Combined ecommerce and elearning with integrated CRM
Increasing course enrolments for the leading provider of professional Public Relations qualifications.
Location: Maidstone, UK
Aftercare: Hosting, support, and maintenance
Ecommerce functionality to buy courses
Elearning added to the site
Improved CRM
We’ve now delivered three major projects for PR Academy and are looking forward to a continued long-term relationship, incrementally advancing their software set up as we go. This is the type of client relationship that we love at BrightMinded.
The brief
PR Academy is the largest centre for professional qualifications accredited by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR). Each year PR Academy teaches hundreds of students how to excel in public relations.
PR Academy had an ecommerce website for online course bookings, and a separate content hub, both built in Umbraco. The ecommerce website was difficult to use on the back-end and had numerous challenges for users on the front-end. The content hub was performing okay, but not driving traffic to the ecommerce site.
The back-end systems – CRM, accounting, course management – were proving inefficient for the PR Academy team and were a source of much frustration.
Impact
Increase of 33% in course enrolments as a direct result of the investment in the new technical infrastructure and digital marketing, when compared to the previous year. A fantastic result for a brilliant client.
108% increases in organic website traffic year on year.
Brightminded is a great fit for us, they quickly understood our business and what we wanted to achieve. We really like how they combine creativity with real rigour and attention to detail in the build. I really can’t say enough about the difference they’ve made to our business and our peace of mind!
The challenges:
- Migrate two separate websites to one new WordPress site without losing any organic rankings.
- Deliver a new, efficient ecommerce solution to increase course bookings and provide a smooth enrolment process for students.
- Integrate the back-end with Administrate CRM and Active Campaign for email automation
- Build a user-friendly front-end to support the customer journey and drive increased conversions.
- Deliver a content hub for blogs, guides and toolkits to support content marketing and lead nurturing.
What we did
Phase 1: Build a new WordPress website
The website migration was meticulously planned and achieved no loss of organic traffic. In fact, traffic has increased 108% year on year. We worked in partnership with our digital marketing partner Focus Mode – Digital Marketing Consultancy.
The website provides a great user experience for both customers and the PR Academy team.
In the 12 months following the website launch, PR Academy smashed their targets and achieved its best sales year to date.
Phase 2: Elearning on-demand course
Our second project was to develop a free elearning course: ‘Introduction to PR’. The course is a lead generation tool incorporating video, text and quizzes.
You can try out the course for yourself and receive a certificate of completion. The course currently ranks #1 in Google for ‘free PR courses’.
Phase 3: Improved course booking system
Our third project was to improve the CRM. We removed the current CRM and replaced it with a constellation of services, taking the best part of several systems rather than one monolithic system that didn’t quite fit PR Academy’s needs. This involved removing Administrate CRM and replacing it with Active Campaign, Xero and Stripe.
The result? A much more efficient back end system and greatly improved customer experience.
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