The situation
AACSB, a global nonprofit that connects educators, students, and businesses to create the next generation of great leaders, has been working with Imarc for several years. Our first collaboration was the creation of a completely redesigned website, but we have also helped optimize their website after launch, including introducing personalization logic in Sitecore.
Recently, they approached Imarc about a paid news subscriber overlay commonly found on news and content sites that would help them engage members and subscribers and earn more leads from their thought leadership.
The challenge
After listening to their ideas, Imarc’s Strategy and Creative teams came up with a different approach to help them reach their goals of scalably building and nurturing relationships with their business and educator audiences as well as training existing members to log in.
The solution
Given the industry and AACSB’s desires, three types of content were initially considered – open, gated, and paid. While paid hasn’t been utilized to date, the foundation for a wide range of use cases has been laid.
From there, we worked to put forward an optimized form experience that helped users understand the value of creating an account or logging in for a more seamless reader experience. This same idea was employed for triggered downloads of reports and traditional gating. Together, these experiences were crafted to help users access AACSB thought leadership.
In tandem with the primary engagement solutions, Imarc architected a sign-up and subscriber slide-in module experience for LINK, AACSB’s weekly newsletter for educator and business audiences to facilitate a softer lead capture for open content.
Imarc considers these flexible options as a family of scalable solutions that can be used in multiple places while providing the same positive user experience.
Imarc helped us envision a lead gen strategy that integrated with our current systems and content strategy and has helped us grow leads without causing undue burden on our current members, which was a big priority for us.
Andrea Smith, Director of Marketing
The results
Since the launch of the LINK slide-in module on April 21, 2023, newsletter leads have been steadily rolling in. The gated content functionality that just launched on February 9, 2024, has also been earning heavy success levels. So far, the gated content work increased opt-in form submissions by 240% and their leads have improved by a factor of four!
The future
We are looking forward to seeing further thought leadership engagement wins for AACSB from this project. In the meantime, we will continue our ongoing performance marketing efforts, making additional website optimizations, and helping them increase their ROI by providing a stronger experience for prospective advertisers, exhibitors, and sponsors.