Marketing Automation for the CofC One Year MBA Program

We’re putting the finishing touches on the launch of SharpSpring – a marketing automation and CRM platform – for the College of Charleston one-year MBA program.

As we continue to grow their recruiting pipeline through a mix of digital and traditional marketing tactics, we wanted to focus our efforts this year on what happens after a student becomes a lead. Our goals for implementing SharpSpring were to:

Free up time for a small team.
By automating responses to new leads, and triggering notifications to the appropriate internal contacts, their internal recruiting team can focus their efforts on more high value, personal communications. SharpSpring make it easy to create trigger-based emails and notifications based on visits to certain pages, requesting brochures, or even changing a specific field (like GMAT score or webinar attendance) in the CRM.

Better understand the prospect pipeline.
SharpSpring has a beautiful, visual way to look at the prospect pipeline. You can customize each stage and get a real-time view of where each student is in the process. You can even automate their progress through the pipeline based on certain events. The CofC team has aggressive goals for recruitment this year, and this will help keep everyone accountable.

Prove marketing ROI.
In the past, we used Google Analytics to attribute web leads to a specific marketing channel, but that information wasn’t passed into any sales database and tracked through the lifetime of the lead – critical information to determine the true ROI of our marketing efforts. With SharpSpring’s easy to use campaign assignments and built in contact relationship management (CRM), we can now look at the life of a lead, and determine which marketing channels produced the best ROI.

Stay top of mind during a long sales cycle.
We wanted to make sure that we had the platform in place to reach prospective students throughout a long decision-making process. While personal communications from advisors and program leaders are critical to help students make a decision, we felt the CofC team could add in some traditional and automated email marketing to the mix. Over the course of several brainstorming sessions, we mapped out the best place for email to be used, wrote draft copy, married them to the brand design, and then implemented in SharpSpring (which has a built-in email system integrated with its CRM and marketing automation tools).

It’s early in the process, but we’re excited about what we’ve seen so far. Give us a shout if you’re interested in a demo of SharpSpring or just to learn more about marketing automation.