Fresno Pacific Universityis an accredited Christian university located in the Central Valley, California. Founded in 1944, Fresno offers leading academic programs for both undergraduate and graduate students. Lisa Alvey and Nick Gundry, representatives of the university’s social media and interactive team, share how they use HubSpot to grow the number of prospective students.
Before HubSpot, 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.
Fresno uses HubSpot’slanding pagesto 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 HubSpot’sclosed 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 HubSpot’slead nurturing tool, Fresno increases the chance of converting leads into customers. Nick especially likes the automaticemail alertsthey 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.
Since it first started with HubSpot in September 2009, Fresno has doubled its organic traffic from 15,000 visits to over 30,000 in March 2010. Its referrals have similarly grown from 3,000 in September to over 7,000 in March.
Not only has Fresno increased its traffic, but it has also attracted thousands of new leads. Since September, 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 the 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.”
