From Emails to Messaging: AECC Global Improves Lead Engagement by over 4X
Leading overseas education consultancy boosts student connects across eight countries
60-70%
Open rate compared to 10% for email
65%
Coverage for leads generated, 4.3X lift as compared to 15% for email
500K
Students reached every month
"Switching to Gupshup revolutionized our communication strategy at AECC. With their seamless WhatsApp integration, we saw a 600% increase in engagement, boosting our message open rates from 10% to 70%. In just 30-45 days, Gupshup helped us onboard local WhatsApp numbers across eight countries, significantly expanding our global reach."
Shilesh Gargi 
Head of Marketing, AECC Global
Background
AECC Global, established in 2008, is a leading education consultancy that offers comprehensive guidance for students aspiring to study abroad. With a presence in 15 countries and 42 international offices, AECC Global partners with over 750 universities worldwide, facilitating access to 110,000+ courses across 12 countries. Their services include course selection advice, application assistance, visa documentation, and scholarship guidance, ensuring a seamless process for students from application to arrival at their chosen institution.
AECC Global conducts 60-90 events monthly, generating numerous leads from webinars and in-person sessions. Initially, AECC relied heavily on email campaigns to follow up with the leads generated from these events. Despite their best efforts, the email campaigns yielded a meager 10% open rate, limiting their ability to engage with potential students. This low engagement meant that many leads remained untapped, resulting in missed opportunities for both the students and AECC.
Challenges
Initially, AECC Global faced several communication challenges:
- Integration and Support Issues: Previously using another vendor’s messaging solutions, AECC struggled with integrating their communication stack into its marketing automation system. Additionally, their set up resulted in significant manual effort and inefficiencies.
- Managing Communication Channels Across Countries: AECC faced difficulties in managing and scaling their communication channels across multiple countries, as the previous vendor did not provide a seamless way to handle it, limiting reach and operational efficiency.
- Operational Inefficiencies: AECC’s existing solutions were not optimizing their marketing efforts, particularly in terms of remarketing and engagement rates. They also lacked advanced automation capabilities, which hindered their ability to efficiently manage and qualify leads, resulting in lower conversion rates and increased operational costs.
Solutions
Gupshup implemented multiple solutions for AECC to enhance their communication channels and improve engagement with their audience. One of the key solutions was the integration of WhatsApp for remarketing activities, significantly increasing their reach and engagement rates. This integration allowed AECC to efficiently manage and interact with leads, significantly improving their operational efficiency and lead conversion rates.
One notable achievement was the quick implementation of local WhatsApp numbers for eight different countries within a span of 30-45 days, significantly enhancing AECC’s ability to manage multiple regions. The bot support helped automate lead qualification and data collection processes, reducing the manual effort and making follow-ups faster. This automation was integrated with AECC’s CRM system – Zoho, ensuring seamless data transfer and interaction tracking.
Moreover, Click-to-WhatsApp ads opened new avenues for direct engagement with potential students, offering a convenient way for users to connect with AECC’s counselors. These solutions collectively enhanced AECC’s ability to manage communications across different countries, ensuring consistent and effective engagement with their audience. AECC is also experimenting with new-age features of WhatsApp, such as limited-time offers, carousels, and flows, optimizing their engagement strategies.
Results
AECC Global experienced significant improvements in their communication and operational efficiency:
- Expanded Reach: The integration of WhatsApp significantly boosted AECC’s communication effectiveness. Email campaigns achieved a 10% open rate, while WhatsApp campaigns reached a delivery rate of 81% and an open rate of 60-70%, representing a substantial increase in engagement.
- Increased Engagement: The switch to Gupshup enabled AECC to improve their lead-to-meeting conversion rates. Initially, they were only able to connect with 15% of their event registrations, but after implementing Gupshup’s solutions, this rate increased to 65%, allowing AECC to effectively action two-third of all generated leads.
- WhatsApp Supremacy: WhatsApp was used for remarketing activities, sending personalized messages to over 500K students every month based on their preferred study destinations. This targeted approach resulted in a sixfold increase in reach, and 1 in every 3 students read the remarketing messages.
