Business Case performed by Vini Apoena in Orlando, Florida from January-2021 to January-2022 as designated Chief Marketing Officer for Amazing Explorers Academy, nominated by the investment firm, Synkro Capital.
Amazing Explorers Academy has thousands of students distributed between more than 15 locations attending hundreds of American communities. In the pre-education industry alone, AEA pioneers in the STEAM curriculum with Science as the foundation of children’s learning, integrated with Mathematics, Technology, Engineering, and Arts.
In previous posts, I've presented cases with universities and corporate training.
As a marketer, I was more than excited to work in the early childhood field - it really felt like scoring a new goal, together with completing a full circle of understanding.
During this management, the team was able to reach important milestones, including record growth and consolidation of their digital presence. The student base grew by 135% in less than 10 months, together with deploying an across-the-board CRM structure, supported by a strong data collection expansion and emerging new data analysis that helped the company in the decision-making process - accelerating the business and creating momentum to the brand long-term development.
Abundant, organized, and meaningful data about customers is only possible through omnichannel software.
To make this happen, AEA shareholders approved investments in a full CRM deployment, a new call center operations, student acquisition training, growth hacking cycles, on-site triggers/nudges/modal strategy, branding development, lead lifecycle enhancement, churn management, conversion funnel control, dashboards, new marketing leadership, omnichannel automation, procurement (digital buying) & PPC/social.
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1. Deploy Amazing Explorers Academy's New National CRM Program, including deciding technical requirements of the scope, its timeline, budget, schedule, procurement, terms & conditions, and creating score criteria to define suppliers based on points.
2. Improve digital acquisition efficiency and efficacy by sales enablement and boosting the flow of prospects, increasing the conversion rate, controlling the conversion funnel, and reducing overall CPL - all build and tracked by software, reducing the amount of work for the sales team by advancing the company capacity to acquire, store, preserve, analyze and have data-as-a-service for its operations.
3. Deploy new technology while following The General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (GDPR) "Children’s Data and Parental Consent", when applicable to U.S businesses, collecting data for specified, explicit, and legitimate purposes, and not further process it in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes, ensuring the Company complies with new regulations.
4. Control investments, define strategy, reach enrollment goals, distribute resources, execute and create new reports for all marketing efforts, including agencies and other suppliers. Generate leads, optimize conversion funnels with CRO, landing pages, and triggers/nudges. Define attribution blueprint, remarketing, placements, pipeline incentives, and channel attribution.
5. Assume the leadership of all digital transformation initiatives, including managing and training talents in multiple national (Florida, Texas) and international (Brazil, UAE) locations, interactions with IT, Mobile App optimization, reskilling, onboarding, dashboards, continuous alignment, performance review, and 1:1 sessions with career development mentoring.
The client provided a very good startup structure.
Amazing Explorers Academy invested in their mobile app (iOS, Android) for several years, creating a strong database that could be accessible by tailor-made APIs. The process of integrating schools with the new CRM got way simpler from this point forward. Taking advantage of this strong mobile position to think of a mobile-first strategy was part of my initial approach, together with ensuring that data generated in after-sales phases would also be integrated via Online Registration.
Together with business goals and advancements, I was also looking for a way to build a narrative for parents that could be perceived as an individually designed journey but essentially made with advanced automation technology - carried by multifunctional campaigns, across multiple channels, and in fundamental sync with the CRM.
We started holding meetings with dozens of suppliers to understand functional requirements, present alternatives, and develop detailed specifications. Developers started working on integrations to connect legacy systems with new data loads.
It's frequently harder to ensure investments in a medium or long-term sales project (compared to paid media, for example) if revenue-making advancements are not fast perceived. Financing digital infrastructure will always lead to enhanced competitiveness, but it takes time, resources, and steadiness.
To deal with expectations, I've boosted short-term visibility by collecting "low-hanging fruits" that were presented as "extra project gains". Never easy to keep up with both, but it helps to build executive-level, continuous support.
