Becoming the No. 1 ranked tech bootcamp worldwide
What if, when it comes to tech, students at university aren’t always getting the skills they need? What if there was a better way? What if learners of all stripes - from students and career changers, through to entrepreneurs - had a more efficient process to get the skills they need to flourish?
So began the journey of Le Wagon. Headquartered in Paris, Le Wagon was founded in 2013 by Boris Paillard, Romain Paillard and Sébastien Saunier. The trio's goal? Create training programs to teach people the tech skills they need to bring their ideas to life.
This blueprint has seen over 28,000 students graduate in the decade or so since then and they offer bootcamps across the world and online. Le Wagon’s earned a score of 4.98/5 from over 6000 reviews and, as the No.1 ranked tech bootcamp on the planet, they count IBM, Apple and Microsoft among the companies that hire their alumni.
Focusing on what matters
Le Wagon’s partnership with HubSpot began back in 2019. With thousands of students enrolled and a growing number of aspiring learners, they needed a CRM that worked seamlessly for them. Something to enhance the student experience and effectively manage their expanding network. Enter: HubSpot.
“Sales and marketing wanted an accessible tool to better manage our leads,” explains Le Wagon’s Head of Acquisition, Francesca Chong. “We wanted to be able to do campaign nurturing and to make forms quickly without calling on the engineering team.”
HubSpot, says Francesca, helps them solve all sorts of challenges. Whether that’s collaboration between regions, helping teams be more independent, scaling marketing faster, or better personalizing the messages Le Wagon sends out into the world.
Plus, the user-friendliness doesn’t go amiss.
“It’s generally just a joy to use,” she says. “HubSpot allows us to group all the information on prospects, customers and marketing campaigns in one place. Automated workflows and simplifying data management allows you to focus on the most important things. Work is hard enough. Why make it harder with a clunky CRM tool?”
Tightly defining their audience(s)
Being highly rated means that many of Le Wagon’s new students join through word of mouth. Additionally, there’s SEO—Google “tech bootcamp,” and Le Wagon appears right away—along with organic traffic and traffic from their social channels.
But Le Wagon also targets specific groups through ads and targeted campaigns.
These groups include upskillers—those who want to gain new tech skills in order to future-proof their careers and help with promotion. Then, career changers whose current careers aren’t related to tech—for example, “nurses and teachers” says Francesca—but who want to make a big switch. Next, there are individuals interested in tech and looking to gain more practical skills. Finally, there are entrepreneurs. This group often has a specific business idea that involves substantial data processing—they may want to launch a service, create an app, or simply manage their new business more effectively.
CAPI helps better connect with their target audiences
For these four distinct groups, personal content is king. Courses at Le Wagon are a sizable investment - whether that’s time, money, or brainpower. Naturally with such a commitment, the sales cycle can be long.
“Even though we’re B2C, the nature of our product means the sales cycle is closer to B2B,” says Francesca. “Typically, this can take three-to-six months from a lead to a conversion. So, we’ve got a long sales cycle and a high CPA, and we want to optimize that as much as possible.”
This is where CAPI, an integration in HubSpot, comes into its own. Because it captures data server-side, relying on first-party data rather than third-party cookies, you get a truer sense of your audience. You can see where they’ve come from, what they click on, read, or do, and better identify the types of content that appeal to certain audiences. (Hint: the more personalized, the better.)
All of this helps prospects become leads and leads become conversions.
“Building out audiences is just effortless with CAPI - it improves the efficiency of our paid ad campaigns,” says Francesca. “Previously we were working with some high CPAs with many touchpoints along the way. So, we’ve worked to improve the personalization along that journey.”
1PD beats 3PC
First-party data (1PD) offers a range of benefits. It is more reliable, accurate, and compliant with privacy regulations. Additionally, because it is more personal, it increases the likelihood of acquiring and retaining customers.
Francesca agrees.
“CAPI is compatible with server-side tracking,” explains Francesca. “This enables us to send conversions to Meta directly from the server - bypassing the browser altogether. As the data is more reliable than cookies it makes for better ad optimization and effectiveness. Meta attributes conversions more effectively across devices and cookies - something third-party cookies struggled with.”
Imagine if you couldn’t see half of your audience. They’re there, but they’re camouflaged. CAPI and the use of 1PD allows you to shine a flashlight on them. You can suddenly see them. It fills in the gaps - the chasms, even.
Before, around half of Le Wagon’s conversions - some 40% or 50% - couldn’t be attributed to any of their conversion channels. They were in the dark. Now with CAPI it’s more like 20-30%
“We can’t fully track but it’s a lot better,” says Francesca. “It’s so helpful - and as we continue to implement server-side cookies we’ll see those numbers reduce further.”
CAPI’s fits with the ‘test and learn’ philosophy
“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Or so said existentialist writer Samuel Beckett.
It’s a mantra that could be tweaked for those wanting to take their marketing to the next level: “Learn again. Test again. Learn better.”
Such a philosophy is at home at Le Wagon. Whether that’s new messaging, new audiences, or new creative assets. Francesca and the team are cheerleaders for the ‘test and learn’ approach and iteratively improving.
They’ll have a strategy and go at speed with the testing. The team will learn what they need to learn, test it, document it, then run more tests and learn even more. Rinse and repeat and success beckons.
Over to Francesca.
“CAPI for sure helps with optimizing. You’ll run tests and have that instant data connection so we’re not having to spend half the time looking for the data to validate the test. We already know as it’s already connected. Our retargeting campaigns - using CAPI - are the most optimized campaigns we have on all of our paid channels. The campaigns using CAPI are just a ton more efficient.”
How much more efficient?
“As a benchmark, our average CPA on Meta retargeting using CAPI was €194 in the last quarter vs €833 for our “cold targeting” campaigns using similar assets,” says Francesca. “We’re targeting warmer leads but still have vastly different numbers - thanks to CAPI. It’s about a quarter of the price.”
Le Wagon: transporting students to their futures
Yet, it’s not only about slashing costs and streamlining processes. It’s about offering the right products to the right audience - and using data to do so.
An example, on a recent data analytics bootcamp Francesca and the team got back data that the students wanted something more commercially focused.
This, she explains, led Le Wagon to developing a brand new course: a Growth Marketing bootcamp. During the roll-out phase the team were easily able to tweak and test multiple personas. Thanks to the ‘seamless’ HubSpot and CAPI integration, says Francesca, they were able to update their personas with no time lag and target those new personas within a week.
This nimble approach, coupled with having data on their side, will help see Le Wagon travel from strength to strength, as they continue to train the tech stars of the future.