Finding out which enquiries turn into students for a language school

Lots of messages, not many students

The school teaches English, including IELTS preparation, at two campuses and online. Most of its advertising runs on Facebook, Instagram and Google, and nearly every ad sends people to WhatsApp, because that's how its students prefer to get in touch.

The ads were producing hundreds of conversations a month. Enrolments, though, were flat, and nobody could say which ads were bringing in the people who actually signed up.

Following each enquiry through

We set things up so that every WhatsApp conversation started from an ad carried a note of which ad and which course it came from. Then we gave the admissions counsellors a simple sheet to record what happened next: whether the person visited, took a placement test, and enrolled.

This was the hardest part of the project, and it had nothing to do with technology. The counsellors were busy, so we kept the sheet to four columns and checked in with them every week until filling it in became a habit.

What we learned

After two months the picture was clear. People asking about IELTS preparation enrolled at roughly three times the rate of people asking about general spoken English, even though the spoken English ads got far more messages. Most IELTS students had a deadline, usually a university place or a visa application, and they were ready to start.

The second finding surprised the school more. Enquiries that got a reply within an hour were much more likely to enrol than those answered the next day, and a lot of messages arrived in the evening after the office had closed.

What the school changed

They moved a large part of the budget towards IELTS campaigns and gave each course its own landing page, so the ad and the page said the same thing. The counsellors started an evening rota, and we added an instant reply that answers the most common questions, like the next start date and class times, straight away.

We also sent the enrolment data back to Meta and Google, so their systems could look for more people like the ones who actually signed up.

Six months on

Monthly enrolments are up 32%, and the cost of each enrolment has come down by 29%. The average time to reply to a new enquiry has gone from most of a day to about an hour.