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College Improving Website Traffic and Growing Student Conversions with Inbound Marketing

By March 26, 2012April 19th, 2023Digital Marketing, Uncategorized

Fresno Pacific University is an accredited Christian university located in the Central Valley, California. Founded in 1944, Fresno offers leading academic programs for both undergraduate and graduate students.

Challenge: Tracking Marketing Initiatives and Closing the Loop

Before using inbound marketing methodologies, Fresno faced a twofold challenge—measuring its marketing activities and closing the loop to deliver leads to recruiters. “We didn’t really know how to find or track our leads,” Lisa said. Though Fresno invested in radio, print and online ads, the university couldn’t get a grasp of the specific results of its marketing initiatives. Nick and Lisa looked for a way to follow a lead from its site visit to its actual conversion. “We didn’t really have any way to close the loop,” Nick said.

Solution: Landing Pages and Salesforce Integration

Fresno uses landing pages to address the issue of collecting lead data and closing the loop. This enables the university to gather information about its prospects and answer questions such as how much time potential students spend on the site and what information they are looking for. Lisa was impressed by the ease with which she could create these forms, modify them and plug them on the site.

By implementing a closed loop marketing system, Fresno tracks which of its marketing channels are most efficient. Thanks to this data, the university can make informed decisions about allocation of resources between channels.

By using lead nurturing, Fresno increases the chance of converting leads into customers. Nick especially likes the automatic email alerts they receive when a lead has visited the site. “That is just a prime opportunity that this person is ready to receive information; they are ready for communication with the business,” Nick said.

Results: High Conversion Rates & Lead Growth

  • Doubled Organic Traffic in 6 Months
  • Attracted Over 1,200 Leads in the Past 6 Months
  • Reached 100% Conversion Rate on 2 Landing Pages
  • Accumulated 6,000 links from over 1,300 domains

In the first six months of inbound marketing, Fresno doubled its organic traffic from 15,000 visits to over 30,000 visits per month. Its referrals have similarly grown from 3,000 per month to over 7,000.

Not only has Fresno increased its traffic, but it has also attracted thousands of new leads. In the same six months, the university has accumulated over 1,200 leads. A big part of this success can be attributed to Fresno’s use of landing pages and their high conversion rate: 2 of its 21 landing pages have a stunning 100% conversion.

Using Hubspot software, Fresno addressed the challenges its marketing team was initially facing—tracking leads and closing the loop. As Lisa said, “We know that we are doing our job—we get the leads in, we get them to the recruiters and that really closes the loop for our marketing team.”

This post originally appeared on Hubspot.com.

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Larry Levenson

Larry is passionate about inbound marketing and is a HubSpot Certified Trainer. He's learned the "secrets" of leveraging HubSpot to make marketing hyper-effective and customizes that information to help our clients meet their goals. Larry lives in Prescott, AZ, and when not at work, he is hiking or hanging out with teenagers as a volunteer with Boys to Men USA.