Camp Walden lead generation campaign

Posted on Sunday, September 20th, 2009 at 3:54 PM by Pramesh Attwala  |  Comments (0)

Challenge

Camp Walden is one of Canada’s largest and most established high-end camps, with over 39 years of history, over 750 pristine acres of land, and 200 staff members who work to create unforgettable experiences for up to 500 campers every summer.

For the past four years, Camp Walden has used web-based marketing to promote its camp globally and acquire new campers. This includes through search engine marketing and search engine optimization.

The camp’s site ranked high for essential keywords and drove an impressive amount of traffic. But the camp’s administrators had a problem: for all of the traffic their website received, relatively little of it converted to sales, the traffic was highly untargeted, and there was little insight into which online channels were driving the greatest return on investment.

Walden’s online conversion funnel was, essentially, blocked—with no way to turn traffic into qualified leads or to measure lead conversions. The camp’s administrators were beginning to worry that their online expenditures—and particularly their search engine marketing activities—were likely losing them money because they weren’t designed to turn visitors into customers.

And they were done with fly-by-night internet marketers and black-hat SEO firms. They needed to devote their energy to creating the best possible summer camp experience for their campers—meaning they needed a trusted, experienced partner to analyze their website’s performance, turn more visitors into customers, and make appropriate recommendations for improving their online marketing performance on a regular basis.

Solution

Recognizing that acquiring more campers required a more sophisticated solution than simply increasing traffic to Camp Walden’s site, we:

  • Audited the effectiveness of Camp Walden’s web marketing and sales funnel and created a strategy to improve the conversion of visitors to prospects, improve the conversion of prospects to customers, and track the entire process to identify the most effective marketing channels
  • Applied our strategy to implement a cost-effective lead-generation campaign through Google AdWords without any substantive changes to the camp’s current site; developed a strategy-aligned AdWords campaign linking to targeted landing pages featuring a strong offer—a free weekend at Camp Walden—and split tested 20 variations to determine which would pull the greatest conversions
  • Connected each landing page to a customized Salesforce.com instance, allowing us to set up sophisticated auto-response functionality and lead-assignment rules that mapped to Walden’s existing sales processes, and eliminating the need for the camp’s administrative staff to manually process unqualified leads
  • Used the collected data to optimize the campaign accordingly, combining data to create end-to-end reports that allowed us to optimize according to which ads were driving the most clicks; which landing pages were driving the most lead conversions; and which keywords, ads and landing pages were driving the most sales
  • Expanded our Google Analytics reporting to include the entire Camp Walden website, allowing us to determine top sources of qualified traffic—and the most effective channels for driving conversions

Results

Since engaging Commune, Camp Walden experienced a dramatic increase in landing page volume and conversion rates during the three essential months leading up to the 2009 camp season.

Improvements during this period included:

  • An increase of 52.6% in new visits to Camp Walden’s site
  • An increase of 28.8% in pageviews, indicating that visitors were more deeply engaging with the site’s content
  • A total of 148 landing-page conversions in the first three months
  • An additional 100 conversions from the camp’s online brochure request form, which was, for the first time ever, tracked in a detailed way

Additionally, our work with Google Analytics allowed us to identify high-performing and low-performing marketing channels. For example, we discovered that Facebook was a top source of referrals, but that very few of these referred visits converted to leads. We also discovered that two other search engine marketing services—those of Yahoo! and Microsoft—were taking more time to manage than they were worth, due to their low volume of clicks and conversions. At our recommendation, Walden adjusted its online advertising budget accordingly.

Our work with Camp Walden has also led to some important long-term benefits. Walden now has a measurable advantage for its subsequent marketing activities, allowing us to use the data gathered this year to launch more effective campaigns for the next season. For example, in our July and August reports, we found a high volume of traffic to the camp’s photo gallery from the cities where many campers’ parents live. This discovery suggests that parents come frequently during the summer to see Walden’s regularly updated photos, meaning that the photo gallery would be a prime place to promote re-registration for the subsequent camp season—getting an early jump on marketing and sales for each subsequent camp season.

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