ELS Malaysia

Client Story

At A Glance

113%

Increase in Student Enrollments

16%

Increase in Average Monthly Revenue

Client Testimonial

Backstory

ELS Malaysia is a franchise of the world-renowned US-based ELS Language Centres. They have close to three decades in the country and offer a model of English learning study locations in Subang Jaya, Johor Bahru and at the Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM).

Their programs include advanced writing programme (secondary school), Certified Intensive English Programme (CIEP), International English Language Testing System (IELTS) Test Preparation and Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) for university students.

They also offer professional English learning courses for teachers (TESOL Certificate Course) and corporates (Communicative English Programme (CEP) and Company Training: English for Specific Purposes (ESP).

The premier English training programmes have won ELS Malaysia several awards and accolades. They include the prestigious 5-Star Quality Standards Award (SKIPS) from the Ministry of Education. In the World Branding Awards, the institution also won the “Brand of the Year” in English Education.

The Challenge:
Poor conversation Rate

The Challenge:
Poor conversation Rate

ELS Malaysia primarily uses a website as the main lead generation tool. They have a simple sales process on the platform where they provide comprehensive information about their programmes.

The idea is to captivate the interest of students visiting the site and drive them into the sales funnel through a contact form. The institution has also invested in live-chat as part of lead generation, and students can find more about programmes offered through this feature.

While this seems like a foolproof strategy, ELS Malaysia continued suffering poor conversion rates. As a premier English training programme, the poor conversion rates remained a great concern. With all the investment in sales and marketing, there was little to show in the form of quantifiable ROI.

In one conversion survey, the number of potential students inquiring about ELS programs stood at 185. However, the enrolment rate was poor, as only 11 students enrolled.

At one point, the conversion rate was as low as 5%. For such a large institution, some drastic action was overdue to reverse the decline.

Strategy

ELS Malaysia contracted us to reverse the fortunes of their marketing campaign. Our lead generation team got to work and opted for the HubSpot suite of marketing and sales tools for the project.

Below are the steps we undertook using HubSpot Workflows to rejuvenate the client’s marketing efforts and boost student enrolment levels.

Our team undertook the following steps:

Creating Personas for the Client’s Target Customer

We created buyer personas to get an intense understanding of the students our client should be targeting. It would help develop suitable content for lead generation.

After extensive research, we found the ideal target customers for ELS Malaysia included:

Local students (16 to 18-year-olds) seeking to refine their spoken and written English or who have upcoming IELTS and, or TOEFL tests.
Overseas students (16 to 18-year-olds): The are mainly from Muslim countries who like the country’s familiarity in terms of religion and culture.
Professionals: The English language is in high demand at the workplace and professionals in the country want to refine their skills for career progression.

Lead Generation Automation

We leveraged HubSpot’s Workflow to automate the lead generation and nurturing process. Automating the process saves time when sending targeted emails to prospective leads.

Through a criteria qualifying potential leads, Workflow automatically sends an email when anyone meets the criteria.

Lead Scoring

Our team at eVietGlobal LLC started analysing the leads generated so far. Lead scoring is a critical step in boosting conversions. We used HubSpot to assign lead scores to everyone show had so far responded to the clients’’ emails.

We analysed promising leads and gave each a score to help us focus more on those close to converting. By prioritising specific leads, we streamlined the lead generation process and saved resources in the campaign. On the HubSpot’s client’s contact section, there’s information about every contact to help us with lead scoring.

Together with the client, we created lead scoring criteria and assigned scores for every lead. For instance, site visitors who checked the “how to apply” page would get a higher lead score than those who browsed through “courses offered.”

Bridging The Gap Between The Sales And Marketing Team

Through our interaction with ELS Malaysia, we noticed a disconnect between the client’s sales and marketing team. It was adversely affecting the conversions rate.

Our team resolved this through a sales level agreement (SLA).It identified and set clear goals for both teams to work efficiently. With an SLA, everyone involved with conversions has a specific task and knows the overall goals of the campaign.

The SLA also makes it easier to track the performance of the client’s marketing campaign. With every team member having a role to perform, it became easier to achieve the client’s overall marketing goals.

Evaluation through the Productivity - Paid Search report

Our team closely evaluated the client’s personnel to identify underperformers. But this was not the end of it, trained the underachieving employees to boost the lead generation efforts.

HubSpot’s Productivity – Paid Search report is an invaluable tool to follow-up on the performance of sales and marketing team members. After identifying skill deficiencies, it became easier to train these employees to improve performance.

Results

By leveraging HubSpot suite of marketing and sales tools, we recorded great success in this campaign which was two-pronged:

Increase in average monthly revenues: before we started working with ELS, monthly revenues averaged $119,492.46. After implementing HubSpot tools, ELS witnessed a 16% jump to $138,206.
The tools offered by HubSpot helped us from the start to identify prospects, nurture these leads and boost conversions. The suite of tools is in one place, and our team could monitor every aspect of the lead generation campaign. We owe the success of our partnership with ELS Malaysia, the efficiency of HubSpot’s sales and marketing automation tool.