EMG – Educations Media Group is one of the top leaders in education search worldwide. Throughout their various search sites, they help visitors to discover resources for anything related to Undergrad, Postgrad, plus study abroad programs, but additionally to help guests in finding the best tools for professional development, training, and further learning courses even for leisure and personal development.
The depth of their knowledge and experience has enabled them to develop and adapt into one of the best tools for knowledge resources, and have become the leading search engine for education: educations.com the global website — helping people find and compare an array of education programs, as well as providing detailed information on studying abroad.
Many of the other sites under the umbrella of EMG – Educations Media Group are localized to the US, UK, Sweden, Germany, and others offer similar resources in finding specific programs or studies, but also to help education providers of all kinds to reach their target audience plus the ability to recruit potential students.
educations.com was previously using another provider for live chat, but felt the need for something a little bit more powerful and a tool with automation that could help them deliver quality Email Marketing. They had been doing manual email campaigns to over their 2 million members. These operations needed a lot of coordination and effort, which was very broad and not specific.
The templates for their emails were very rigid, and could only have an image with a size that wasn’t responsive or without much flexibility, something they felt really too stiff to really showcase their brand effectively.
Additionally, having a live chat before User.com without any filter or segments felt overwhelming. Many people asked basic questions, something that was taking up too many resources, and they felt they needed a change.
Darrah and her colleague were assigned to research numerous tools with the goal of finding the best email marketing, and after a long process of contacting — about 20 demo and trials from many companies from the US, Europe and worldwide — they came to the conclusion that User.com would be the best tool for all their Email Marketing, with everything else a bonus, but an additional possibility of products or avenues to grow into.
The other companies they tried seemed to have a limit on triggers or actions, but with User.com the possibilities seemed literally endless. From then on it was a no brainer and were quickly able to narrow down their search from 20 different products down to 1.
Early on using email marketing and data collection they’ve found extremely helpful segments, removing a large barrier of basic questions to guide each person to what they’re looking for.
With marketing automations, they have been able to automate a visitor’s experience through their search, and based on pages visited or items interacted with they can create recommendations of other articles, even suggest key programs though popups or chat that the visitor may be interested in.
Once a visitor leaves contact data, they are automatically sending out email campaigns offering additional information based on the visitor’s touchpoints to their site, and are getting an incredible response, something that they never had access to before.
The User.com templates and options for delivery opened up an additional range of opportunities with image .gif files and emojis to properly communicate and engaging even with a younger audience to have a more playful tone or to test different outreach with what the emails look like, even to a sort of rebrand of their communication and outreach.
With typical email campaigns they are seeing 28% open rate from members and 7-10% normal click. However, when they trigger an action email campaign the open and click rates jumps to double, which they find is amazing and something they attribute to instant emails that people can remember educations.com because of the automatic automations.
Additionally, the ability with timing to dynamically send out these mailings immediately has been key to getting impressive results, from 7% previously, now to 40% and even sometimes 50% open and even click rates, which has completely helped to improve their entire database to be more responsive and more engaged.
The slipping away feature has been vital to recapture these visitors before they become inactive or they stop engaging, but has helped to nurture subscribers who would otherwise be lost by giving personalized content that the team knows the visitor wants to read and are already looking for.
From the student’s perspective, this is super effective and they’ve found it to be highly resonating with their audiences to be able to receive exactly what they’re looking for with the best guides and suggestions for them to only need to make a choice and then act on it.
Other products they are using are Live Chat popup by tailoring conversation based on a certain amount of pages or time spent on a page, by offering assistance.
Popups are currently notifying visitors with awareness and bringing focus of their free global study abroad fair and encouraging them to signup and participate. All these additional tools are all things they didn’t expect, that have been an add on bonus for their site, taking lost engagement starting at 2% and with tweaks of personalization, seeing 10% and higher as they experiment further.
