École polytechnique modernises executive education admissions

Sales and marketing relied heavily on spreadsheets and lacked central visibility of leads and opportunities. For marketers, that meant extracting information from up to 25 spreadsheets to create campaigns and manually compiling information to analyse impact. Meanwhile, leads only reached sales reps when an application was submitted by email, missing the opportunity to nurture leads.

Now, applicants submit applications in a self-service portal built on Experience Cloud. Staff have access to more details on each applicant which it can use to create more relevant, personalised communications. They now also have visibility of candidates who have started an application in the system, allowing them to prioritise their follow-up actions.

Reps also automatically receive leads from candidates based upon their area of interest, thanks to automatic lead routing in Sales Cloud.

But the biggest change has been how the school can personalise its communications for the right applicant at the right time. Here's how it works:

• Applicants are segmented by interest and job role. The school sends tailored communications with links to relevant content, like gated webinars. Webinar registrations have increased by 30% thanks to optimised landing pages and targeting applicants by their main interest or job role. The sessions are reused as gated content to maximise their value.
• The marketing team uses data from email engagement and AB testing to optimise each communication.
• The team tracks key KPIs like cost per acquisition and campaign ROI with real-time data insights easily accessible in dashboards.
• In one click, sales reps can change the lead status in Sales Cloud and trigger email communications in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement that encourage the applicant to book a call with them directly. This nurturing journey has led to a 20% decrease in applicant submission time and reps have recovered approximately 10 working days per year thanks to the time saved.

As a result, the team handles 30% more leads. And because all of this rich applicant data is located in a single source of truth, reps can uncover new opportunities, like alumni who have changed job roles and might be interested in another program.

The school also plans to use Einstein AI for lead scoring to help its reps identify and prioritise the leads most likely to submit an application.