Oregon state university pace program leveled up engagement and enrollment

An overview of how we helped:

: 4,800 new qualified leads
: Enrollment grew by 6.8x
: 182% increase in newsletter subscribers

Introduction

Oregon State University's Professional and Continuing Education (PACE) program connects learners across Oregon and beyond with accessible educational opportunities.

OSU came to Web Canopy Studio looking for a way to attract new learners, engage with their website featuring over 100 programs, and delight their 100,000 subscribers with a email campaigns

Utilizing HubSpot's HubDB and email workflows, Web Canopy Studio was able to create an integrated experience for their ideal customers.

T H E C H A L L E N G E

1. Customized to death

Their old Drupal website was super dated and was so customized that there was little OSU could do to update the site on their own. It was also time-intensive to edit web pages - navigating a byzantine network of web pages scattered everywhere.

2. Security concerns

OSU had significant security concerns with their outdated system. Their website was actually hacked and they couldn’t install security updates regularly because it would break their customized website and then need to be fixed every time.

3. Organizational nightmare

Then came the challenge of organizing 100+ courses spanning a variety of programs. Updates to their old catalog was tedious and drained the resources of their small team.

Existing website

T H E S O L U T I O N

Strategic Market Entry and Awareness Campaign

Oregon State University's PACE program now has a modern website that resonates with their tech-savvy audience, new email templates that utilized this design, and increased engagement in their newsletters.

They are now able to create great looking web and email content without having to dive into custom templates and CSS. They can focus more on producing content and less on trying to manage the tools that deliver that content.

Utilizing the power of HubDB, their whole website is essentially a massive spreadsheet with about 5,000 cells. This means simple changes that used to take a few hours can now can be done in minutes.

The new website

It's important to grab the viewer's attention in the couple of seconds you have right from the moment they land on the site. Most of PACE's learners are over 30 and already have a college degree, so they are not typical college students. This required really focused messaging to capture our unique audience.

Featured courses

While we wanted to reinvent the sell-first mentality, we also wanted to feature some of the unique classes offered through PACE. Taking full advantage of HubDB, we were able to dynamically pull featured courses to a custom slider built on the homepage.

Courses_Professional-Development-and-Continuing-Education-Oregon-State-University

Lead magnets

Casual viewers might not be ready to sign up for a class, or even a newsletter, but offering downloadable premium content mid-page lends itself to starting the lead generating machine.

The plan

Before the final call to action we laid out how simple it is to get started with PACE in four easy steps.

Process_Professional-Development-and-Continuing-Education-Oregon-State-University

The path to success

Here's how we got the website to produce the results needed for success:

Intuitive user experience

Adopting HubDB for all courses and certificate programs, we created a direct path for users to see only the offers that suit their specific needs.

Smart trigger CTAs

Each item in the course catalog has a unique CTA that triggers workflows that are segmented by lists in HubSpot to send users specific catered content related to their area of interest.

Easy to use website

WCS utilized the organization and ease of use of HubDB. We relied heavily on strong wireframes and prototyping to illustrate the user flow and to map out the HubBD tables needed to make a seamless user experience.

How HubSpot was utilized

Lists: Segmented their learners using the lists tool as they engage
Workflows: Triggered workflows for notifications and nurturing when a form is submitted
CMS: Website Pages, Landing Pages, Blog, Design Manager
HubDB: Built out dynamic page structure uniquely controlled by HubDB
Email: Follow up emails and nurturing emails created for lead engagement

Lead Capture: Unique CTAs on all course pages, popups, customized forms
Campaigns: Organized all new website activity into campaign
Reporting Tools: Analyzing performance using HubSpot's reporting tool
Custom Integration: Integrated CTAs with the current OSU e-learning platform called IdealLogic to automate two systems

The results

Here is how OSU's new website has impacted their bottom line:

Leads

This year alone, leads have increased by 148%! That's in large part to an enticing lead magnet that's utilized on their site and a sister site at the university. The popup has 4.8k new leads since launching last November.

Page views, time on page, and engagement levels are also up across the board.

Revenue

OSU PACE has seen 75% growth in revenue for Quarter 2 year over year, 40% growth in revenue for Quarter 3 year over year, and an overall growth of 10% in revenue for the year before the website went live to the year after.

Enrollment

Enrollment has gone from 10,219 learners in their courses in 2019 to 70,257 learners so far in 2020!

Not only does that mean more revenue, but also less marketing dollars spent promoting classes through other channels. After one course hit it's all time high (the record was 123 and they just hit 141) they were able to offer a summer course that has since also filled.

"I really see the power of having everything under one roof, in this case HubSpot. We have always enjoyed HubSpot, but now we’re HubSpot evangelists. Because they [WCS] were able to customize and build tools for us in HubSpot that we were not equipped to do, we are so much more successful across the board"

Rich Collins
OSU Marketing Writer and Content Strategist

Need to see these kinds of results?

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