Case Study: How to Drive Conversions with a Holiday Discount Campaign

Increasing Student Registrations through Email Marketing

Thinking about hosting a holiday campaign to drive conversions and build awareness about your brand or business? Last year, Mambo ran an incredibly successful holiday campaign for one of our higher education clients, Portland State University’s Center for Executive and Professional Education (CEPE). By marketing this program across all of CEPE’s channels and customer touch points, we were able to leverage cross-channel pollination while tracking which channels were the highest converting. Read on to find out which channel we found was the most effective for this campaign!

 The Organization

PSU’s Center for Executive and Professional Education (CEPE) has been offering on campus and online executive training and certificate programs for over 30 years.

 The Situation

For this holiday discount campaign, CEPE wanted to better understand which marketing channel was leading to more student enrollments. Past email promotion around the holiday campaign had not previously been measurable and only large un-segmented emails were sent.

Our Strategic Approach

• Create custom discount codes for each marketing channel: Email Drip Campaign, Social Media, and Print Collateral & Events
• Develop lead nurture drip campaign to be deployed through a marketing automation email tool
• Build a landing page where students could retrieve their discount code that was unique to the email drip campaign
• Create custom email messaging to send to segmented audiences based on their engagement with each email
• Execute marketing automation pilot campaign, leveraging the current student email data base

The Results

Within just four weeks of the campaign, Mambo Media was able to…

• Generate 218 student registrations, from the Email Drip Campaign alone

• Exceed enrollments by 183% with the Email Drip Campaign over other marketing efforts

• Increase Winter Term revenue by $40,000 over the previous year

Through our marketing automation implementation we were able to:

• Optimize user experience and relevancy of content with engagement-based custom segments. Mambo personalized subject lines and teasers based on students’ engagement with previous CEPE emails. Once students had registered using a holiday discount code, this student would no longer receive holiday discount promotional emails.

• Create efficiencies for the CEPE team using a marketing automation tool that triggered an email drip campaign automatically based on our pre-established parameters

• Enabled unique tracking for each channel to learn which marketing effort had the highest ROI

What did we find? Email is not dead. Especially when it’s strategically planned to nurture prospects based on the content they respond to the most.

Are you thinking about launching an email campaign for your holiday season? Whether you’re in need of a short-term seasonal campaign or ongoing marketing support, Mambo’s team has the expertise to accomplish your business goals.