L’Etudiant is a French multimedia group specialized in informative content regarding training, higher education, and employment for students between 15 and 25 years of age. For more than 40 years, L’Etudiant has been keeping its audience informed about the world of education through publications, digital services, and student fairs.
The website provides helpful advice to students as well as their parents to support the academic journey. Several times per year, L’Etudiant organizes student fairs that attract more than two million visitors per year to help young people make the best choices for their careers.
As the leading organization in France in the field of higher education, L’Etudiant is closely involved in the educational and professional careers of millions of students. In 2021, the company wanted to leverage its website as a tool to gather qualified leads for its comprehensive service offering.
Working with Selligent by Marigold, experts at L’Etudiant decided on a two-pronged approach: First, use the website to solicit personal details from students on their career-related interests and goals. And second, use this customer intelligence as the foundation for better understanding the needs of students and directing them to the most relevant content.
Implementing Selligent’s digital technologies has helped us capture and understand the interests of our young target group as the basis for serving relevant, personalized content. We’ve significantly increased our conversion rate while also raising our engagement and loyalty to a new level.
Lisa Rodrigues
Digital Marketing Manager, L’Etudiant
In the first step, L’Etudiant used Selligent’s website functionality to display a survey via pop-in banner when visitors spend more than one minute on the site. Known visitors are greeted by name, while unknown visitors are asked for their information to start a two-step, personalized cross-channel marketing journey:
1. Based on browsing behavior and pages visited, the banner asks visitors about their interests; for instance, guidance around Parcoursup, the national admissions platform for the first year of higher education. The banner also collects contact details and opt-in to marketing.
2. Information collected via the banner enriches the visitor’s Consumer Profile in Selligent for the next step: Receiving interest-specific email newsletters, populated via Selligent’s email tools with dynamic content according to each individual user’s personal interest (field of studies, careers, resources, etc.).
Collecting more personal information as the basis for interest-specific engagement created a virtuous cycle for L’Etudiant; a cycle with direct impact:
“Improvements from implementing Selligent by Marigold manifested almost instantly. Within only a few months, the new banner system showed a tremendous impact in terms of acquisition and conversion. It also helped collect actionable personal information that set us on track for a more personalized approach in our outbound marketing,”
said Lisa Rodrigues, Digital Marketing Manager at L’Etudiant.
In a matter of three months, pop-in banners delivered via Selligent generated 130,000 sessions on the L’Etudiant website and 110,000 sessions on a virtual student fair website. Several hundred Consumer Profiles received rich information on personal interests. In turn, the personalized student newsletter doubled open rates, increased engagement seven-fold, and attracted ten times more click-throughs than previous newsletters.
Marigold: where relationships take root.