Our strategy would allow Amazing Explorers Academy to be majorly managed by data, supporting the decision-making process through best-of-the-industry omnichannel technology & powered by IBM Watson.
After approving the plan with the CEO, my first step was to get the word out and start screening specialized companies that would be responsible to deploy the new CRM program. By specialized I mean not only having know-how with CRM setup but also in the pre-k educational industry.
Under the approved strategy, I have designated resources to different initiatives that would need to be developed in sync with the Master Deck, following weekly interactions and a very strict timeline. Our project documentation had details of Agile management procedures that would be in place to operate the initiative.
We took special decisions to ensure school workers would fully understand the new platforms. Putting people to use a new digital solution is one of the hardest parts of a deployment project. A good onboarding experience would tackle this issue front forward.
I've started to work on new customer flows to match the new CRM premisses. A1 pages with extensive maps outline for the client how the CRM would penetrate operations in a seamless way - without disrupting schools or negatively impacting day-by-day operations.
Like many other industries, the Education sector was also extensively impacted by staff shortages during the months following the initial impacts of Covid-19. Opening new classrooms became a challenge. Our strategy to deal with that uncertainty was to replace spot reservation strategies with pre-enrollment statuses. The trick there was to ensure low levels of churn during the pre-enrollment phase. In order to make this happen, parents would automatically board CRM flows and start to be involved with the community and AEA professionals.
21 specialized workers got directly hired to work only in the deployment of the New CRM Program.
AEA's Digital Property was divided into 2 instances (.com & .net), each one with a specific type of storage registering either institutional info or sales correlated data. This early separation came before starting the project and was essential to avoid disrupting the business while developers were deploying the new CRM systems.
To ensure short-term results, the main website was filled with triggers to enhance the amount of generated leads and developers deployed a cross-domain track, turning visible individual leads going over the journey - facilitating the work for new PPC agencies that we hired. Omnichannel strategies must include enough tech to deal with high volumes of requests. We also started studies to deploy chatbots with the ability to support customers, identify problems & open tasks to coordinators - all automatically.
Together with monitoring data related to this specific project, I have also started to receive, monitor, and improve numbers related to newly enrolled students.
I've personally designed a new Daily Controller Dashboard that would automatically populate itself with the number of children that were enrolled on each specific day of the week for each one of the locations under my management.
It would be impossible to manage all the demands by myself.
Besides 21 new hires, I have dedicated 3 more employees: 2 for sales and 1 for operations. They would support the growing flow of leads and help me with minor project details, including dealing with the demand from suppliers and developers.
I've also selected 1 new PPC agency to deal with paid media.
1. Together with 24 technicians, I was able to head the deployment of around 120 Mapped Digital Upgrades (Data Points) across Amazing Explorers Academy digital platforms - unifying the company's data visibility into a data-as-a-service approach.
2. Total Booked Tours per month has grown by 184.6% considering a linear 5-months analysis from the 2nd project month > forward.
3. Total Generated Leads went up 120% in a 3-months analysis from the 4th project month > forward. Then it got a new bump and grew 136% in 7 months straight. Schools started to go full.
4. Total Active Students went up 135% in 10 months, registering a 7-years acquisition record.
5. Acquiring huge amounts of students is not enough: you need to retain them. New retention strategies helped Churn (Total Disenrolled Students) drop from 19% a.m to 3% a.m (linearized between schools).
6. A new Online Registration platform was created, tested and partially deployed. It scored an 80% approval rate with beta-testers. Objectively replaced a 30+ minutes handwritten procedure with a 5 minutes checkbox digital form.
7. All stakeholders got proper training to get on board with the new CRM guidelines, including c-level, sales execs, school directors, teachers, assistants, designers, developers and etc. I have framed this digital development as a "continuous reskilling program" that would ensure workers the opportunity to acquire new skills and grow within the company.
8. As an additional delivery, I've managed to start a side-project with company execs and develop a Talent Screening Platform to help accelerate the rate of daily qualified candidates. That initiative was founded to help deal with staff shortages in Florida.
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