In this Social CRM case study in China, you can learn about how our Social CRM (sCRM) and Marketing Automation strategy helped a prestigious international education group: 

• Improve lead generation and management
• Enhance data ownership and obtain data insights
• Boost O2O experience and deliver a consistent experience
• Craft more informed marketing strategies
• Empower communication with school communities

About The Client: Dulwich College International

Being a part of one of the most distinguished educational groups in the Asia-Pacific region, Dulwich College International is an independent international school brand.

Since its establishment in Shanghai, the Dulwich International family has grown and expanded in China and other parts of Asia and is renowned for its academic excellence, innovation, and respect for tradition.

As the digital transformation in the Education sector has been booming globally, more and more schools are leveraging digital channels and employing Marketing Automation (M.A) strategies as a key tactic for digital transformation.

However, due to the differences in China’s digital ecosystem, where:

• Dominating social media channels differ from the rest of the world
• SMS and emails are not the main communication channels
• Private Traffic domains are concentrated in the WeChat ecosystem

This article talks specifically about the Marketing Automation strategy on a Group/Brand level. In the next article, you can explore the School-specific level approach.

Marketing Automation and Social CRM (sCRM) Initiatives for the Brand Level

Objectives

The ultimate objectives for the Dulwich College International Group are to:

• Enhance the brand’s perceived value
• Empower all of the schools under the Brand

 As many parents (the key target audience for China’s education sector) also follow the general Brand-level WeChat Official Account for initial research, this needs suitable M.A and sCRM strategies.

This is not only to more effectively convey and spread its perceived value, but also to guide the target audience to the individual school-level Official Accounts based on their interests, which helps accelerate lead generation.

Solutions & Results

1. Enhance Data Ownership and Multi-Channel Synergy

During the initial Digital Transformation Audit of their assets in China, we identified a valuable opportunity to improve synergy between the Private Traffic domains and gain deeper visibility into follower profiles across the existing WeChat Official Accounts.

The next step was to craft user journeys across different channels to create synergy and deliver a seamless omnichannel experience.

At the same time, our Social CRM consultants in China also constructed a holistic tagging strategy to:

• Build and continuously enrich user profiles
• Improve the tailored content delivery accuracy (push the right content to the right users at the right time), ultimately boosting user engagement

In addition, we helped enhance the synergy between WeChat and the schools’ application platform. By leveraging the Social CRM system bound with the WeChat Official Accounts, the international school can make WeChat a CRM to view a holistic user journey across the systems and channels.

2. Elevate Lead Generation for Schools

As Dulwich College International oversees multiple schools, one of the key areas of focus at the Group level has been optimizing how to generate and direct qualified leads to each individual school — an important strategic priority for continued growth.

There is also a valuable opportunity to strengthen personalized engagement content tailored to the Brand’s main audiences, including prospective parents and job seekers, ensuring their unique needs are met more effectively.

To address these goals, Dulwich International aimed to:

• Construct a Welcome Journey enabled by Marketing Automation to drive new leads to relevant schools’ WeChat Official Accounts based on their identified interests in an automated process
• Deploy keywords auto-reply for identity-based content delivery along the journey
• Establish an enquiry journey for a more efficient enquiry process

As a result, the International School Brand managed to:

• Achieve significant growth in the school interest identification among all followers
• Increased Journey completion rate through tailored engagement paths for new followers
• Identified a remarkable percentage of users with specific content interests, along with achieving a much higher enquiry submission rate

3. Improve Decision-Making Insights

A key opportunity for this education group in China was to strengthen its use of data-driven insights and performance benchmarks to support more informed decision-making at both the Brand and School levels.

Our Marketing Automation and Social CRM consultants worked with the Brand to deploy a website tracking plan besides the WeChat ecosystem. By placing tracking code on the website, the International School can record user actions and integrate data across multiple platforms to better understand user behavior.

This allows the team to identify visitor interests, measure conversions, and deliver an omnichannel experience with consistent data and focused analytics.

To further empower the Group, we provided tailored monthly reports to evaluate key success indicators and build multi-channel performance metrics that align with their Marketing Automation strategy.

As a result, the Brand and Schools are now equipped to better understand their key personas and uncover valuable, and often surprising, data-driven insights.