AD Éducation optimizes application management and the applicant journey with improved, automated processes

A European leader in higher education, the AD Éducation group brings together 21 institutions present in 9 countries. Each year, AD Éducation offers more than 42,000 students programs in design, audiovisual, animation & video games, culture and luxury, music, communication, marketing and digital, management and engineering sciences.

As part of its ambitious growth objectives, the AD Éducation group called on Markentive to optimize its acquisition and application management processes and to implement HubSpot for 7 pilot schools in the group.

The challenges

To support the group's growth and strengthen its conversion performance, AD Éducation identified several structural areas for optimization:

1. Making better use of data

Information on leads, applicants and students was spread across several business tools. This setup left significant room for improvement in centralizing and reconciling data, so that teams could deploy more targeted and effective segmentation and nurturing strategies.

The challenge was therefore to centralize knowledge of prospects and students in a shared tool, fully connected to the core of the group's information system.

2. Unlocking marketing potential

Centralizing data makes it possible to optimize campaign management and audience targeting, based on a unified, consolidated view of group data previously managed independently by each school.

Implementing lead scoring and lead nurturing strategies was therefore a key opportunity to improve opportunity identification, contact pre-qualification and the prioritization of leads to pass on to the sales teams.

3. Optimizing sales processes

The volume of prospects sent to the sales teams was an important growth lever, provided their handling could be optimized.

Automating and structuring prospect and application management processes made it possible to streamline journeys, reduce manual work and ensure faster, more effective lead handling by the sales teams

The solution

To centralize data, give marketing teams everything they need to deploy advanced segmentation and nurturing strategies, and automate part of the sales processes, the AD Éducation group chose to implement HubSpot's Marketing and Sales Hubs, with Markentive's support. A shared instance was deployed, using different brands (7) for the onboarded schools. 

1. A tailored data model: 

The data model architecture was designed to fit the specific needs of a group of schools. It includes in particular:

• The standard contact object, for prospects / applicants / students, as well as their legal guardians

• The standard deal object, used to manage applications. Two application management pipelines were deployed to support the processes of the group's schools. With these pipelines, each application is tracked precisely by the sales rep in charge.

• The standard course object, with the full catalog of programs offered by the group's schools.

• A custom event object, to track prospects', applicants' and students' registration and attendance at the various events organized by the school. 

In addition, custom association labels were deployed between the different objects, for a clear 360° view of the information.

Finally, a synchronization was deployed between HubSpot and the group's student management tool, again to have a complete view of each student, even after admission. 

2. Marketing tools for growth

To optimize the tracking of marketing campaigns, marketing source attribution tracking processes were deployed in the tool, and the acquisition tools (the schools' social media and ad accounts) were connected to HubSpot. Data qualification automations based on predefined criteria were also deployed to better qualify the database (tagging areas of interest, for example).

In addition, the priority lead nurturing scenarios were defined to pre-qualify prospects and help them move forward in their journey.

To better qualify and prioritize prospects, the priority multichannel nurturing scenarios (email, SMS, WhatsApp) were deployed in HubSpot according to lifecycle stages.

3. Optimized sales processes 

To streamline the sales handling of prospects, the rules for handing a prospect over from marketing to sales were reviewed and automated through workflows, as was their assignment based on their areas of interest.

Once the prospect is passed on to sales, the lead status was also standardized and automated so that each sales rep can track their portfolio efficiently. Likewise, application management processes were standardized across schools, through the creation of two pipelines (long programs vs short programs), the management of mandatory information to qualify at each stage and the related automations.

Finally, HubSpot's productivity tools were made available to the teams to make their daily work easier: connecting their inbox and calendar, using meeting links to schedule interviews, etc.

The results 

The implementation laid the foundation for data-driven management, essential to AD Education's continued growth.

1. A smoother funnel:

The automations (workflows) and the lead nurturing strategy aim to reduce the handling time for hot prospects (a reduction target compared with an initial 48 hours) and to shorten the deal (application) cycle compared with the initial 25-30 days.

30% of application meetings are scheduled without any action from sales reps, through HubSpot's meeting scheduling tool. The automations also relieve sales teams of administrative tasks, allowing them to focus on guidance and advising students on their choice of program, which have higher added value.

2. Performance management:

Definition of an optimized marketing attribution model and deployment of detailed sales and marketing dashboards to track performance in real time. The KPIs now tracked in HubSpot include the number of prospects generated by lifecycle stage and lead status, the “prospect to applicant to admitted” conversion rate, and individual sales rep performance.

3. Optimized data:

The project made it possible to clean, migrate and centralize the group's data, providing a clean, structured reference base for deploying HubSpot to the group's other schools.