EHL WeChat Official Account & Student Recruitment in China

In this IT Consultis case study, you can learn about how our Social CRM strategy helped EHL reshape its student recruitment process in China.

About The Client: EHL

EHL is a top hospitality management university with a long history dating back over 125 years and a globally recognized reputation.

Particularly, it offers a variety of educational programs, ranging from apprenticeships, Undergraduate, Graduate, and Executive MBA in Hospitality & Tourism degrees to professional courses.

In 2022, the university has over 3,700 enrolled students on all 3 campuses in Switzerland and Singapore. And, many of these students come from China.

Therefore, aside from the existing global website, EHL has also specifically set up a WeChat Subscription Account to better connect with their Chinese current and future students.

Objectives

Although the school has gone in the right direction by establishing a WeChat Official Account, there were still several challenges to overcome, including:

• The lack of understanding and classification of the users
• The lack of effective lead collection strategies on the current EHL WeChat Official Account
• The low engagement levels after lead generations and introduction events

Therefore, to re-establish its presence in China, the main objectives consist of:

• Increase brand awareness and follower engagement
• Nurture leads in the China market towards the conversion into students

Solutions for EHL

By understanding the brand's pain points, IT Consultis (ITC) has come up with fully-optimized strategic solutions using Social CRM (SCRM) tools.

First, we set up a new WeChat Service Account (instead of using a Subscription Account) and migrated all of the followers over to the new one. The Service Official Account would give EHL a wider range of business functions, including:

• Follower Segmentation
• Customer Services
• QR Code Tracking
• Location-based Services
• Advertising on WeChat
• Personalized Menu
• Template Messages

In addition, EHL could also gain more visibility thanks to the enabled Push Notifications and appearance as a regular friend on the Chat display. On the other hand, WeChat Subscription Accounts are all shoved into the Subscription tab instead.

Secondly, we plugged the new Service Official Account with Jing Social, an SCRM tool, for lead nurturing strategies & implementation. Particularly, these strategies include:

• Leveraging the chatbot functionality to create a Welcome Message geared toward education and collecting key data for profiling users
• Setting up behavior-based tagging to deliver personalized content and appropriately drive the conversation with the followers
• Utilizing the Webinar functionality to educate users on EHL and using forms to obtain more relevant user data
• Building a customized Lead Scoring System to reliably transfer leads to prospects

Moreover, this tool allows EHL to create informative monthly reports to analyze and monitor the performance.

And, on top of all that, we also created pre/during/post-event management strategies to further boost user engagement with the Account.

Functionality aside, visually, ITC has helped EHL redefine the look for its new WeChat Official Account, especially the Landing Page, which forms the first impression for many users.

Results

As a result, with our SCRM strategies and bespoke UX/UI design for EHL Service Account, IT Consultis successfully:

• Increased the tagging rate with clearly defined segments
• Boosted the number of followers after the WeChat Ad deployment
• Grew the number of monthly active users and Webinar watchers thanks to more personalized content based on the user profiling
• Raised a significant number of Marketing-Qualified Leads (MQLs)