Boosting Student Enrollment with Chatbot-Powered Ads: A Case Study on Summit Academy OIC

Summit Academy OIC is a tuition-free accredited vocational school located in North Minneapolis. The school has been serving the community for over 50 years, offering certification training in the industries of healthcare, construction, and IT along with extensive career services. The academy was seeking a cost-effective way to generate high-quality potential students and educate them on the opportunities the academy provides, with the ultimate goal of increasing enrollments to its programs.

Summit Academy OIC, a tuition-free accredited vocational school in North Minneapolis, was seeking a cost-effective method to generate high-quality potential students and increase enrollments to its programs. The school had been running campaigns on various advertising channels including terrestrial radio, cable TV, digital TV, and Facebook Ads, with Facebook Ads being the most effective. However, these campaigns only led people to the website where only an average of 4% of visitors completed an application to attend an information session. The school wanted to increase this number and believed that more engaged and educated prospective students would be more likely to apply to info sessions and eventually enroll.

To address this challenge, Summit Academy OIC employed Customers.ai to design a Facebook bot to connect with prospective students through two entry points: a highly targeted Facebook Ads audience and the school’s website chat widget. When prospective students interacted with the bot, they received information about the school’s various programs, indicated their program of interest, and received a matching program information packet after providing their email. In a second phase of follow-up, the Facebook Messenger bot sent prospective students a drip campaign sequence with additional information about the program’s unique tuition-free advantages and helped them schedule attendance at an upcoming information session. This automated lead generation, lead qualification, and lead nurturing approach in an interactive, familiar mobile chat interface helped the school scale its lead gen program faster than other traditional and digital programs alike.

• The implementation of the chatbot-powered ads and automated lead nurture system transformed the student outreach and qualification process at Summit Academy. The multi-phase prospective student outreach with a Customers.ai chatbot achieved better results compared to other Facebook advertising campaigns the school had run. The interactive, familiar mobile chat interface allowed for more engaged and educated prospective students, leading to an increase in information session applications and enrollments. The automated lead generation, lead qualification, and lead nurturing approach also allowed the school to scale its lead gen program faster than other traditional and digital programs.

• 30% increase in prospective students

• 10X lower CPA compared to other Facebook ads

• Every month since the implementation of the chatbot, the school has broken enrollment records