IMT-CDL Increases Admission Rates with LeadSquared’s Enrollment Automation

LeadSquared has helped us A/B test certain marketing aspects, which keeps us informed at each step. Tracking conversion ratios from campaigns had been a humongous task previously, but with the introduction of LeadSquared’s analytics, there has been complete transparency on the entire admissions journey. Overall, it is a must-have tool for admission teams.

Rakesh KumarHead of Marketing, IMT-CDL

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ZERO

LEAD LEAKAGE

INCREASED

ENROLLMENTS

360º

APPLICANT VIEW

REDUCED

STUDENT RESPONSE TIME

Loves LeadSquared for:

100% Lead Capture
Complete Student Admission Journey Tracking
Detailed Reporting Capabilities
Managing Student Drop-Offs & Nurturing Leads
Easy Follow-ups – Zero Missed Opportunities

ZERO

LEAD LEAKAGE

INCREASED

ENROLLMENTS

360º

APPLICANT VIEW

REDUCED

STUDENT RESPONSE TIME

Institute of Management Technology, Centre for Distance Learning, Ghaziabad is part of the prestigious IMT group, one of the oldest & most reputed institutions in management space through open and distance learning. While IMT provides the flexibility of ODL, it offers the quality of education at par with PGDM programs offered by top-ranking business institutions.

IMT CDL, a pioneer in distance learning management programs offers access to a variety of management programs. It focuses on the diverse professional needs of the aspirants in the 21st century. Located in a lush green 6-acre campus at Ghaziabad, IMT CDL boasts of world-class infrastructure. It consists of a fully networked wi-fi campus and well-equipped virtual classrooms that enable 24 x 7 learning. IMT CDL is on a mission to serve society through excellence and leadership in management education, research & consultancy.

Challenges

India currently has 200 million school-going students, and 36.6 million students graduate YOY. It has the 3rd largest higher education sector globally. Hence, generating enough student inquiries is not an issue. Converting casual inquiries into admissions is what is more of a challenge. This is what IMT CDL came to us with. Managing student inquiries efficiently is the key metric to any successful admissions process. Therefore, IMT CDL needed a high level of visibility across the institution to build a seamless admission process. But without lead management in place, the institute was facing multiple challenges such as:

1. Lead leakage worry due to manual lead capture on excel sheets

They wanted to simplify the lead capturing process, but lead leakage was a significant issue.

2. Lack of ready-to-use communication templates, resulting in inconsistent nurturing process

Little or no insights on the performance of team members or lead sources.

3. Lead Management and Tracking

Maintaining excel sheets for admissions led to improper follow-ups with the students.

4. Tracking student intent was absent

Making it difficult for admission counselors to personalize communication.

5. Insufficient Marketing Analytics

No analytics to track profitable lead sources and thus improper marketing budget allocation.

Solutions Provided by LeadSquared’s Enrollment Automation

Improving the targeting of the marketing campaigns with the help of analytics, and ensuring lead capture from all sources, managing, and tracking the student intent was the main objective of the project.

“When we think to expand our horizon globally, traditional ways of micro-management & manual interventions can just work to an extent, but beyond that, when we start optimizing and scaling up, it requires a lot of innovative thought and an enrollment automation such as LeadSquared.” LeadSquared is ever-evolving and innovating on bringing efficiency to the admission process and backed by a proactive team.”

Rakesh KumarHead of Marketing, IMT-CDL

LeadSquared provided the following solutions to achieve this objective:

They were looking for a completely digital automation solution to capture, qualify, and assign leads to the right team members.

1. Lead Capture Automation:

LeadSquared supports capturing all your leads from online & offline channels. such as publisher panels, website, micro-site on landing pages, social media, Google Ads, events, phone calls, and even traditional on-the-ground campaigns. LeadSquared’s enrollment automation helps IMT CDL acquire leads that directly land on the website and the ones filled by the admissions representatives and automatically distributes them among admission coordinators.

Responsive website landing page and contact forms helped them optimize conversions for all courses across different devices.

The student drop-off journey is managed by capturing essential signals such as which page they dropped off from and accordingly notify the admission counselors to take the right action. Advanced analytics helps identify the best campaigns hence making the marketing budget reallocation easier.

