Background

ICL Academy is the only online 6th-12th grade school that tailors academics to students’ passions. Their award-winning Impact Learning model combines world class academics, service leadership & character development, community experiences, and world champion partners. They enable students to pursue their passions, such as acting, singing, tennis, skiing, volleyball, waterpolo and more, while integrating that passion into their day-to-day academics & activities and supporting it with world class mentors like Bode Miller and Kerri Walsh Jennings.

The 2021-2022 school year was ICL Academy’s second in existence. As spring 2021 progressed, they wanted to find new ways to reach students and families who were good fits. They’d engaged with an agency to help with their advertising efforts, but they weren’t finding much success. Stackmatix’s consultative and holistic approach combined with the experience of working with innovative startups were what they were looking for to help.

Challenge

Critical marketing infrastructure, such as analytics, tagging, tracking, attribution, reporting, and even ad platform access were missing for ICL Academy because their previous agency had centralized control of those platforms. For that reason, they also needed to develop creatives and receive insights and feedback on effective approaches. As a result, ICL Academy had previously been unable to find success through advertising and was uncertain whether it was a viable growth channel for them.

ICL Academy was taking the right steps in setting up a new CRM, but needed help with building integrations to their advertising and marketing systems, data management, and funnel analysis. Their website was also undergoing significant changes as they sought to find the right ways to communicate their unique value proposition to students and families in compelling and engaging ways.

Finally, they knew they needed to get these things set-up quickly and have a trusted partner who could help as they quickly approached the busiest time of their year, the start of the school year, when they needed to be able to focus on the needs of their students, families, and those considering enrolling at a highly innovative online school. With the Covid-19 pandemic continuing for another school year, these conversations would prove to be all the more important as families tried to determine the right course of action for their students in an unprecedented time.

Solution

We aligned quickly with ICL Academy about the need to get the platforms, technical marketing infrastructure, and tracking set-up quickly and properly to ensure we had a solid foundation to build on. We set-up Google and Facebook ad platforms, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Hubspot integrations and tracking, ad tagging and tracking on their Wordpress site, landing pages, and audience creation from CRM & other offline data sources. We designed and built out far more sophisticated campaigns than had been run previously with a robust search buildout, unique audience-based Facebook / Instagram ad sets, and helped in the development of compelling display and video creatives.

Over time, we optimized campaigns to hone in performance and make certain we were addressing the people most interested in ICL Academy’s offerings. We added hundreds (almost thousands) of negative keywords to their search campaigns, which proved essential during a pandemic when search terms like “online school” could apply to an extreme range of different topics. We tested many different types of targeting, copy, and audiences on both Google & Facebook/Instagram platforms. We even tested YouTube after seeing the strong performance of video on Facebook – a great creative format when you want to familiarize an audience with a brand new product or service.

As is often the case in growth marketing, not everything we tried worked, but our solid measurement foundation allowed us to perform weekly tests to expand our approach with successful tactics. Every week we tested & iterated on the strategies we used, focusing on the best performers, removing underperformers, and adding additional tests as we progressed. Throughout the engagement, we consulted on the CRM, sales funnel, landing pages, and other facets affecting conversion to focus on the 3 metrics most important to the short and long-term growth of ICL Academy: cost-per-lead (CPL), lead volume, and return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) during the first year and over the customer’s lifetime value (CLTV) since most students enter the school earlier than 12th grade and stay for more than 1 year.

Results

We’re excited to note that we achieved an overall 1st year ROAS of 2.15x and an expected CLTV ROAS of 9.15x (based on the number of years of school each student has left after enrollment). Further, our performance improved month-over-month from when we took over in May to the last month we focused on the 2021 Fall enrollment period in October. Over the last 2 months we achieved CPLs 40% below goal and lead volume more than 70% higher than goal. Overall for 2021-2022 Fall enrollment campaigns, even with the ramp time and all of the new learnings taken into account, we achieved CPLs 11% below goal and lead volume 17% above goal.

As we launch Spring 2022 campaigns, we are seeing CPLs continue to improve, a testament to the solid data-driven measurement foundation we took the time to implement the right way. We’re proud to be partnering with ICL Academy as they bring this innovative online school to students pursuing their passions, and we couldn’t be more excited about what we’ll accomplish together as we move into the New Year.