Making unit economics sustainable for a leading education brand

How we used SEM & SEO interventions on a brand’s e-learning portal to increase revenues by 30X, reduce acquisition cost by 16x, and improve organic traffic by 2.8x over a 9 month period

The Brand

The brand is a well known provider of educational services. It has emerged as a benchmark in the test preparation domain with its excellent performance in various medical and engineering entrance exams held across India. For the last 22 years, it has been producing 1st rankers in various Medical & Engineering Entrance Exams across India. The brand launched its e-learning platform to make education accessible to those who cannot make it to the classroom programs and therefore scale the business.

Challenges

Being an online portal, digital as the primary source of customer acquisition is natural. However, the unit economics of customer acquisition using digital was not working due to a very high cost of acquisition relative to the revenue. The primary challenge, therefore, was to make the unit economics sustainable and then scale.

• High cost per acquisition: 2X spent on digital was generating 1X revenue. Digital marketing campaigns were generating large number of leads but conversions were abysmally low
• Low conversion rate: The volume of customers were also at a scale which did not make the e-learning business vertical attractive.

Objectives

•  Get digital to yield better ROI and then scale the digital channel exponentially

GenY Medium’s Category insights

The category is an high involvement category, therefore multiple touch points, persuasion at different stages of conversion is needed to convert. Multiple, online-offline connects would be needed.

The category required a habit change, which is always difficult and expensive to bring about. Automa-tion would, therefore, be key.

Inducing trial and then attempting to sell the full-fledged product would be important. Therefore ‘sachet-pricing’ would be needed.

The comfort and confidence derived from speaking with a counsellor would be important. Therefore, a connect with a real person immediately before the transaction would help.

Overall strategy

 

Strategy

 

Creativity & innovation

A/B testing was done over a period of three months. Source tracking was put in place to study all the leads and acquired customers. Based on those insights, path ahead was planned.

 

•  Tele calling process: It was found that all the leads were sent to a common tele-calling team creating difficulty in tracking which leads came from digital
• Communication: Various types of ads were tested with focus on various features including larger logo sizes, etc.
• Location: Campaigns categorized to metro and non-metro cities to identify any impact of internet penetration on final conversions
• Channels: Various digital channels (search, display ads, social media) used with multiple targeting options

The experiments helped in identifying the major factors contributing to a higher number of conversions. It was discovered that the channel Click to Call was generating maximum engagement. Consumers found it convenient to directly call the telecalling team if they found a “click to call” button.

Building upon this insight, new campaigns were designed. The ROI from the campaigns witnessed a significant jump. Conversion rates shot up from 0.42% to 5.7%.

Execution

 

Technology

Google Adwords – Advertisements through search and Gmail; display ads for remarketing Zoho CRM – Leads management

Facebook Business Manager – used for Facebook advertisements Google Analytics – Analysing the website traffic

Google Webmaster – Analysing the keywords that the website was ranked for

Virtual Mobile Number – Each “Click to call” linked to respective mobile numbers at the backend

MailChimp Email Automation – Automation for lead nurturing

 

Results

Time taken to act on a lead reduced by 11X. 30X growth in the revenue numbers and 16X decrease in the Cost/Acquisition over a span of 9 months.

Improved rankings of all key coaching related keywords through SEO strategy. The organic traffic increased 2.8X during this period due to improvement in Keyword Rankings.