News

Colleges Track Marketing with LeadWatch Live

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 06/03/09

Three institutions have signed on to use LeadWatch Live, a Web-based inquiry management solution from EducationDynamics that allows colleges to assess marketing campaign effectiveness. The service will be in use at California College San Diego; the six campuses of CollegeAmerica in Colorado, Wyoming, and Arizona; and the five campuses of Stevens-Henager College in Utah and Idaho.

LeadWatch Live allows schools to access their lead data from anywhere at any time with an Internet connection. Features include:

• Real-time lead aggregation to collect, filter, and house leads from all media sources, including lead vendors, paid and organic search, and the school's own Web site;
• Compatible lead delivery engine to post leads to multiple destinations, including an institution's CRM system, call center, e-mail delivery, or a combination;
• Real-time alerts to create custom triggers to alert administrators about important performance benchmarks; and
• Campaign optimization to analyze, adjust, and refocus media planning and budget allocation around the highest performing sources.

In addition, LeadWatch Live enables colleges and universities to tailor data to meet campus-specific validation and reporting requirements, including:

• Campus-specific custom form validation to create custom inquiry forms for each campus;
• Campus-specific degree validation to set lead validation at the campus level to account for degree offerings specific to individual campuses; and
• Geography-based lead validation to scrub leads that don't meet the pre-determined geographical proximity to the specified campus.

"In a fiercely competitive marketplace, we need to know two things: how our campaigns are performing and which media sources provide the best return on investment," said David Meiling, director of marketing at CollegeAmerica. "LeadWatch Live gives us the immediate feedback we need to answer both of those questions and to tailor our actions accordingly."

LeadWatch Live can be licensed as a self-service package or outsourced to EducationDynamics' Media Management Services. With the latter approach vendor employees manage the inquiry management process, including negotiating with lead providers, warehousing creative and content, maintaining ongoing budget and lead cap management, and monitoring and reporting program performance.