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About
Penn Foster College, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, was established as the first distance-learning institution in the United States.
The college has been devoted to providing affordable high-quality higher education for more than 130 years, with a mission of instilling life-enhancing knowledge, skills, and credentials that benefit students in their chosen field or in the pursuit of lifelong learning.
Penn Foster offers both associate and bachelor's degree programs, as well as specialized academic certificates, across a broad range of study areas, including veterinary science, healthcare, design, and electronics. The college is accredited by the Distance Education Accrediting Commission (DEAC).
The Problem
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Penn Foster College experienced a dip in admissions following strong post-COVID enrollment figures.
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The school's admissions and recruiting efforts rely in large part in calling or emailing to prospective students to provide them with the information they need about the school's broad range of study areas, and ultimately to help them to actually enroll.
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Admission officers have limited time and any leads that are not responded to promptly result in a rapid decrease in their conversion rates.
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As a result, the school would previously stop reaching out to leads or prospects who hadn't responded in seven days after an attempted contact.
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Penn Foster's biggest KPI is lead-to-enrollment-but they were converting only 1.5% of these week-old leads.
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The Penn Foster admissions team wanted to put their time to efficient use, yet still follow up with potential students who might have fallen through the cracks.
The Solution
Penn Foster Senior Paid Media Account Manager Alicia Slachta spotted in Meera's Al-driven platform an opportunity to use a conversational texting to revisit and convert those aging leads.
Slachta saw, too, that conversational texting would enable the school to engage potential students with details about immediate enrollment opportunities, rather than only high-level information about the school's programs.
She initiated a trial of Meera (with just two departments), then requested a full dev-backed automated implementation.
Meera
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Extends the capabilities of Penn Foster's sales teamwith intelligent, unobtrusive followups, to engagestudents who may be hesitating or reluctant toanswer phone calls or emails
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Allows the school to reach its prime demographic of25-34-year-olds without requiring them to answervoice call or an email.
Results:
Meera allowed Penn Foster to follow up on leads considered too old for efficient conversion using manual outreach methods, and at the same time transferred a large fraction of the school's outbound messaging into text-based conversations, instead of labor-intensive and low-response telephone calls or rarely-opened emails.
Text conversations aren't just convenient for the admissions officers-they match the way that the students themselves would prefer to communicate, and let them view and respond to messages on their own time, from anywhere.
