A small technical college in California with three campuses.

Before the college began using marketing automation software, it was allocating $50,000 in monthly marketing spend toward various marketing activities, including print advertising, AdWords PPC, email marketing (without automation), and on-site events. However, the college had no accurate visibility into its return on investment (ROI) for these campaigns — it was ultimately having to make guesses as to which activities were producing revenue and which weren’t.

The college suspected that its lead-to-campaign attribution estimates were wildly incorrect, and it wanted to identify the true campaign ROI for each individual location so resources could be properly allocated.

The college used marketing automation software to implement a three-step approach. First, the college used it to reveal the ROI of the current marketing strategy with campaign tracking, and then protect against wasteful spending by reallocating budgets to winning campaigns. Finally, the automated and improved campaigns with content marketing and lead nurturing showed that while some campaigns were winners in one location, they were breaking even or not generating a return in others. The college was able to quickly address this issue by rebalancing budget allocation across existing campaigns and new lead generation increased by 109% in just one month.

Initially, the college had been gathering around 180 new leads each month. With the help of marketing automation software, it was soon capturing almost 900 new leads per month — a 5x increase.

Similarly, the college’s cost per lead (CPL) was about $280 before implementing marketing automation software. It set an initial goal of bringing the CPL down to $100. The college met this goal after three months, and it far exceeded expectations by bringing the CPL down to $58 after six months — an 80% savings from where it had started.