Carnegie Leverages BlueConic to Accelerate Digital Transformation for Their Clients

About Cargenie

For more than 30 years, Carnegie has been a leader and innovator in higher education marketing and enrollment strategy, offering groundbreaking services in the areas of Research, Strategy, Digital Marketing, Lead Generation, Slate Optimization, Student Search, Website Development, and Creative that generate authentic connections.

As a Solution Partner, Carnegie leverages BlueConic to serve the digital marketing needs of its ever-growing client base.

Challenges

Carnegie’s client list is a who’s who of top colleges and universities, each with something unique to offer their students. The common denominator is fierce competition for student attention and conversion. A variety of both known and unknown visitors hit their sites every day, everyone from prospective students, transfers, graduates, and parents. Providing personalized experiences to each of these audiences is a must.

Providing a differentiated experience for each site visitor was a challenge Carnegie hoped to solve for their clients. In addition, clients were struggling with “stealth applicants,” an applicant that appeared, seemingly, without any history of interaction. Unable to recognize prospects on-site and across devices, schools were unable to leverage past data to target this audience with the right enrollment campaigns.

Higher education marketing departments, like many organizations, are often operating from limited resources, making it difficult to address these issues at scale.

How did Carnegie respond? By creating Clarity(TM), a service that offers comprehensive marketing attribution and web personalization built on BlueConic, a pure-play CDP.

Solutions

Level Up CRM With Dynamic Data

Most schools start with some sort of CRM or marketing cloud to manage prospective student records. Records typically hold basic data for known visitors or applicants like email, home address, and application status. But ultimately, CRM data is static. With BlueConic, Carnegie sets up behavioral data collection on-site using Listeners.

This allows them to dynamically track both known and unknown visitors, collecting valuable information like what program prospects explore, and whether or not they’re looking at financial aid, campus housing, athletics, or career services information. This data is then merged with existing CRM data into BlueConic profiles. Suddenly, schools have visibility into the aspiring biology major interested in career services along with their application status. What’s more, Carnegie can show exactly what campaigns and activities are driving started and completed applications. The icing on the cake? It’s all first-party data, so data from the eager high school sophomore won’t expire by the time they’re ready to apply.

Personalization at Scale

This isn’t just data for the sake of data. Once Carnegie has a rich database of interest, behavior, and application data, they can unlock the real game-changer: on-site personalization at scale.

What Carnegie achieves here is a mindset shift – clients can tailor web pages without needing to manage a multitude of landing pages, back-end code, or with involvement from IT.

Using BlueConic Dialogues, Carnegie can create bespoke on-site experiences tailored specifically to a student. Now, as soon as the aspiring biology major hits the client’s site, they can be served with content highlighting the career services available with a nudge to complete their application.

Perhaps there is a recruiting fair in their area the next weekend. Based on their location data, they could receive a custom invitation on-site, rather than in an email they might miss or worse - nothing. BlueConic personalizes content using real-time data, so marketers are always delivering the most relevant content.

Data-Driven Decisions

Carnegie understands that change is hard. That’s why they backup everything they do with data to show the client. Using BlueConic insights and pushing data into Big Query using the native Connection, Carnegie builds custom dashboards for each client to show campaign impact, conversion rates through the funnel, and the lift of each piece of personalization compared to a control group. Now, Carnegie can precisely show the ROI of their work and identify which decisions should be made next to optimize future performance.

Results

Carnegie is having tremendous success with Clarity. For example, a university in Ohio wanted to advance the user experience, maximize conversion rates, and deliver website personalization among prospective students and website visitors. Using BlueConic Dialogues, powered by rich profile database, the university saw a 112.5% and 362.5% increase in conversion rate from two on-site personalization initiatives.

BlueConic enables agencies, like Carnegie, to ultimately give their clients back time in their day to bring the art back to marketing. With the latest technology and digital strategy, they can help marketing teams grow without adding resources. Carnegie can stay a lean organization and schools don’t have to hire additional employees to scale their marketing.

A key benefit that Carnegie finds with BlueConic is that clients don’t have to rip-and-replace any of their legacy technologies, which can take years. Instead, Carnegie simply plugs in BlueConic as the center of the stack, dramatically improving ROI and time to value.