about the growing need for essential workers
- A HubSpot landing page, then used as the template for later campaigns
An automated sales pipeline
Follow-up that happens without anyone sending it.
- The student journey mapped in Whimsical
- Automated sequences and follow-up at each stage
- The actions the sales team takes to close, stage by stage
- A qualifying chatbot, written for each key web page
Lead nurturing
Keeping new leads engaged while they decide.
- Built with the SRI team
- Emails timed to where a lead is in their thinking
- Each one answers a question that might stop them enrolling
The chatbot, in one line. It collects a visitor's details and then hands the conversation to a person in real time, so a question gets an answer even when no rep is already online.
Onboarding came before any campaign. We ran a shortened version of our usual HubSpot onboarding, so the SRI team would be comfortable working inside HubSpot by the time the automations were switched on, and set up a basic sales pipeline for the later stages to build on.
Old leads before new ones. With no ad history to plan from, the first campaign went to the 1,000 old leads already in the CRM. As COVID-19 took hold, those emails spoke to the growing need for essential workers, and asked each lead to make a change for their own career and for everyone else's sake.
The landing page carried the ads. Whether the campaign worked came down to the page the ads pointed at, so it was written to match the ad and designed to keep a visitor on the offer, with one clear path to enquire. It was then used as the template for the campaigns that followed.
Then the pipeline, the chatbot and the nurture. In the following month the basic pipeline was extended with automated sequences and follow-up. The chatbot gave a visitor a second way to convert, and the nurture sequence kept each new lead engaged while they made up their mind.
Every email, planned before it was built.
The sales pipeline was mapped in Whimsical first, so SRI could see each step, and its timing, before any of it went into HubSpot.
Follow-up that runs without anyone sending it.
Old leads sitting untouched in the CRM?
Four goals. Here is what came of them.
What Sarina Russo Institute asked for before the project started, and where it stood three months later.
Goal 01
A sales pipeline that handles the basic emails
We built a HubSpot pipeline, mapped in Whimsical first, with automated sequences and follow-up at every stage.
Every stage
has its own automated emails, so routine ones are no longer sent and answered by hand. The student journey is laid out stage by stage, from the first attempts to connect, through enrolment, to the census date.
Goal 02
A three month lead generation campaign
We ran Google Ads and Facebook Ads with remarketing and a cold leads campaign to 1,000 old leads, and built a landing page to be reused.
305+
new leads, over 45% past the goal. That is 95 more than planned across the three months, with no past ad history to plan from.
Goal 03
Lead nurturing to lift conversion
We built a sequence with the SRI team, each email answering a question that might stop a student enrolling.
Less time
from the team with each new student. New leads get the nurture sequence while they make up their mind, each email answering a question that might stop them enrolling.
Goal 04
A chatbot, and Facebook Messenger integration
We built a qualifying chatbot written for each key page, which takes the visitor’s details and hands the conversation to a person.
Every key page
can take a visitor’s questions, even when no rep is online. It gives a visitor a second way to enquire, beside the landing page the ads point at.
Put together, SRI came out of three months in an uncertain market with 95 more leads than it planned for, and a sales process that no longer runs on emails sent by hand.
The pipeline, the nurture sequence and the campaign template are SRI’s to keep running, so it can keep generating leads from them after the three months.
“Finding tech consultancies FOR your marketing solutions is easy. Finding marketing solutions FROM your tech consultancies is not. These guys are MarTech experts that execute on your complete customer journey. Wouldn’t have it any other way nowadays.”
Andrew Pennisi
Sarina Russo Institute
Who ran it
Trav WhiteFounder and Head of AI Engineering
Led the HubSpot onboarding, the paid campaigns, the automated pipeline, the chatbot and the nurture sequence.
HubSpot Certified Trainer, 9 HubSpot Impact Awards, Founded Neighbourhood in 2015
Still answering every enquiry by hand?
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