Improving Deakin University's current applicant experience for a student first approach to conversion.

How did we do it?

Our experts were provided access to Deakin’s Marketo and Salesforce instances, to analyse how each platform was set up and how they were integrated with one another – with a specific focus on how course applications would integrate from the application portal to Salesforce and into Marketo.

After running preliminary discovery workshops with Deakin’s internal experts and stakeholders, Social Garden’s technical team gained critical findings, insights and specific objectives to meet for this project. Social Garden then thoroughly reviewed Marketo and Salesforce in both production and sandbox environments and tested the front-end application portal to work out the best way to pass data from one system to another.

This provided Social Garden an understanding of the data flow, key conversion points and where optimisations could be made.

Social Garden then mapped out how the data should flow from one platform to another along with what data, process and trigger updates would be required to meet all of Deakin’s requirements.

Social Garden’s experts then provided tailored recommendations and strategy on how to implement the recommended solution to improve Deakin’s application experience and conversions with relevant timely communications for prospects.

How did we deliver it?

Current State Workshop

After the initial briefing session, the team at Social Garden ran a workshop to map out the current data flow between all systems. Using LucidChart our team of experts mapped the existing process and what the new application experience might look like, working with Deakin to ensure it was aligned to what was required.

Future State Workshop

After the Current State Workshop, a Future orientated blueprint was developed to detail the data flow that relates to clear, succinct and simple applicant steps. This included an overview of the Salesforce and Marketo efforts required to execute the strategy. Clear identification of the changes needed to be made, as- well as additional new features to improve the user journey such as velocity scripting were documented.

Recommendations

With the needs of Deakin in mind, Social Garden provided a set of recommendations for Deakin to action. This included a detailed future strategy process chart, supported by clear detailed documentation of each step in the process. This provide a clear blueprint for Deakin to execute against, so that they could integrate changes independently for long term success.

What some of the recommendations included.

Marketo Background Forms

These enables prospects activities to be tracked easily without interfering with the current registration or login process.

Munchkin and Mouseflow Tracking

Whenever an applicant registers or logs-in to the application portal. These tools allow you to natively track user actions to measure user experiences across application portals to allow for optimisations in the future. The key goal here is creating solutions.

Integration

In order to create a seamless flow of data – certain data from the application portal had to be changed to ensure we could accurately measure how far user had progressed through the application portal in order to receive the correct relevant communications.

Optimised Application Journey Nurture

We reworked the existing strategy for the application nurture to allow for a more dynamic user experience which allows each student to be on their own journey and be contacted at more appropriate cadence based on their behaviour.