University Decreases Marketing Expenses by 49%

The Challenge

An Online University was buying leads from several different sources and seeking to understand the quality of each lead. They wanted to focus their marketing group’s time and effort on leads most likely to enroll in their university. Using Versium’s predictive lead score, they were able to prioritize their outbound sales efforts on high scoring leads, while nurturing low scoring leads through less expensive email drip campaigns. This resulted in a substantial improvement to their Marketing ROI.

The university was generating approximately 30,000 new leads every month from multiple sources, but did not have insight into how to prioritize follow-up with these leads. Without visibility into the quality of each lead, all leads were treated equally, marketing dollars were wasted, and many highly qualified applicants were not contacted in a timely manner.

The Goal

Reduce marketing expenses while maintaining their rate of enrollment.

What Versium Did

• Using Versium’s easy-to-use self-serve online service, the university uploaded a historical list of prospective students who completed a lead form and enrolled, plus a list of prospective students who completed a lead form and did not enroll.
• The lists were automatically blended with the university’s data to provide deep insights into the preferences and behaviors of the enrollees and non-converters. Appending LifeData added more than 1,000 data elements to each of the university’s records, providing powerful signals to the predictive model.
  
• Versium generated a predictive model using machine learning in a matter of hours. The process was fully automated and did not require any data science expertise from the university.
  
• Versium’s powerful predictive modeling dashboard allowed the university to upload and score their leads, and immediately view the quality of those leads in terms of expected conversion rate and quantity of students likely to enroll.
  

The ROI Impact

The university captured 98% of their historical enrollments amount by marketing to only the top 51% of their highest scoring leads.

The university’s custom Predictive Lead Score enabled them to dramatically reduce marketing costs and prioritize admission staff’s time to focus on contacting high-quality applicants before their competition. Versium’s API access also enabled the university to score leads in real time.