Compass Learning Finds Automated Marketing Leads To Greater Volume & Efficiency

By building a lead generation program from the ground up, Compass Learning sought out a way to start fresh with a new lead gen system that would help nurture leads to deliver better results to sales, and also track and measure marketing activities to demonstrate how marketing adds value.

“A lot of marketers face challenges like these,” said Eleanor Bowman, director of marketing communications at Compass Learning. “You feel pressure from sales to deliver great results, but the question is, how do you maintain a handle on everything? How do you measure and manage leads? You can’t just turn over cards from trade shows anymore. You need a way to deliver real value.”

With ease of use a critical factor in choosing a marketing automation tool, Compass selected Marketo’s Lead Management solution. According to Bowman, the company was able to create and launch a nurturing campaign on the first day of implementation, and also synched the system to its Salesforce.com CRM system. “This has allowed us to increase our level of activity,” she said. “We simply didn’t have the bandwidth to support a lead generation and lead nurturing program of this magnitude before. We can do so much more…It’s like having more people on our marketing team.”

LEARNING LARGE
Compass Learning uses cutting-edge technology to deliver personalized learning experiences to over 11 million students in 20,000 schools nationwide. By providing customized technology solutions, Compass Learning strives to help each student reach his or her potential.

Since Compass Learning prides itself on the level of customization its products deliver to students and educators, Bowman said it was equally important to engage potential customers with marketing campaigns that embodied this commitment. Bowman said Compass has used the new solution to create targeted campaigns for different grade levels and prospective buyers, which supports the company’s drip nurturing strategy. “Our market is certainly starting to look for personalization more, and Marketo really allows us to capitalize on that trend,” Bowman said.

The company is now employing trigger-based marketing techniques. Since Compass Learning markets to individual schools and school districts, the new system allows Bowman’s team to create automated follow up for each prospect based on response to initial outreach. For example, if a principal opens a link about learning software towards teens, Compass sends an automatic email that includes information about the benefits of their software for high school students.

As another component of its targeting, Compass is also taking advantage of the landing page templates the Marketo system provides. The Compass marketing team can now create and manage custom landing pages, without bogging down their IT department with requests.

In addition to increasing marketing efforts, Compass Learning can track each instance of activity and its effect on business. Bowman can create quick and easy weekly reports that show where leads are coming from, what’s happening to them, and where they’re going, keeping the marketing team up-to-date on lead status at all times.

Since the implementation, Compass Learning has dramatically increased its marketing activity, without requiring additional staff. She added that the company now has a much better handle on its lead flow, including the ability to look at the day they ran an ad and how many responses it received.

Bowman said the new system has also enabled the alignment of Compass Learning sales and marketing teams, allowing them to work more collaboratively and better predict who marketing will translate into leads.