Overview

IDP Connect helps students and parents navigate the requirements needed to evaluate, choose, and attend a university. Email marketing plays a critical role in keeping their audiences informed. But with the focus primarily on social channels, IDP Connect had been failing to deliver the expected volume of emails for years, so increasing the number of emails sent per month was a priority for the marketing automation team under the direction of Andreyna Rodriguez, Marketing Automation Manager, at IDP Connect.

• 5% increase in open rates year-over-year
• 4% increase in click-to-open rates year-over-year
• 23% increase in web sessions year-over-year

Challenges

A new focus on marketing automation required a rethink and update as to how the company would use Acoustic Marketing Cloud.

According to Rodriguez, “We wanted to bring a multichannel approach to our marketing strategy, so we needed to reconfigure the initial setup of the database. We also wanted to generate more traffic and improve the engagement with our audiences to better understand their journey and whether we were providing the right information and services for them.”

The team at IDP Connect also needed to consolidate several tools into one platform. “We needed a user-friendly platform to deliver email, SMS, and app push notifications. It was important for us to have everything in one place. We had struggled for a long time because we were using many different platforms. We wanted a centralised platform to enhance our reporting capabilities and make it easier for us to improve our audiences’ journey and target the right audience with the right message in the right channel.”

Another big challenge was giving its team of digital marketers more autonomy. Rodriguez explains, “We wanted to enable our team to create templates along with their monthly newsletter quickly and that wasn’t happening. We were reliant on developers and designers, and this is where Multichannel Composer changed our lives. It massively reduced the timeline of that process.”

Solution

Acoustic Marketing Cloud allows IDP Connect to target students, parents, and universities around the world through the most effective channels.

“Our main priority at the start was finding a user-friendly marketing platform that could deliver our email campaigns, SMS strategies, and app notifications in one centralised place. With Acoustic, all of our marketing capabilities are in a single platform for better targeting on the right channels—as well as simplifying the reporting and implementation process,” says Rodriguez.

In the past year, IDP Connect has created over 100 new templates with Acoustic’s Multichannel Composer without the need of intervention or support from their developer team, simplifying and speeding up the process. “Acoustic’s Multichannel Composer has been amazing. With more automation and design elements saved as blocks, we have revamped transactional emails and completely changed the look and feel of our newsletters all because we have the time to do it. The ability to align our templates more with industry trends, gifs, appealing visuals, and rounded corners have made the look/feel more attractive and on-brand.”

Results

With ongoing support from marketing automation specialists Purple Square, IDP Connect has been able to maximise its technology investment in Acoustic Marketing Cloud. Purple Square works together with Acoustic to advise and help IDP Connect shape their marketing technology platform to ensure it delivers and can support its evolving customer journey roadmap.

IDP Connect’s marketing content now has a fresh, more professional look and feel that is aligned with the latest education industry trends. Since the revamp, its UK portfolio has seen an average increase of 5% in term of open rates and 4% increase in terms of click-to-open rates. Sessions for its key website also increased by 23%. In the last year, some of its international sites have also experienced significant changes in the level of engagement, conversions, and traffic.

“The combined effort of Purple Square, our developers, and Acoustic made what could have been a complicated project a much easier process,” says Rodriguez. This ongoing collaborative process and flexibility of the technology are both key reasons the marketing automation team continues to work with Acoustic and Purple Square: “They have considered our feedback in different areas such as reporting, template production, survey, SMS, and app integration and we value when our needs are taken seriously.”

About

IDP Connect is a global name in higher education. Working primarily with students and their parents, IDP Connect provides the tools and information students need to navigate the requirements and paperwork of the application process for higher education and study abroad programmes.