Case study: how testing helped us set the right strategy
The Project
Ironhack is a global tech school that offers Bootcamps in UX/UI Design, Web Development, Data Analytics, and Cybersecurity. As part of the Growth team, my goal is to get as many qualified leads as possible that will potentially become book students.
One of the key actions set onto the 2021 strategy for Lead Generation, is to partner up with different tech influencers.
Duration: 2 months.
Tools: Figma, Whimsical, Hotjar, Google Analytics, Pardot.
Hypothesis: Our first approach towards collaboration with influencers was to generate as many applications as possible. To achieve it, we offered a 10% discount to the community, designed a co-branded landing page, and posted 5 posts on the influencer’s Instagram account.
Strategy
Since we were not 100% sure about our hypothesis, we finally added a double CTA on the landing page where the user could either ask for more information or directly apply and get the discount (see image below).
Although we knew that adding a second CTA was not a best practice, our approach was to test and get as many insights as possible. We were not sure whether the audience was ready to pay a 7.5k€ bootcamp.
Testing helped us make better decisions in future collaborations.
Hypothesis validation
After analyzing the results, we realized the users were not ready to apply, and therefore, our approach with influencers evolved into a single lead gen CTA with a nurturing campaign (see image below) together with a co-hosted webinar and posts on both the influencer’s and Ironhack’s Instagram account.
All these actions were carefully thought in order to:
1. Get as many Qualified Leads as possible
2. Nurture those leads
3. Convert leads into applicants
Apart from the CTA and overall strategy, thanks to Hotjar we were able to see that the first LP had way more content that the user was not reading and we decided to shorten it (see image).
Besides that, we also decided to remove secondary buttons such as the newsletter form or another “Get more info” button and make the primary button a sticky button.
*Note that in the left LP, we were offering all the bootcamps whereas in the right one just the UX/UI bootcamp.
Another modification was to highlight clearly and in more than one module the discount available (see image).
Results
All these changes in the strategy, approach, and landing page resulted in a more qualified amount of leads and relative book students with a site CVR of 1.8% vs 7.2% on the second approach.
As I mentioned earlier, we wanted to focus on quality vs quantity and to us, this meant a success.
I’d like to remark on the importance of testing, without it we wouldn’t have been able to see what was the best approach. At the same time, as we are selling a luxury product, this kind of action needs extra thought and more time to convert as it is not an impulsive purchase, so for this particular business it is not a key channel at the moment but a good one to do every now and then.
Extra info:
The ideal situation would be to simply add a discount code on the application form of our website so that:
- The user doesn’t get lost between landing pages vs our own website
- Can easily make us aware that is coming from this collab and wants the discount
- Doesn’t request any discount during the personal interview
- We don’t lose tracking
It often happens that the user is aware of the discount but goes directly to our website, applies as a regular applicant and then, in the personal interview talks about the discount. This affects tracking/data as we usually pay a commission for every book student and makes us manually edit the prospect on Salesforce.
What do you think? What has been your best approach with influencers so far?
