The Challenge
With more than 35 years of experience and more than 750 locations throughout North America, Sylvan Learning is the leading provider of personal tutoring and enrichment services for students in grades K-12. To help parents searching online for child tutoring and enrichment services find and engage with their local Sylvan, Sylvan partnered with DAC Group to manage their online presence across digital channels, including search and display.
“Search is one of the most important marketing channels for Sylvan,” said Seth Lueck, Senior Online Marketing & SEM Manager at Sylvan. “DAC Group has done a tremendous job of optimizing our paid search campaigns, SEO, and landing pages to capture and convert more traffic and increase student enrollments.”
To truly optimize Sylvan’s enrollments and reduce cost per lead (CPL) from search, DAC Group needed complete, accurate attribution data for every conversion: web forms and phone calls. For that missing data, they turned to Invoca.
The Resolution
Integrating Invoca data with ad platforms
“The call data from Invoca was eye-opening—Invoca showed us how search drives calls to Sylvan locations,” said Kyle Harris, Digital Account Manager at DAC Group. “Invoca enabled DAC to measure Sylvan’s true cost per lead for paid search keywords and optimize the program to achieve the best results and lowest CPL.”
Call data from the Invoca platform is also passed directly to Google Analytics, DoubleClick, and Optimizely platforms, enabling an aggregated view of all lead data.
The call data from Invoca was eye-opening—Invoca showed us how search drives calls to Sylvan locations.
Kyle Harris, Digital Account Manager at DAC Group
Integrating Invoca with Sylvan’s database for insights that drive enrollments
Beyond Google Analytics and DoubleClick, DAC Group and Sylvan took their search marketing optimization efforts a step further by integrating Invoca’s call data with Sylvan’s leads database.
“The results have been amazing: This year with Invoca, Sylvan has increased leads by over 33% from search marketing – all while keeping cost per lead flat. We are extremely pleased with how much we’ve been able to scale,” said Lueck.
With results like these, it’s no wonder Sylvan and DAC Group won the Best Education Online Campaign award at the Web Marketing Association's Internet Advertising Competition.
Sylvan uses PreSense to personalize conversations
Sylvan uses Invoca PreSense to route calls to particular agents, and even tell them which keywords that caller searched — “math tutoring” for example — through a voice notification or whisper message only agents can hear. It enables agents to personalize conversations to assist the caller and generate more enrollments.
Using conversation intelligence to identify underperforming franchisees
Sylvan’s marketing team also uses Invoca’s conversations analytics to monitor what is happening on the calls they send to their 750 locations. “If there is a certain brick-and-mortar location whose numbers aren’t measuring up to the rest of the system,” said Lueck, “we will dig into the data to look if they are seeing more calls than normal going to voicemail, if they are promoting a national offer...and that allows us to proactively reach out to them and provide those recommendations.”
Sylvan utilizes AI and machine learning for insights
Sylvan also has begun using Invoca to rate how franchisees who aren’t using the system perform when managing calls from customers. Invoca’s AI and machine-learning analytics tool is training an algorithm built to categorize franchisee calls in order to identify what is and isn’t working. “Our marketing team is listening to hundreds of calls and manually categorizing them,” Lueck said. “From there, the algorithm will look at how we have categorized them, find commonalities among each category, and start to categorize our calls."
The Results
- 33% increase in leads from paid search
- No Increase in cost-per-lead
The results have been amazing: This year with Invoca, Sylvan has increased leads by over 33% from search marketing—all while keeping cost per lead flat. We are extremely pleased with how much we’ve been able to scale.
Seth Lueck, Senior Online Marketing & SEM Manager at Sylvan
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