2. Lead Nurturing:

We had little control over communication templates & hence, either there were delays in getting back or inconsistent templates were used to nurture students.

LeadSquared’s enrollment automation helps you save the emails you design once as templates and reuse them whenever you want. Therefore, saving your team the effort to redesign emails when similar campaigns need to be set up. Such Templates can be automated as well based on the need. This also goes true for SMS or WhatsApp communication.

3. Out-of-box Integrations:

LeadSquared’s integration with multiple connectors or third-party applications such as Facebook helped the IMT CDL team capture student inquiries from numerous sources and web pages.

The call-center integration with telephony. Systems ensure, no student inquiry is missed, and the prospective students are catered to on time. LeadSquared integrates with telephony systems such as Knowlarity, Ozonetel, and many more.

4. De-duplication and Distribution Automation:

Lead duplication is a primary concern for most educational organizations. Duplicate leads reduce the productivity of your team members. When students are interested in multiple courses, it creates various student inquiries in the system. IMT was facing the issue of numerous lead course inquiries.

LeadSquared’s enrollment automation helped counter the massive problem of data duplication right at the source (at the point of filling the student inquiry). The de-duplication logic works based on unique field authentication (phone number, email id) or key fields such as program name and checks if the same inquiry has been made within a specific period.

The unique student inquiries are distributed among the admissions team based on different selection criteria – including the availability of resources, the number of leads with a resource, past performance, student location, or simply in a round-robin fashion. This immensely helped IMT CDL in improving their response rates.

5. Student Enrollment and Admissions Pipeline View:

“We could manage all our student life cycles centrally with varied access to the different teams – counselors, team leads, and others. Thus ensuring complete visibility into all the applicants’ profiles, activities, and progress and a holistic view of admission funnel progress. With the help of LeadSquared’s enrollment automation, admission team members can understand the lead funnel process better than before. The leads move through various stages such as prospect, opportunity, and student, resulting in better lead management.”

Rakesh KumarHead of Marketing, IMT-CDL

6. Complete Admission Reports:

7. Productivity Reports:

There wasn’t much scope for taking corrective measures. It was challenging to track productive lead sources, leading to little or no scope for optimizing marketing practices. And it was nearly impossible to forecast realistic admission numbers. With LeadSquared, we got in-depth analytics for every aspect of our admissions process. Application completion, drop-off rates, counselor efficiency, and much more.

With the help of LeadSquared, the Admission Heads can track all agent activities and profitable lead sources in real-time. As a result, this has been a great resource while working remotely. Additionally, it is possible to deep dive into the performance metrics using 150+ marketing and admissions reports.

Admission counselors can track metrics such as – Number of calls made, Overdue tasks, Student activity on the website, daily closures, inquiry to admission ratio for them, overall efficiency, and much more.

Marketing users can track metrics such as the number of inbound leads, leads from various sources, quality of leads from multiple integrators, campaign efficiency, quality of website content based on drop-offs, and more.

Benchmarks:

“We were able to analyze each aspect of our lead to admission lifecycle and create benchmarks for lead maturity milestones based on lead sources. This helped to identify the gaps for every team member and improvise their effort. Information about source-wise conversion rates helped us optimize our marketing efforts and allocate marketing budgets.”

Rakesh KumarHead of Marketing, IMT-CDL

Results

IMT CDL team has been able to see significant results right from the beginning of the project. By utilizing a digital student onboarding journey, IMT CDL reduced drop-offs, improved student engagement, and increased their student inquiry to enrollment rate. LeadSquared automation helped them reduce manual work wherever possible, ensuring a more efficient and seamless admissions process. With the introduction of LeadSquared and continuous optimization of the product, they have experienced remarkable improvement in their admission process. Additionally, they are working to improve the enrollment and conversion rate by bringing other parameters such as lead de-duplication logic, communication automation, follow-up prioritization based on student activity, and much more.

LeadSquared’s seamless admission process automation has helped IMT CDL create a benchmark for our admissions and marketing teams and has also streamlined the admissions process. We have witnessed a higher inquiry to enrollment ratio. Tracking student behavior has helped nurture them and has been very helpful in reducing drop-offs.