Background

The client was introduced to Girikon by Salesforce staff thanks to Girikon’s expertise in implementing Salesforce for the education industry and more specifically, higher education institutes. The client selected Salesforce Pardot to replace HubSpot in creating their landing pages, forms, email templates and digital engagement journeys. Girikon presented the solution based on the experience gained from implementing Salesforce for other Education providers and was selected without much hesitation by the client to kick off the implementation.

Besides Pardot discovery, Girikon also conducted the discovery to prepare for the Salesforce rollout to other departments and faculties. After gathering requirements including students’ pain points, wishes and opportunities to improve, Girikon presented the student journey to the client. The client understood that Pardot could be used not only to capture the first step in the overall student journey but also to communicate directly with prospective students throughout the application and onboarding process.

Girikon worked with the clients’ IT department to develop the digital enablement strategy to implement an end-to-end solution for their student’s journey beginning from the prospective students’ enquiry to application, admission, offer, enrolment, onboarding and most importantly the support throughout their lifecycles as students and beyond.

About the client

The client is a Higher Education Institution offering Biblical studies, quality education, and training.

The client is committed to the Baptist heritage; however, the community of students is from multiple religious denominations. The college’s objective is to prepare their students for the application of their studies within their profession, such as ministry, teaching, mission, nursing, accountancy, and building. The client offers training in Bible, Ministry, Theology, Evangelism, Mission, Education, Counselling, Chaplaincy, and Leadership development.

They are currently undertaking a Digital Transformation Project and looking for a more efficient way of doing everything. Key activities include reviewing their current digital ecosystem, examining current business processes, and adopting a new digital platform such as Salesforce. Such adoption can help the college produce a 360-degree view of students throughout their journey, introduce key automations, and implement interoperability between their third-party systems.

The Problem

Below are the paint points that the client’s team was struggling with:

  • Management of current enquiry process through HubSpot, Jotform and Paradigm (Student Management System). With the existing process and multiple platforms, they found it difficult to sync their prospective data with Salesforce.
  • Lack of a 360 view of their Marketing, Sales, and Student Journey.
  • Plenty of manual tasks being performed by the Marketing team.
  • Lack of proper analytical reporting and Prospect activity tracking in the prior setup.
  • Inability to track Prospect activities on the college’s website.
  • Complex process to create custom forms, email templates and automation process in the prior setup.

Besides those pain points, the client also expressed several wants and needs:

  • The client wanted an integrated solution within the Salesforce eco-system which could help them build a scalable solution for the long term.
  • The client wanted to simplify the current process of syncing back a Lead or Opportunity to Pardot to re-nurture a Prospect during the Sales Process.
  • The client also wanted to simplify the Prospect Scoring process to help them focus on important Leads.
The solution

Girikon worked alongside the client to implement Pardot, which helped them mitigate their existing pain points and improve their efficiency. The implementation of Pardot turned out to be a complete game-changer and helped the client in the below-mentioned tasks:

  • Enquiry Management
  • Prospect Nurturing
  • Improved Communication including newsletters, events
  • Detailed Prospect tracking
  • Migration of HubSpot features to Pardot
  • Data Migration from HubSpot, Jotform, and Mailchimp to Pardot

Pardot for Educational Institutes Case Study

Pardot Implementation: 

  • Setting up Domain for the client’s Pardot Implementation
  • Setting up Marketing Campaigns based on Faculty
  • Setting up two Landing Pages: ‘Get equipped for a rewarding career in teaching’ and ‘Introducing the Christian teacher’
  • Creating 4 Pardot Forms: Prospects Capture, Prospectus Download, Event Registration, and General Enquiries Forms
  • Creating Custom Email templates
  • Auto-Syncing Prospect records from Pardot to Salesforce as Leads
  • Using Engagement Studio for automation and sending reminder emails in set time intervals: 3 days, 5 days, or 10 days after filling in the Pardot Forms
  • Creating Segmentation List and Segmentation Rules to segregate the List of Prospects based on Regions, Faculties and Campuses
  • Tracking Prospect Activities from the client’s website by implementing Web Tracking URL
  • Migrating Data from HubSpot, Jotform and Mailchimp to Pardot

Landing Page Examples

Pardot for Educational Institutes Case Study

Pardot for Educational Institutes Case Study

Example Pardot Form

Pardot for Educational Institutes Case Study

Project Timeline

Pardot for Educational Institutes Case Study

The Outcome

Girikon’s Pardot implementation to match the business processes of the client was successful. Thanks to the implementation, all the client’s business units are now stored in Salesforce, which acts as the single source of truth.

The implementation of Web Tracking URL for Pardot Forms and Landing Pages helped the client easily capture the Prospects and track their activities, including website activities.

Engagement Studio helped them automate the recurring reminder emails based upon their custom logic. The Prospect Scoring enabled them to prioritise their Prospects and nurture them accordingly. As a result, the client witnessed significant growth in student enrolments.

Customer Satisfaction

The client was so satisfied with the Pardot implementation that they continued using Girikon’s services, including implementing their Education Data Architecture (EDA), Student Success Hub, Payments2Us, and Nab Transact and creating multiple Integrations with their Legacy systems.

“As we were the first higher education institution in our region to adopt the EDA with the Student Success Hub (SSH), there was a lengthy scoping phase for this project. Girikon were excellent in assisting us with discovering our needs and how Salesforce could meet and exceed those needs.”

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